Home Garden is where the heart is

I've planted in seven garden plots this year, but our home garden is still dearest to me. When we moved in three and a half years ago, it was a 54 square foot strip of patchy weeds in front of the driveway. That summer, I dug it up with a spade, added half a bale of peat and a garbage bag of well-rotted cow manure, and had a bumper crop of tomatoes. The next summer I learned the pitfalls of monocropping, as blight hit my tomatoes. The following year I diversified, and this year - I think I like this one the best.

I planted vegetables that I knew my kids would enjoy picking and snacking on and vegetables that are best when brought to the table five minutes later. Lettuce, snap and shelling peas, cherry tomatoes, mizuna, carrots, shungikyu, basil, radishes, peppers, fall-planted garlic and the perennial chives. My son added three onions he grew from seed and an upside-down tomato he got for his birthday and my daughter planted a butternut squash.

And now that I've picked up the old seed packs and trimmed the grass, I can show it off! Tomorrow: first salad with lettuce and mizuna thinnings, chives, and radishes.

Sunday Brunch

Comfort Food

I know that I should be posting informative, politicized information. But it's December, and I just want to hunker down in a warm nest and fatten myself up. If you like, you can read Barry Estabrook's take on organic agriculture's ability to feed the world (after the proof, a zinger: "Given that the current food production system, which is really a 75-year-old experiment, leaves nearly one billion of the world’s seven billion humans seriously undernourished today, the onus should be on the advocates of agribusiness to prove their model can feed a future population of nine billion — not the other way around"). However, this post is going to be about comfort, and soup.

Some unanalysed part of me feels secure when certain numbers increase. Not money in my bank account, which would be sensible, but quantity of food that I've put up makes me feel happy. I'm not talking freeze-dried packets to be eaten in a steel bunker in the nuclear aftermath. I mean jars of applesauce and tomatoes, bags of potatoes and onions, and a freezer of pies and meat. I ascribe to Sharon Astyk's principle of food storage: store what you like to eat, so in a situation where you have to eat it (job loss, ice storm) you will enjoy your food rather than have it add to the suffering. Last week, I decided to make a meal entirely from stored food.

I grew onions for the first time this year. I've come late to an appreciation of onions, and I didn't know how many to plant in our limited space. It turns out that I planted enough to last until last week in storage. These are the last onions, and the last carrots. (I grew many carrots, but correspondently ate more and found more ways to use them in recipes because they were so tasty.)

 I added canned tomatoes. I added garlic:

 

Vegetarians, avert your eyes. I added ground beef:

I added spices, and noodles, and voila:

I made comfort.

Love apple: the complicated tomato

I don't mean to suggest by my last post that tomatoes are not a vegetable. Although, of course, many will argue that they are a fruit, and some purists even argue there is no such thing as a vegetable, I generally use commonly accepted notions rather than botanical definitions. Whatever the tomato is, it is delicious and nutritious.

Of course, it is not without dangers. Perhaps because of its resemblance to deadly nightshade, colonial Americans thought it was poisonous and used it only as decoration. While that was disproven (for the fruit; all other parts of the plant are toxic), it now turns out that because of their acidity, canned tomatoes are particularly adept at leaching bisphenol-A from the lining of the cans. BPA has been linked to ailments ranging from reproductive problems to heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. Conventionally grown, they also pose a danger to farmworkers: fields are sprayed with  more than 100 different herbicides and pesticides - and fieldworkers have been found in conditions of slavery in Florida.

If one can navigate these dangerous waters, the tomato is indispensible for certain types of cuisine, e.g. mine - tending towards the one-pot meal where things can be dumped in and simmered or baked. I came across a woman the other day who didn't know what people would use a lot of canned tomatoes for in cooking. She only used them for chili or spaghetti sauce, which they ate maybe once a month.

In addition to chili, here's what I use them for:

• jambalaya
• bruschetta
• lasagna and other pastas
• zucchini parmesan
• lamb and chickpea stew (with or without lamb)
• soup bases - lentil or peanut or hamburger or Manhattan clam chowder
• shirred eggs
• cabbage rolls
•  ...and yes, pizza sauce

 Fresh, could they need any more enticement than the company of fellow vegetables?

Ketchup may no longer be a vegetable, but pizza is.

If you've been following American food news, you've probably heard that the US Congress has voted to make pizza a vegetable. (No, the link isn't to a Wall-E clip.) More precisely, the guidelines for nutrition in  school lunches now assert that the two tablespoons of tomato sauce on a slice of pizza counts towards the weekly calculation of vegetable servings. The proposal to limit servings of potatoes (often in the form of hashbrowns and fries) per week was also dismissed.

Probably not this pizza.

I went to a "community school" for grades seven and eight. It was located in a newly gentrifying area, and had a mix of incomes represented, tending to the lower end. It didn't have a cafeteria or lunch program (very few schools in the city did) but I remember getting weekly donations of free muffins. I usually chose chocolate-chocolate chip: sweet, fatty, calorie-dense, likely nutritionally void. It didn't occur to me at the time to wonder at the donation. Cynically, I wonder now - was it a tax write-off? Past-date goods? An attempt to make us future muffin customers? Or just a treat for the poor kids? What, exactly, was the purpose of the muffin?

It is hard not to be cynical when looking at the lobbying that was behind Congress's decision. Food companies including ConAgra, Coca-Cola, Del Monte Foods and makers of frozen pizza like Schwan argued that the proposed rules would raise the cost of meals (14 cents per meal according to the Department of Agriculture) and require food that many children would throw away.

Here's some background on school lunches in the United States.

In fiscal year 2009, federal school nutrition programs underwrote more than five billion meals served to over 31 million students. Students are entitled to free lunches if their families’ incomes are below 130 percent of the annual income poverty level guideline established by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and updated annually by the Census Bureau ($29,055 for a family of four in 2011). Children who are members of households receiving food stamp benefits or cash assistance through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families block grant, as well as homeless, runaway, and migrant children, also qualify for free meals. Students with family incomes below 185 percent of poverty are eligible for a reduced price lunch. Of the five billion meals provided to 31.8 million students during the 2008-09 school year, 55 percent were free of charge, 10 percent were reduced price, and the other 35 percent were paid.

That's 17.5 million children living in poverty. Surely there is a duty to provide them with nutrition, not the cheapest mass-produced schlock available. If the government is not going to address societal problems that perpetuate poverty, is not properly funding and regulating school meals the least it can do?

Libertarians will cry, "It's the parents' responsibility!" Sure, in an ideal world, with parents who have nutritional knowledge, cooking skills, and access to cheap, healthy ingredients. We don't live in that world. Let's work with the one we have.

July Salad

Butter lettuce, mizuna, peas, snap peas, walnuts, pansies, centaurea. Best served with friends.

Salad Days

Why do I have this gorgeous bed of lettuce when I find salads intimidating?

Black seeded Simpson and Matina Sweet

"Oh, just bring a salad." I dread those words. To me, salads mean one of two things. The first is the gourmet salad One tosses together with an airy laugh, with ingredients like "caramelized seckel pear halves stuffed with gorgonzola dolce" - ingredients I have never seen, let alone possess. I am the type of person who occasionally throws caution to the wind and buys something like Italian parsley for a new recipe, then realizes she has no other uses for it, and discovers it weeks later, brown and slimy, in the bottom of her crisper.

The second thing salad means to me is the wodge of green that is slapped on a plate and nudged to the edge by the fleshocentric* main dishes that the salad offers a weak justification for gorging on. In my world, it is typically one of three options:

• The Triumvirate (lettuce, cucumber, wedge of pallid tomato tasting of dirty water)
• The Slaw (cabbage and carrot, creamy dressing)
• The Jello (orange or red with fruit, or occasionally, and hideously, green with slaw)

Ugh.

Usually when I make salad I try to compensate for the lack of taste in a typical Triumvirate and add every vegetable I happen to have. This results in a salad that tastes of nothing in particular and has to be drowned in dressing for flavour. But I do have a gorgeous bed of lettuce. So I decided to try a new approach: use common ingredients, but with a "less is more" philosophy.

This is my lettuce, carrot, sunflower seed salad, with crushed garlic, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar dressing. Fresh and sweet. I look forward to more experimentation!

 *Thanks to Hugh Joseph's presentation on salad at the AFHVS conference for introducing this hilarious term to me.

Cabbage

Post-election, I am trying to think happy thoughts. Comfort food falls in that category.

I grew up eating a fair amount of cabbage, although what all it was in I can't remember. I can remember eating homemade sauerkraut, and eating around the core of the cabbage after my mom sliced off the leaves. But I didn't use cabbage once I was on my own, because I didn't really know how.

I decided I should learn to cook with cabbage, so I've been using it in some soups. I also stumbled across this delicious recipe for braised cabbage from Orangette. Enjoy!

The Family Meal: Easier than Ever!

There's a lot of talk lately in certain circles about the importance of the family meal. A typical internet post on the topic will tell you that "research shows" eating together as a family will result in a cornucopia of positive results:

• Everyone eats healthier meals.
• Kids are less likely to become overweight or obese.
• Kids more likely to stay away from cigarettes and alcohol.
• They're less likely to use illicit drugs.
• School grades will be better.
• You and your kids will talk more.
• You'll be more likely to hear about a serious problem.
• Kids will feel like you're proud of them.
• There will be less stress and tension at home.

I like to cook, and I come from a family who always sat down to eat dinner together. I am doing the same with my children. Works for us. However.

There seems to be an unstated assumption that you could be running a crack house but if you started sitting down to dinner with your kids - even take-out pizza, as one site suggests -your life would turn around. I don't know about you, but it seems a little suspect that the one commonality amongst high-performing families in these studies is that they sit down to dinner together.

But let's suspend our disbelief, and ignore the probability that families that have the time and resources (knowledge, tools, money) to prepare meals and eat them together probably also have the time and resources to help the children with homework.

I have discovered an even easier way to increase your children's grades and nutritional intake:

Eat Broccoli Together.

Specifically, Romanesco broccoli.

Broccoli Romanesco florets (photo by Alfredo Matacotta)

How cool is that? Fractal vegetables. As the blogger from Love Apple Farm says, "You could steam this baby whole, present it to your perpetually bored lachanophobic teenager, and with any luck, get him to eat his veggies AND start a conversation about molecular nanotechnology."

Let me know how this magic bullet works for you! I'd especially appreciate if you could introduce this to some malnourished poor families, preferably with a tone of condescension, and report back on the results!