Spring Fever -- Go Wild!

 

Dandelions,leeks,toothwort, violets

Fiddleheads in the woods

Outdoors every day, anyway, keeping track of what Nature is up to, why has it taken me so long to begin foraging? The extent of my wildness in past years has been to add toothwort leaves and edible flowers to ordinary salads. I never tried dandelion greens before. And fiddleheads are a whole new world for me: if I'd known how delicious that little dish would be, I'd have brought more home! Next year....

Salad with carrot shavings added

Sautéed fiddleheads with yellow violets

NOT "Crackers over the Sink"

Inspired by red gooseberries

One of my friends had her 85th birthday recently, and I decided to make a special birthday dinner for the two of us. We enjoy meals on my front porch together, often remembering when there were four of us, not just two. (We share a lot of memories.) So why not an extra-special evening? And there were those gooseberries, after all, calling for something out of the ordinary.

So I put together a dinner plan starting with dessert, the most ambitious item on my menu:  gooseberry tart. Gooseberries have to be “topped and tailed” (stem and blossom ends removed), which is time-consuming but also a basically meditative task perfect for a summer afternoon. Instead of adding sugar to the berries, I mixed in about a third of a little jar of plum jam.

For the shell, I looked at half a dozen recipes and cobbled mine together from bits and pieces of all of them. I didn’t have almonds to grind for the pastry (that would be nice another time) but did have powdered sugar. And we might as well say here that this pastry is known as pâte sucrée. Chunks of butter worked with fingers into flour, sugar, and a pinch of salt, and I added a whole egg (though some people use only the yolk or no egg at all). While the sweet dough rested in the refrigerator, I worked outside in the yard for an hour, planting what will be a lovely daylily border, I’m sure, when the plants fill in. 

Later, while prebaking the tart shell I cooked a batch of rigatoni, and you could call what I made with it mac ‘n’ cheese, I suppose, at least a variation thereon: basic bechamel sauce but made with cream rather than milk and fresh nutmeg grated in; then, for the cheese, raclette. We are very fortunate to have fine raclette made right here on the peninsula at Leelanau Cheese, and I’d bought that at the farmers market on Friday, too. My cheesy pasta I baked in cute little ramekins, with extra raclette on top, but the cuteness was nothing compared to the taste. I warned my friend, “One bite, and you’ll feel a need to go to confession!” She laughed but agreed after she tasted.

We had the salad I invented a couple weeks ago and love for its cool, freshing summer tastes and textures: tomato (this one an heirloom variety from the farmers market), cucumber, blueberries, and pinenuts, with balsamic vinaigrette. We had poached (steamed, really) salmon and green beans with curried mayonnaise, with the rigatoni-raclette on the side. And for dessert we had gooseberry tart generously heaped with freshly whipped real cream.

(Cold, the next day)

Half-eaten serving!

Another friend told me the other day that someone had asked her, after her husband died, if she was fixing regular meals for herself or “eating crackers over the sink.” I certainly don’t fix meals like this when I’m alone (or even for company more than once a year, if that!), but once in a blue moon, for an old friend, it felt like the right time to pull out all the stops -- which meant I also did better than crackers over the sink the following day, when my next evening's dinner recapitulated everything but the whipped cream and so, finally, I got a few half-decent photos to illustrate this post. Because while I often photograph while I'm in the process of cooking and baking, I also often forget to photograph the finished dishes in all their glory. "Did you take a picture of that?" the Artist used to ask me. But now no one asks.

 

This Salad Needs No Clothes

"Did you take a picture of it?" No! I was too hungry! And we didn't leave much in the big bowl, either. But here are the ingredients:

Fresh corn, steamed on cob and then cut off and chilled

Fresh heirloom tomato, your favorite, cut in bite-size pieces

Sliced black olives

Thinly sliced fresh radishes

Sliced fresh pepper, your favorite kind

Chopped fresh chives

I don't think I've left anything out, but you can add or subtract as you wish. My main point is that this salad needs no dressing. You may add dressing, if you like, and freshly ground pepper is always good, but it is deliciously irresistible just as it is.

The joys of late summer!

"Is It Worth It?"

Back in June

That was my husband’s question, when I told him I have an idea for next year’s garden and how I can combine straw bales with the first stage of raised bed constructions. “It’s worth it to me,” I answered, and he did not push me further. 

Before the olives

I tell the dog, as I choose vegetables from the garden,  that my Greek salad contains “all things bright and beautiful.” Cucumbers are soft green, peppers soft yellow and bright orange, tomatoes as red as red can be. Since we don’t live in the south of France (let alone in Paris), I’ll need to buy olives at the store in town, but it pleases me to look at my own garden’s bounty in a bowl. In the garden, stiff training supports that held heavy peony heads earlier in the summer now bear aloft fat purple fingers of eggplant. A few of those split in two and brushed with olive oil can go on the grill next to a couple of chops, and with salad on the side, that will be dinner.

eggplant this morning

Yesterday’s forecast of “scattered showers” for Wednesday and Thursday has been downgraded to “partly cloudy,” with hope for rain pushed back to next Monday. Having to water my garden every morning and evening, though, keeps the daily status of that riotous jungle clear in my mind.

“Is it worth it?” 

In terms of what? Given the cost of plants and straw bales and fertilizer and the time spent watering, am I saving money over buying the same vegetables at the store or the farm market? Well, they wouldn’t be the same vegetables, would they? Not to me, they wouldn’t. It is worth it to me to feel that I am inhabiting my own life, rather than simply commuting to and from a house and visiting the country as a tourist. I am living, here and now, on my home ground. 

The piper must be paid in any life. Is life worth living, with all its work and troubles and woes? I say yes. 

Home

A Personal Best

This is going to be your personal best tabbouleh, the perfect summer lunch to take to work. Get up early and add ice cubes to yesterday’s leftover coffee. Your caffeine jolt doesn’t need to be hot to get you moving on a warm, still morning. Last night you poured boiling water over the bulgur and let it sit, so that’s ready. Now add olive oil, chop cucumbers and tomatoes and onions (use a good, sharp knife — don’t saw!) and stir them in gently, then squeeze fresh lemon juice over everything and stir again. The vegetables are all from your own garden or the farm market, of course. 

Now go out to your garden while everything is cool and beaded with dew and gather nice, big, beautiful, dark green parsley. Chop and add. 

There’s only one ingredient missing now, so on your way to work (tabbouleh packed in a cooler, with a container of yogurt on the side), stop by a swiftly running stream and gather fresh mint. When you get to work, you’ll rinse the mint well, chop it and add it to the mix, then refrigerate everything until lunch announces itself. Hunger is the announcement. 

When you get home after work later in the day, finish mowing grass and have leftover pizza from the night before as your evening meal. (You had your salad for lunch.) Check the garden for more ripe cucumbers before you turn in for the night. Tomorrow you can make a cold cucumber soup to serve and enjoy with meat from the grill.

I used the silly word “leftover” twice above. Edit that out. Planning ahead makes life easier. You don’t throw out good coffee when you can have it the next day over ice. You order a medium pizza rather than a small for two people so there will be enough for another evening. Because if you didn’t plan ahead, how would you ever keep up with and survive the busy summer season?

“Time goes on slippin’, slippin’ / into the future….”

And eggplants are coming along. Those will be good on the grill, too.

Start With a Blood Orange

Blood oranges are not unique to Spain, but I always think of them as Spanish, from my first encountering them in Paris, and then I think also of strawberries and the protests from French farmers and agricultural workers one year over strawberries imported from Spain in what I thought of “The War of the Strawberries.” Oranges, of course, need a warmer climate than strawberries (and so we have Michigan strawberries but not Michigan oranges), but let’s stick to oranges today. Strawberries will come in good time.

Les sanguines. Blood oranges. The name is strong and yet poetic, evocative, calling up associations and mysteries far beyond citrus.

Blood orange fruit segments are a deep garnet in color (darker than Ruby Red grapefruit), and the thick orange rind surrounding the juicy pulp usually bears a deep red blush, too. They are delicious as well as beautiful, but it was the beauty and the magic of the name that first drew me to them. Some objects, like some places, simply have irresistible names, and if the objects are beautiful, too, why try to resist?

Now, to my amazement, blood oranges have come to Northport, where they are at present no more expensive than the more ordinary oranges. A dollar apiece for either kind! Cheaper than a candy bar! Too special, though, I can’t help thinking, to be merely sliced into sections for a snack. And a single blood orange goes a long way when used in a salad, half of one sufficient for two people’s salad. It dresses up mundane Romaine remarkably, along with some crumbled goat cheese and works well with a raspberry vinaigrette. 

But a blood orange inspires me to go beyond lettuce and cheese, and so my salad the next evening began with cubed cold tofu and sections of blood orange cut into thirds, which would probably have been good enough; however, I had a bit of leftover fruit salad – orange and mango and grated coconut – so I tossed that in, too, along with freshly sprouted mung beans, finally dressing the whole and tossing with a light application of sesame oil.

Done?

That would have been the end of it, except that I also found the tiniest dab of chopped cabbage and kale to sprinkle over the top for bright green contrast and added crunch. Perfect!

NOW it's done!

What inspires you in the kitchen as spring comes on? Or do you find it too hard to stay indoors?

(Bring outdoors in)

Domestic and Wild Peppery Foraging

Wild mustard

The little farmhouse kitchen, redolent in winter of soup and fresh-baked bread, lively with stirring and bubbling, falls still as summer comes on, with bookstore and yard and garden demanding unceasing attention.

Few Parisians can afford the space for private gardens. For outdoor relaxation they depend instead on large public green spaces, such as, near my old friend Hélène’s apartment, the Luxembourg Gardens. (A world in itself, that!) But even without a burgeoning potager (kitchen garden, as the English call it), Hélène cultivated pots of herbs in a sunny window. And by the way, it’s smart to restrain perennial herbs in pots, no matter how much ground you have available, as some of them, given garden room, will develop Napoleonic ambitions and try to take over your entire world, making much more otherwise unnecessary work.

Taking a leaf from Hélène’s book, then, and because time and energy allowed me to reclaim only about half of my former vegetable garden, neglected for the past two years, I have done some of my food planting in containers this year – tomatoes, radishes, even collards (I have my doubts about the collards in a container, given the size of a full-grown plant, but if we eat away at the outer leaves fast enough, perhaps they can be kept in check) – as well as, among the flowers, nasturtiums, a colorful edible addition to summer salads.

Tomato plant and radish seedlings

Radish thinnings

Our first summer salad supper was Thursday evening. The radishes needed thinning, and the young sprouts were far too tasty to throw in the compost pile. Since the thinning task coincided with the last blooming of a local wild mustard – another delicate, edible, peppery cruciform, much like the spring’s toothwort in flavor – radish sprouts and pepper blossoms made a nice addition to the green salad, strewn atop after Greek dressing had been drizzled over lettuce and tomatoes.

Ah, summer! Supper on the porch! Flowers on the table and on our plates! Now, if ever, come perfect days....

From Spring Woods to Farm Kitchen

You’re probably expecting, from my subject heading, either morels or wild leeks, but I want to introduce you to a less well-known Up North spring delicacy. It is the humble cutleaf (or cut-leaved) toothwort (also known as crow’s toes or pepper root), found from eastern Canada to Florida.

You can walk in the woods for years without noticing it, as I did. Then one day you make the identification, and from then on you watch for it eagerly every spring. Here is a site that keys it as a Brassica, i.e., a member of the mustard family. Its name has apparently been changed, just like my old childhood friend Brontosaurus, whose new name will never be lodged in my long-term memory. -- Whoa! Here’s good news for my generation: Brontosaurus is Back!!! Well, I'm glad I looked that up!

Anyway, toothwort. I am bound and determined to keep in the mustard family. Look at the four-petaled flower, and try to deny the family relationship.

My point – and I realize I’m taking forever to come to it – is that the peppery leaves and flowers of toothwort are a welcome change from the store-bought lettuce (and even kale) we’ve lived on all winter. I went to the woods on Friday afternoon and picked me a nice mess.

I chose the bland smoothness of tofu to offset the peppery greens. (If you don’t make your own tofu but live in the Grand Traverse area, the best available can be found at the Oryana Food Co-op in Traverse City.)

I dressed my salad with a little olive oil and very small dash of balsamic vinegar, whisked together with a smidgeon of Grey Poupon. And that was that, except for a sprinkling of hard-cooked egg yolk on top. If you don’t care for tofu, you might substitute the white from the hard-cooked egg – an easy exchange.

We seem to have strayed far from Paris today, but it’s that time of year – time to get out into the northern Michigan woods. Although I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that toothwort or something like it can be found in the forests of Europe. We are, after all, at about the same latitude, and many of our plants are common to both continents. And who knows better than the French about foraging in the woods for kitchen treasures?