Homework

The weather report says that the heat index reached 125F or so today here in Baltimore, which is simply unspeakable.

So I won’t speak of it.  Instead I will show you pictures.

Lilies and hydrangea from the garden.  I’ve been cutting the lilies as they hit their peak, and bringing them into the house so they can stink up the joint with that heady, sweet scent of theirs.

This morning’s farmer’s market was a wonderful orgy of high-summer fruit.  We bought white peaches and yellow, white nectarines (one of my favorites), and the most glorious tiny sweet yellow-orange cherry tomatoes.    It’s a little MStew of me, but I always think fruit looks prettier on Depression-era glass, somehow.  (And to make up for the MStew quotient, you can enjoy my very old, very faded, very seriously worn and stained tablecloth, heh.)

So pretty.  Now if my own tomatoes would just hurry up and ripen…

One week until my book is due.  I picked us some liles and sea holly from the garden and put them in an old mustard jar on the kitchen windowsill so we’d have something pretty to look at.

‘Cause dayyum, it’s hot out there.

1. Flavored Waters — I see them for sale in the shops and I think “I may really be incapable of understanding how far people will go to avoid doing something that is nearly effortless to begin with.”  Because $1.49 for 20 ounces of water with a little mint in it?  It’s not highway robbery if you voluntarily part with your money, my friends.  Get yourself some sort of reasonably wide-mouthed jug (a recycled glass juice bottle is tops) and fill it 7/8 of the way with water.  Plunk in something that tastes nice: cucumber slices, citrus zest, borage flowers, mint leaves, sliced fruit of any kind, a couple chunks of watermelon plus a few chunks of rind (white part only), a quartered tomato, basil leaves, a clove or two, orange flower water, rosewater, kewra water, knotted strips of lemongrass, a pinch of fennel seed. Play with the combinations and mix it up.  Try mint plus orange flower water, cucumber plus rosewater, watermelon plus basil, borage flowers plus halved green grapes, tomato plus fennel seed, citrus zest and a dill blossom.  Refrigerate your water and its add-ins and let infuse for an hour or two before drinking.

2. Cucumber-Almond Granita — Puree two large peeled seeded cucumbers in a blender.  Add a couple of handfuls of almonds and a couple handfuls of green seedless grapes or honeydew melon.  Add a tiny splash of orange flower water and just a touch of honey or agave nectar.  Pour into an ice cube tray and freeze.  To serve, pop out as many cubes as you want and turn them into slush in your blender or food processor.

3.  DIY Creamsicles — 2 parts freshly squeezed orange juice to 1 part buttermilk (or soymilk plus a little extra lime juice), about a half a lime’s worth of lime juice, and a little agave syrup.  Pour into popsicle molds or paper cups, freeze, and eat.

4. Beans Love Greens, Hot Weather Version — Drain and rinse a can of good quality cooked white beans like cannellini.  Get a bunch of the nicest, tenderest, most voluptuous greens you can find.  For me, it’s almost always chard straight from the garden but you can have what you like.  Just don’t buy the “prewashed” crap in the cellophane bags please, it’s all ‘prewashed’ in the same gigantic sink, effectively, and people get sick from it.  Also it is neither nice nor tender nor voluptuous and really, what is the point of eating any green vegetable that does not look up at you from the plate, flutter its undulating curves at you, and whisper “I’m lovely, I’m delicious, eat me”?   Anyway, wash and dry your greens and tear them into pieces of a comfortable size.  Make a nest of leaves on your plate.  Top with beans, cherry tomatoes or wedges of larger ones, seeded chunked cucumber, torn basil leaves, some good pitted olives, and, if you like, some kind of salty cheese like feta.  Dress with the best olive oil you can lay hands on, and either good wine or sherry vinegar or lemon juice.

5. The Essence of Fruit Crisp — Prepare and layer on a plate or in a shallow bowl bite-sized pieces of whatever sort of fruit appeals to you.  Stone fruits and berries work best, but you could do this with summer apples and with pears, too.  In a small frying pan, melt a tablespoon or three of salted butter (depending on how many people you plan to feed) and then cook, in the butter, three tablespoons of Grape Nuts to each tablespoon of butter.  As they start to get fragrant, sprinkle with brown sugar and maybe a little cinnamon.  Stir and keep cooking until the sugar is all melted, just a moment or so.  Drizzle the butter/sugar/Grape Nuts over the fruit.  Perfect for when just plain sliced fruit doesn’t seem desserty enough.  If you want to bump it up another notch, sprinkle a pinch of really good sea salt over the whole shebang.

6. Water Chestnuts with Coconut Milk and Shrimp — Use FRESH water chestnuts only for this, or in a pinch, jicama.  Peel and julienne the water chestnuts, keeping them submerged in cold water before and after cutting so they don’t discolor.  Roughly chop some shelled, deveined shrimp — cooked or raw, it’s up to you.  If you can get good raw ones, it’s nice that way.  Make a mixture of 4 parts lime juice, 3 parts coconut milk, and as much fresh minced chili and onion as you want.   Mix the lime/coconut mixture with the shrimp.  Drain the water chestnuts well and add.  Refrigerate for an hour.  Salt to taste.  Vegheads, just sub nice fresh firm tofu.

7.  Vietnamese rice-paper “salad” rolls, aka gai cuon — Oishii Eats will show you how, and her mom is hilarious.

8.  The Best Peanut Butter Sandwich Ever — You want some good, crusty French-style bread.  Baguette is great.  Slice a hank of it the long way like a sub sandwich roll, and remove some but not all of the crumb.  You can also do this on a really dense seedy wholegrain but try it with the French loaf first.  OK.  Get you some peanut butter, whatever kind you like.  A little sweet is OK.  Spread a thin — and I am not funning with you, I mean thin! — layer on both halves of the bread.  Next, you want a little chili paste.  Sambal oelek, the Indonesian spice paste, is fantastic and is what they use at Chicago’s Cafe Lula where they call this the tineka sandwich, but you know, it will work with many different kinds.  Sriracha, sweet chili-garlic paste, toban jian, what you got.  Schmear that right on up into  your peanut butter.  Then you wanna make a nice friendly haystack of shredded carrot, cucumber slices, sprouts, lettuce, definitely some tomato and a little bit of paper-thin sliced onion.  Drizzle just a snoodge of soy sauce on your veggies.  Sweet black soy if you have it.  The Indonesian kind is particularly choice in this, but the Chinese will do fine.  Slap the whole thing together and eat.

9.  Tuna Salad in a Tomato — So maybe the savory peanut butter-chili-veg bomb is too adventuresome for your palate.  That’s okay.  Get a fantastic tomato and slice off the top so you can scoop out the gooey bit in the middle (put the gooey bit in some water and let it infuse, you can pour it through a sieve later, and the water will taste wonderful).  Fill your tomato up with tuna salad instead.  Or egg salad.  Or chicken salad.  Or tofu salad.  Or… you get the idea.

10.  Banana Cream — Peel, then toss in a plastic bag and freeze, a few very ripe bananas.  Cut them into chunks, put them in the blender, and puree to a soft-serve ice cream  sort of texture. Add a little bit of vanilla extract.  Stir in chocolate chips if you like, or shredded sweetened coconut, or toasted nuts.

This is one of those dinners that is not for the kind of person who is afraid of mixing things on the plate.  I caramelized zucchini in a tablespoon of olive oil with whole cloves of garlic — a medium heat, with infrequent stirring and a good stout pan, will get it done in a reasonable amount of time — and then fried two eggs over easy in the residual oil left in the pan.  After breaking the yolks, I ate the garlic and zucchini with yolk and bits of eggwhite and some black pepper.  Sublime, especially because I made a nice cucumber salad to chase it with.  The salad is a riff on the cucumber salad from Friday last, only since I had no cilantro left I used some onions pickled in rice vinegar that were lingering in the back of the fridge.  Salt-fermented chiles add a little dimension and floral heat.  A fine contrast to rich eggyolk and unctuous-yet-nicely-crusted zucchini and garlic.

These tomato babies were hanging out in their fetching green hats, soaking up the sun when I went out in the garden a little while ago.

Ushi likes to watch over the garden and supervise me while I work.

It’s been so hot here, and so dry, the kind of weather we usually don’t see until August. Unbroken 90F or better for more than a week now, and no rain at all. It’s hard on the gardens, and on the gardeners. I water every day, carrying buckets of water from the rain barrels to the beds, because it’s the most efficient way of getting water where it’s needed — I have no desire to waste my water on the grass, or on the drought-tolerant plants. Especially since the hydrangeas are barely hanging in there (you see the heat-related leaf droop in the photo above, and it was only 9 am!) and need the water more than, say, the day lilies.

That said, I’ve been managing to keep things looking pretty green, and growing relatively well. I went out this morning first thing to cut grass and do weeding before it got too hot to work. Before I went in again, an hour and forty five minutes later, I decided it might be time for pictures.

The magic beanstalks have begun producing beans. So far just a few, which I have happily eaten right there in the yard. They’re extraordinary when picked small and eaten raw, with a vibrant, incredibly lush sweet flavor. It’s a treat you only get if you grow them, and one of the best arguments I know for keeping a garden.

Shiny happy brassicas holding hands. Brussels sprouts and broccoli and gai lan and yu choy. You can also see some tomato on the far left and chard on the far right. Some of the gai lan and yu choy are being allowed to bolt and self-sow for a fall crop.

The pumpkins have an extremely vigorous will to live. They are basically taking over a quarter of the back yard, which I am carefully not watering so the grass won’t grow much… since there’s no way to mow around and between all those vines.

Pumpkins At Work!

Cucumbers, purslane, long beans, and the Forest of Herbs. Now that the dill’s going to seed it’s thinner-looking over there. Purslane is often considered a weed, but it’s actually a wonderful vegetable. I grow it on purpose and eat it often. It grows back very quickly, it’s actually hard to keep up with it. It’s extremely nutritious, and tasty.

Cucumber blossoms.

The volunteer long bean plants (I grew them in this spot last year intentionally, and some came back to visit again) are blooming. I love their delicate lavender blossoms. Some varieties have pale blue blooms, others white.

The tomatoes have begun to set some fruit, particularly the paste tomatoes. The peppers are starting to bloom. The eggplants are doing their thing, and beginning to set fruit as well. Soon there will be lots of fruit in the garden. And the kitchen.

Whooboy, it’s been a time around here, chickens.  I’m deep, deep in the crunch, though not yet in the weeds thank God, with a book deadline July 15.  So if postings get a little catch-as-catch can, fear not, it’s just that the book has eaten my head, my hands, and probably my cooking time, as well as pretty much everything else.

I did get to cook yesterday, though, as a celebration of both my finally finishing a complete draft of the whole book (cue vuvuzelas!) and a dear friend’s birthday (cue birthday cake!).  I made a Mexican feast: carnitas, frijoles, pico de gallo, veggies from the garden, sliced avocado, and bought a kilo of fine, fine tortillas from Tortilleria Sinaloa across town in Fell’s Point.  (I never want to live in a town without a good tortilleria again.)

So tonight I’m having leftovers.  Chopped chard and purslane from the garden topped with a bunch of carnitas and several large spoonfuls of pico de gallo.  In the little dish, some Korean-style pickled daikon.  And in the big quart Mason jar, a big ol’ vat of iced tea with plenty of lemon juice.  Just think of the pickled daikon as Korean curtido.  Muy rico no matter what.

Since what I’m eating for dinner tonight is exactly the same as what I ate for lunch, I figured I’d take y’all on a little tour of the garden instead of subjecting you to yet another photo of my food.

This rose is “Mermaid,” an old, simple rose with a vigorous and sprawling habit, a territorial nature, and exceptionally vicious and numerous thorns.  It blooms prolifically and grows at a gallop… I planted this rose at the back fence just a little over a year ago.  It’s been duking it out with the ornamental grasses I inherited from the previous owners of the house ever since.

Just inside the back gate you can see my Rouge Vif d’Etampes pumpkin vine, beginning to grow, as scheduled, through the bottom of a little tripod built of branches.  Growing up the tripod itself is autumn clematis, a volunteer that appeared when we chopped down some old diseased thujas that were slowly dying on the spot when we bought the house.  The pot holds my “Penelope” rose, past her first bloom already.  She’ll have another in the early fall, though, don’t worry.

In the Forest of Volunteer Herbs, at the corner of the back porch, we have oregano and dill, thyme and lovage and Bavarian sage, purslane, some baby basil that I bunged in down front recently, and a few garlic chives.  I note that this is what happens when you aren’t careful about pinching off the blooms when your herbs start to bolt: the following year you get surprises.  I’m just amazed there isn’t any cilantro.  By rights I should be up to my elbows in it.  Off to the right is some Kentucky Colonel dill I rooted from a bunch some friends gave me, which seems to be doing all right and will doubtless be having turf wars with the sage before summer’s out.

Looking down the side yard, where the raised bed lives.  Most of the day it gets full sun, only after about 5 pm does the back half get shaded.  Down front there are tomatoes — Tula Black, Brandywine, and Green Zebra — and peppers of the “Biscayne,” “Lipstick,” “Chi Chien,” and guajillo varieties.  Further back a bit, Good Mother Stallard beans, Flor di Castilla beans, both of which are shelling varieties, and a couple hills of “Eden” pole beans, a string bean.  Beyond that, there is chard aplenty, a couple varieties of gai lan, some bok choy, broccoli “Belstar,” and Brussels sprouts, along with a few starts of Roma tomatoes tucked into odd corners.  To the right, with the white flower heads, is one of the elderberry bushes.  To the left you can see the rainbarrels.  Yeah, actual barrels.  Actual whiskey barrels, actually.  They still smell of it some.

The baby blueberries are still working on it.  I planted these berries just this year, so any fruit at all is a nice surprise.

Over the fence is my neighbor’s yard.  He likes roses, can you tell?  It’s nice to be able to enjoy all these roses and still have lots of space to concentrate on growing good things to eat.  Speaking of which, do you see my tiger lilies there in the lower right?  Lily buds are good eating… when I can bear to pick them.  I do so love watching them open.

Another view of the raised beds, with chard and broccoli in the foreground, beans and elderberry bushes in the back.

Up front in the mostly-unkempt, once-and-future shade garden, to which I haven’t yet done much, my astilbes are beginning to bloom.  There’s a volunteer black-eyed susan just to the left, too, that I’ve decided to let run riot if it will.

This is a Sea Holly (Eryngium “Blaukappe”) surprise.  I’d started some of these from seed last year, and felt all studly when I planted them out, whereupon they promptly died.  Or seemed to, at least, until a few weeks ago when they reappeared as if nothing had ever happened.  In the background, Echinacea purpura, and more tiger lilies.

Last but not least, here on the front porch, my $2 begonias.  They started out, a month or so ago, as dinky little three-inch pots of completely rootbound begonia for sale cheap at Trader Joe’s.  I purchased their freedom and brought them home and installed them somewhere with a little breathing room, namely a porch planter, and promptly enrolled them in the patented regime of benign neglect to which I treat all my plants.

They seem to like it fine.

For those of you who are still unconvinced that delicious, home-cooked dinners with local ingredients are out of your reach due to time constraints, let me just tell you that our dinner tonight took me a grand total of 15 minutes start to finish to prepare.  And that includes the time it took to go out to the garden and pick the baby chard.

A classic in the “greens with proteiny things on top” genre is the bowl of greens topped with fried egg.  Egg yolk, with a little salt and pepper, is one of the best salad dressings you can eat.  (Coddled egg, in fact, is the heart of every proper Caesar salad dressing.)  I prefer my eggs over easy.  There are several nearby egg farmers whose eggs I use, these eggs came from Broom’s Bloom Dairy in Bel Air, Maryland, 30 miles door-to-door from my house.  They also sell at my two local farmer’s markets, which is where I buy their eggs.  The baby chard, as I say, came from my kitchen garden.

Just so’s you know, you can top virtually any green vegetable with fried egg and it will be delicious.  Steamed or sauteed kale, raw or stir-fried spinach, steamed or roasted asparagus, raw or wilted chicory or endive, lettuces of whatever kind you like best, lightly-cooked broccoli, pea shoots, sorrel, beet greens, arugula, or my secret love, radish greens… greens love eggs and vice versa and you will love them together.

We also ate these beautiful maple-ginger bison sausages from the wonderful Nathan Stambaugh at Gunpowder Bison.  Gunpowder Bison is 25 miles north of me and their products are truly top-notch.

Delicious.  And so simple and quick.

This is the second patch of unseasonably hot weather we’ve “enjoyed” here in Baltimore this spring.  I can’t say that I care for it being 90 F, but my roses, shameless opportunists that they are, are bursting into bloom.

Meet Penelope, an old variety of hybrid musk rose that dates from 1924.  She grows on one side of a garden arch in my back garden, Clytemnestra grows on the other.  The good wife and the bad wife, natch, and I have mermaids growing on the back fence (they are highly territorial and have savage, bloodthirsty claws).  Clytemnestra is much more temperamental though, and while she did set a bloom today, her blooms tend to go from bud to blown in about 6 hours so getting a good picture is dependent on my getting out there in time, which I didn’t today.

Most of the garden is in, save for the eggplants, tomatoes, and the tenderest of the herbs.  I’ll give those another two weeks or so, until I’m sure nighttime temperatures are more likely to behave themselves in a manner befitting my tomato futures.  After last year’s tomato blight, I’m not taking any chances. Though everything out there is a little shocked by the heat–except, inexplicably, the Brussels sprouts seedlings–I don’t notice anything looking burnt.  So far so good.

I’ve also had two nice surprises.  I planted a Peregrine white peach for my Belovedary this spring, having promised him a peach tree as part of his birthday present last year.  Though the sapling that arrived from Trees of Antiquity was in excellent shape for a mail-order plant, I wasn’t expecting it to do much the first year it was in the ground even though it did flower.  Generally fruit trees take a year or two to start bearing.  Just yesterday, though, I was examining the tree when I was out working in the garden and what to my wondering eyes should appear but this:

That, my friends, is a very tiny peach tree working very hard at bearing a peach.  There are three baby peaches on the tree, and if I get even a single ripe peach off of it in its first year, I will be delighted indeed.

The blueberry bushes I planted this year are also doing surprisingly well.  They too came from Trees of Antiquity, and were planted out only in March, and I figured that there as well I’d be waiting until next year for fruit of any kind.  But one of the three has apparently decided otherwise.

I’d love to take credit for all this fruitfulness, but I’m afraid it has nothing to do with me. I’m a terrifically laissez-faire gardener.  (Another word for this is “lazy.”) All I do is bung things in the dirt and throw some water at them now and then if it doesn’t rain. Besides, the peach and the berries are brand spanking new to my garden, so all I’ve really done is not let them die. Trees of Antiquity deserves all the credit here, and they do sell lovely, apparently chronically overachieving stock.  If only they’d not had a crop failure on their blackcurrants, I might have pictures of precocious blackcurrants to show you, too.  Maybe next year.