Gardens, Recipes and eBooks

So my over-winter Alliums are doing well and my Walla Walla sweets are in the ground, and now I have to decide what else I will plant. After all, I should raise something besides onions and their relatives (i.e., shallots, garlic, leeks).

Tomatoes, of course. Can't have summer without tomatoes. Little, sweet ones, big, tangy red ones. To me summer smells like tomatoes, warm from the sun, so juicy that the drips leave stains on my shirt when I bite into them. And snow peas. They are in the ground too, but after two weeks I can't see a single emerging shoot. Perhaps it was too cold and too wet to plant them yet. But I couldn't wait. The sooner I plant the snow peas, the sooner I can eat them.

Do you get the idea that I love to eat? Oh yeah! And I love to cook almost as much.

Perhaps you read mysteries when you're eating alone. Or romances. I do, but even more frequently, I read cookbooks. Especially the ones with pretty photos. Of course, I rarely try any of the recipes, but it's fun to see what interesting ingredients people combine. Balsamic vinegar on ice cream (I did try that and it was good, after I'd caramelized the vinegar). Krispy-Kreme bread Pudding (just reading the recipe gives me a sugar high). Jellied Cole slaw (made it once, but was underwhelmed). Anything that starts with a can of soup (some sound good, but all that salt...).

 

I've become an adventurous cook, often inventing as I go along. So far I have not had to toss anything out, but I admit that some of my inventions have been less than tasty. Others, though, have warranted a note-to-self to repeat. Like the caramelized yams I did the other night. I'd already cooked the thick yam slices to almost-tender. A half teaspoon of butter, melted in a small skillet, a splash of balsamic vinegar, and a teaspoon of brown sugar, and plunk the yam slices on top over medium heat. Cook until slightly browned and a little crusty on the edge, turn over and repeat. Delicious, low cal, healthy, and super easy.

But this began with my garden, and it should end there. One more thing I plan to plant is nasturtiums. Volunteers from ones I planted about five years ago keep springing up, but they've all reverted to yellow, and I like the red and maroon ones too (the photo shows them the first year I planted them). They look so pretty in a salad. Yes, nasturtiums are edible. The flowers add color and a bite to salads, the buds  can be used like fresh capers or pickled, the leaves are great salad greens and a good substitute for watercress in sandwiches (buttered white bread with the crusts cut off and cut into dainty triangles, if you want to be traditional). And of course, nasturtiums add brilliant color to my vegetable garden. I can hardly wait.

I guess I should mention that in April I'll have a new Regency short story coming from Uncial Press. Common Ground is about a young woman with an untraditional ambition, a young man who'd rather not be heir to a title, and a duck-chasing dog. It's available for preorder now, at Amazon and elsewhere.

So...tell me about your garden. Or about your culinary adventures.

Jude

Not exactly a book review...

Most of you who've read my newsletter over the years know that I like to read cookbooks. I also like to share recipes. This month I'm going to share a hundred recipes.

Well, actually you're going to have to go get them for yourselves. But I promise it will be worth your while, if you like to know about food, about history, about what folks ate in the past.

The History of Food in 100 Recipes by William Sitwell is a fascinating read. Beginning in ancient Egypt (around 1900 B.C.), it tells the history of what people ate from then to the present. And it does it humorously, interestingly, and informatively--with recipes.

Did you know that Piggly-Wiggly invented supermarkets, way back in 1916? Or at least Clarence Saunders, the founder of the chain did. And that Oxo (bouillon) cubes were made popular by a marketing campaign to rival anything we've seen in this century. Peach melba was named after Nellie Melba, an actress (you probably knew that), but I'll bet you didn't know that melba toast was also named after her. 

One of my addictions is having a book about food to read while I eat. Living alone, I need something to occupy my mind at mealtimes, and if it's something to make me think, I tend to eat more slowly, and hence to eat less (a good thing, since I have to watch my weight carefully). Cookbooks and natural histories are my choice of non-fiction, although I confess that I read a lot of what my late husband used to call "mind-rot" too. It's not. Romance, SF, mystery, all have their places in contemporary literature and I make no apologies for anything I choose to read. But mostly I'm not tempted to share them with you. 

Mostly I'm not tempted to share anything I read, because my reading choices are sometimes, according to a good friend, peculiar. But this time I can't resist sharing The History of Food in 100 Recipes. It kept me occupied at breakfast, lunch and dinner for better than a week, because the chapters are short, and two or three can easily be read while one eats. Occasionally the recipes (as they originally appeared) tempt one to try them out, although I don't think I am going to try to make Kanasu Broth (which dates to around 1700 B.C.) or Fisherman's Chicken (dating from 1747, and not containing chicken) anytime soon.

Incidentally, the predecessor to Oxo and other bouillon products was portable soup, and its story is worth reading too.

Bon appetit!

Jude

January's Task

Good news! My short Regency romance, A Pitiful Remnant is a finalist in the historical category of the EPIC Awards. This is an annual contest for ebooks, judged by published authors and editors. I've been a finalist before, but hope springs eternal. Cross your fingers. The winners will be announced in March.

But now it's January and time to prune the wisteria.

My wisteria grows along the fence south of my house. Years ago I planted two wisteria vines, about thirty feet apart, mostly to prevent people from climbing over the fence from the adjacent culdesac. I wasn't being unneighborly. They were trampling my baby rhododendrons, making paths among my perennial beds, and damaging the fence. The wire supports we strung for the wistera, I figured, would prevent all but the most determined trespassers.

They did. And within a few years, as the wisteria grew along them, the leafy vines provided a lovely sight from my office and living room windows, especially when dripping with purple flowers.

Wisteria are vigorous plants. They don't seem to need fertilizer to grow fast, to put out new shoots in all directions. After the first couple of years, during which I cherished each new twining branch, I began having to cut a few back about halfway through the season. They were trying to find something to cling to on the deck, on a pine tree that was just off my lot, and probably should never have been planted there in the first place, and occasionally even on a rhody. In ensuing years I began having to prune more severely, along about the first of July. The photo was taken back when the vine was still behaving itself. Now it's all but engulfed the fence.

Now, about twenty years after I planted those slender wisterias, the trunks are both fat, twisted columns of wood, with numerous shoots that have to be constantly snipped off. Sometimes I've missed one or two, and later discovered long, snaky branches lying along the ground. Last summer I pruned one that had to be forty feet long, sneakily lying along the base of the fence for most of its length, before it started climbing up a seedling oak that was replacing the pine tree that was cut down after it lost a major branch in a storm. Once in a while a tendril will force its way between the boards in the deck, or find a convenient trellis on the big rhody in the back yard. The neighbor to the west has welcomed the wisteria's incursion into his yard. He thinks it's pretty, and so far hasn't realized its threat.

I have a 55-gallon yard debris barrel. Three times last summer I filled it with wisteria prunings. One of these days, when it's not pouring rain, I shall once again prune the wisteria. This time, because its branches are bare, my goal will be to shape it, to get rid of the branches that have forced their way between the boards of the fence. To tame it somewhat.

Only somewhat. Wisteria is, I believe, untamable. A long time ago we moved into a house that had a big, neglected wisteria in the back yard, hard against the side fence. We dug it out, because the fig tree it was trying to overwhelm was more important, we thought. A few years later we noticed wisteria growing over the trees in the adjacent yard. Apparently we'd missed a few roots. Now I understand the wisteria has crept back into the back yard where it originated. Who knows where it will end up?

My point here is to warn you all. Wisteria is bent on world domination. 

Beware!

About those holiday letters...

Do you write an annual holiday letter and inflict it on family and friends? I do, mostly because I love to receive them. So many of my friends are far away, and reading their holiday letters is a way to keep up with their lives, with the events we never quite get around to talking about in our emails, infrequent phone calls, and even more infrequent face-to-face encounters.

The best holiday letters have always been those that include photos of the kids. Some of the kids are now in their fifties, but I've still got their baby pictures, their grade school class pictures, and even a few high school graduation portraits. There are even a few photos of kids I've never met, but they're still part of my extended family because their parents are.

One of my major regrets is that I didn't keep the letters that came with some of those photos. It never occurred to me until about ten years ago, the first Christmas after one of the letter writers died. She didn't write only holiday letters, but long, newsy missives all year long. Sadly I have only a couple of them, and I wish I'd kept them all. Now I do, even the electronic ones. But alas, so many of those don't include photographs.

My own holiday letter has been a webpage for several years now. I stopped sending physical cards (and letters) to nearly everyone on my Christmas card list when holding a pen became painful, due to arthritis. That's under control now, but I admit I really like both saving the cost of postage and not adding to the waste stream (for those of you who aren't aware, I tend to be a trifle passionate on the topic of reducing waste). Using a webpage gives everyone the option of ignoring it, although I hope no one will. It's also easier than sending out a b'zillion emails, which feels way too much like spamming. I figure if I tell the folks on a couple of lists, post to my Facebook page, and put it here, most of the people who might be interested in how I spent my year can go find out.

One thing I've spent quite a bit of time doing this past year, but isn't in my holiday letter, is trying new recipes. The Web is a fabulous resource, so much so that I am gradually reducing the size of my cookbook library. Here is one of the recipes I found, when I decided that all those kale stems were too tough for salad but too healthful to put into the compost bin. It takes 10 to 15 minutes to make, depending on whether you've stripped the stems for something else, or do so just for this recipe.

Sweet and Spicy Sautéed Kale Stems

2 teaspoons olive oil

10-12 kale stems, picked clean of the leaves and chopped into 1 inch pieces

2 tablespoons onion, finely minced

½ teaspoon soy sauce

1 tablespoon honey or maple syrup

½ teaspoon sriracha

⅛ teaspoon chili flakes

Sea salt, to taste

Heat the oil in a medium sized frying pan over medium high heat. Add the kale stems and onion and sauté for 5-7 minutes, or until the kale stems have softened but still have a little crunch. Remove from the heat and stir through the soy sauce, honey or maple syrup, sriracha, chili flakes and season to taste with sea salt. Serve immediately.

I used maple syrup and the red-stem kale the first time I made this. Pretty!

(from: TheEndlessMeal.com)

So that's it for 2015. I wish you good health, good fortune, and good cheer for the rest of this year and ever after.

--from my grandmother's collection, ca. 1910.