Homework

Once you’ve got your supply of shelled, washed, cooked beans, what next?

There are so many options it’s honestly hard to know where to begin, but here are two of my favorites.

For beans that will lend themselves readily to Tex-Mex, Cajun, and many Southeastern US style meals, stew your cooked beans with a large quantity of minced onion, sauteed in some plain oil (peanut or canola or whatever) with a somewhat smaller quantity of bell pepper and a similar quantity of celery, a few crushed cloves of garlic, and a little cayenne or other spicy pepper.  Sautee all the veggies first until the onions are transparent and soft, then add the beans and enough water or broth to just barely cover the beans.  Simmer until about half of the water has cooked off.  This will give the flavorings time to penetrate the beans, and vice versa.  Salt, stir, then wait 10 minutes, and taste and add more salt if it needs it. To further Tex-Mexicanize this method, add ground cumin.

My favorite way to eat beans as cooked above is in a bowl, topped with an approximately equal volume of fresh homemade pico de gallo or salsa of whatever kind I happen to have made lately.  Today’s salsa is diced Tula Black and Pink  Brandywine tomatoes from the garden, lots of onion and garlic, two huge bunches of cilantro diced fine, salt, lemon juice, and three fresh ripe guajillo chiles and one fresh ripe tientsin chili from my garden.  It’s awful tasty.   My second favorite way to eat beans cooked like this is with hot cornbread.

For beans that will make your imaginary Italian granddad smile, stew the beans with a moderate quantity of minced onion sauteed until just turning brown in a generous sufficiency of good olive oil, then add a couple of cloves of sliced garlic and several large fresh sage leaves cut into a chiffonade (roll the leaves up like a cigar, then slice across into thin threads).  Or use a slightly smaller amount of dried sage.  Sautee the onion, garlic, and sage until they smell awesome, then add the beans, and again, just enough water/broth to bring the water level up to the top of the beans.  Add a little salt and a little black pepper and simmer it down until the water is halfway gone.  Taste, correct the salt if need be.

If you like, you can toss beans prepared this way with a small shape pasta like farfalle or rotini.  Gild the lily with a little slosh more olive oil, and some chopped parsley, which are also nice even if you don’t have the pasta with it.  I also like sometimes to dribble a tiny bit of good balsamic vinegar (not the $2.99 crap) over the top of the beans.

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.

Pazi dolmasi is Turkish stuffed chard.  Normally you’d make it with very large chard leaves, and stuff them with a meat or rice filling much as you would if you were making stuffed grape leaves.  Then they’d be baked, probably with a bit of tomatoey or lemony sauce to keep things moist.

The chard leaves in my garden are not very big yet, so I decided to deconstruct my “stuffed chard leaves” into a quicker, easier dish.  The filling, in this case, I made with some ground bison, because I happened to have some on hand.  You could use lamb, which would be more traditional, or a mix of roasted chopped eggplant and cooked rice, which would also be very nice. The chard is cut into ribbons, and then wilted in a hot cast-iron pan.  Because it’s young chard, the stems are no obstacle, and need only a little cooking.

This is a very approximate recipe

• 1 pound ground bison or lamb
• 2 small or one medium onion(s), diced
• 4-6 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
• approximately 1 tablespoon dried or fresh mint
• approximately 1 tablespoon dried or fresh dill weed
• small amount (a little more than 1/4 teaspoon) ground cardamom, or 2 large dried green cardamom pods, crushed
• small amount (about 1/4 teaspoon) ground allspice, or three dried allspice berries, crushed
• 1/2 teaspoon crushed dried red pepper
• freshly ground black pepper
• 1 cup diced fresh or canned tomato
• approximately 1/2 cup dried currants, tart cherries, chopped dried apricots, or other tart *unsweetened* dried fruit
• olive oil
• salt to taste

Heat a heavy pan until it’s extremely hot and add enough oil to put a light film over the bottom of the pan. Add the onion and saute until it is starting to get caramelized, then add the garlic and saute until fragrant.  Add the meat and break it up with a spoon or spatula. As the meat releases its juices and some fat, add the seasonings except for salt (don’t salt until the end), and continue to cook for 5-7 minutes.  Add the tomato and stir well, then add the dried fruit.  Simmer approximately 10 minutes, perhaps a little more; add a small amount of water if the pan begins to get dry.  Before serving, taste, and salt/pepper to taste.

Serve over a bed of chopped wilted or steamed chard.

This is a lovely savory dinner, easily made.  It can be stretched by combining the filling with an equal amount of cooked rice, if you desire. If you want a garnish, toast a handful of pine nuts in a dry heavy pan, and scatter them over the top.

The filling also makes a fantastic sandwich component, which means you need never worry about what to do with leftovers.  I recommend warm, fresh pita stuffed with a healthy handful of fresh lettuce or spinach, some sliced cucumber, and perhaps some thinly sliced radish, then a helping of this filling.  Drizzle your sandwich with plain yogurt or a mint-garlic yogurt, if you like.

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.

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.