Perennial Arugula and Asian Pear Salad

There are two foods in our garden that I really love and that we have a lot of right now: Perennial Arugula and Asian Pears.  I've heard of people eating arugula salads with pears and Parmesan cheese so I thought I'd try something similar with the food we had on hand. 

I picked a handful of Perennial Arugula.  Just a handful will do ya - this stuff is strong!  Puts hair on your chest, as I my dad would say.  I picked two Asian Pears, but ended up just using one.  We have three varieties growing on one grafted tree.  I used the variety that is ripe right now.  It's the blandest one to my taste, but it's juicy and crisp and it went just right in the salad. 

I washed some lettuce from our CSA and put that on two plates.  Then I placed half the handful of arugula on each plate.  I topped that with slices of Asian Pear, halved sun gold cherry tomatoes, and chopped red onion.  I drizzled some excellent extra virgin olive oil on top, along with salt and fresh ground pepper.  Then I crumbled on some Bulgarian sheep cheese we get from the Casablanca Halal Market over in Hadley. 

The result?  Check out Jonathan's face below.  He looked just as happy after lunch when his plate was clean.

Asking for a Kick in the Pants

I need to get eating. 

I need to get eating the Edible Forest Garden.

It's so easy to fall into the comfort of filling my plate with luscious high-summer annual vegetables.  When the tomatoes are bursting out of their skins and peppers come one after the next, it's hard to remember to go after the more unusual plants in our garden.  But that's exactly where the knowledge needs to be built.  And if I'm going to write this cookbook (and I am), I need to give myself a little kick in the pants to experiment with all the stuff growing in our backyard. 

When I moved in to this place, the Holyoke Edible Forest Garden was already several years old, lovingly designed and nurtured by Jonathan and Eric.  They had over 200 species of edibles!  That was very cool, but I wanted to go beyond the geek factor.  How do you eat this stuff, I wanted to know.  Does it really taste any good?  How can we cook with it? 

Those are the questions I want to explore here and in the cookbook.  Consider this my kick in the pants. 

PS- I'll be at the beach (woo hoo!) on Thursday, so look for my next post a week from today.

Fall Preview

It may still feel like summer, but there's no denying just the slightest hint of fall in the air.  The night arrives a little earlier, the stars shine a little brighter, and you can almost smell the earthy scent of leaves.  I do love fall, and I'm looking forward to our fall crop of foods. 

Some of them I already have ideas about:
    - sweet coconut rice with pawpaw
    - beach plum crisp
    - skirrit latkes
    - sunchoke spanish omelette
    - rustic pizza with arugula pesto

And then there are the:
    - cucumber berries
    - air potatoes
    - mint root
    - sea kale leaves
    - asian pears
    - persimmons
    - ground nut

The cucumber berries are ready right now.  Perhaps they will be my next victim.  I've been on a pickling roll, and that seems like a good thing to do with them.  Or put them in a tabouli!  For now, we are busy eating the hot peppers and tomatoes out of the garden.  Oh, and we just harvested a bunch of concord-type grapes.  What flavor!  We froze a bunch to eat throughout the winter.  Mmmm.... I couldn't help but eat a handful of the frozen ones already.
   

Forest Garden Plants Heading out into the World

This past weekend we had a booth at the NOFA (Northeast Organic Farmers Association) summer conference in Amherst, MA.  The booth was for our nursery, Food Forest Farm, and we brought lots of perennial vegetables and forest garden plants for sale.  It was so much fun interacting with people and sharing information and enthusiasm about the plants. 

I am so excited to have sent off so many plants to new homes.  This means lots more people will be planting, cultivating, and experimenting with these perennial foods.  The sea kale, turkish rocket, and chinese yam were the big hits, along with the ever-popular jostaberries, beach plums and hazelnuts.  I foresee a growing community of food foresters!  I am looking forward to sharing my recipes and thinking in this blog and in my cookbook.

Recipe for a Glorious Summer Day

1. Wake up to one of those exceedingly beautiful days when the air is dry and there's a gentle breeze, warm sun, and a few stray clouds drifting across an ocean blue sky.

2. Play some chords on the mandolin.

3. Find your friends outside in the back, sitting under the hardy kiwi arbor. 

4. Bring out a watermelon, some boiled peanuts, and pick some grapes off the vine.  Have a slurpy, salty feast.

5. Talk and laugh as you braid onion tops, and then hang them to dry.

It's only midday, and already it's been enough to make my soul smile.

Stymied... Or Then Again Not

I just went out for a walk around the garden, looking for inspiration for trying a new recipe.  It's a low time for perennial vegetables.  I found some red raspberries but not enough to do anything with so I just ate them ("eat out of hand" is always my fall-back recipe).  There's tons of perennial arugula, but I'm in more of a sweet mood right now, so I passed it by.

I decide to revisit the clove currants.  Last time I posted about them I was about to make them into a dessert.  But I got busy and sleepy, and it didn't happen.  I woke up thinking today would be the day.  I started brainstorming recipes.  My first idea was to put them in muffins, maybe with some sort of spicy topping.  But then I remembered one of my springtime favorites and decided to try substituting clove currants for rhubarb in my mom's beloved "Rhubarb Delight".  It's a dessert that features a simple shortbread crust topped with tender rhubarb chunks suspended in a vanilla custard.  Mmmm...

So, I just popped outside to pick them, hoping for 3-4 cups of currants, and all I got was a measly half cup.  I think the ones that were ready before have gone by.  There are plenty of ripening currants, but very few that were perfectly ripe today.  So now I have a half cup of clove currants kicking around.  Maybe that's enough to pop in a ramekin and put a little crust on top. 

So much for the "Clove Currant Delight".  But come to think of it, rhubarb is a perennial vegetable, and a part of our Edible Forest Garden, so it can go ahead and be the star of the recipe.  I'll have to put that in my tickler file for next spring.

Beautiful Eggplants and Drunken Bees

It's the time of year when the annuals in our edible forest garden really take center stage.  The perennial vegetables that provided succulent spring shoots, buds, and leaves have matured into full-flowering (and somewhat bitter) plants.  We're in a bit of a lull in berry production.  And the fall crops of leaves, roots and tree fruits are yet to make an appearance on the dinner plate (or in the snack hand). 

But our annual beds are really glorious.  Deep purple eggplants, ruby red beets, green tomatoes beginning to tinge yellow and red, summer squash, garlic...  August is a beautiful month.

The passion fruit is flowering and we've started to enjoy our summer host of drunken bees.  Did you know that when a bee is in the passion flower it gets so sedated that you can pet it?  We like to pet the bees, because really, how cool is that?

So, most of the edible forest garden cookery these days is centered around the standard annuals.  Maybe now would be a good time to prepare for the fall season of recipe planning and tasting.  I want to spend some quality time with the fall plants so I can get some recipes set and then be ready to focus on the spring ones next year.

Houttuynia Photos

Last week I posted about the great Houttuynia and using it in a meatball recipe.  I thought our camera was out of batteries, but it turns out it still had enough juice to transfer these photos to my computer.  Here they are!

First, the plant itself.  This is growing as a groundcover in our front garden under the banana trees:

Next, the chopped Houttuynia leaves (the green leaves) mixed with chopped basil (the purple leaves):

And, the sizzling meatballs.  Maybe not the most photogenic dish, but they sure were tasty:

Clove Currants

Our clove currants are ripening, slowly and steadily.  The clove currant (Ribes odoratum) is a medium shrub with spicy smelling yellow flowers in the spring and shiny blue-purple-black berries about the size of blueberries that are coming ripe right about now.  The berries have a sour taste and are quite juicy.

Today I've been pondering about what to do with the clove currants.  Jam, jelly, juice, syrup, and leather all sound appealing but also sound like more work than I feel like putting in today.  I'm thinking a crisp might be nice, and my friend offered some maple syrup to use in exchange for giving him part of the crisp.  Sounds like a deal too good to pass up!  I'll let you know how it goes...