Yard long vegetables

The salad we ate last night for dinner featured an embarrassment of garden riches....homegrown corn, tomatoes, potatoes and beans. The color of the beans is a bit jarring, no? A nearly black component of a salad doesn't exactly bring to mind summer freshness. In their raw state, these beans are a rich maroon. They are red noodle yard long beans and they are far outpacing my pole beans.

The first red noodles appeared two weeks ago, and they have cheerily put out armfuls of long, pencil-thick beans. I have meters upon meters of maroon beans to deal with on a nightly basis. I blanched them for this salad, but they make a good stir-fry as well. The color serves a practical purpose, too: the beans are very easy to find, whereas I often miss green string beans that camouflage themselves well amongst the similarly-colored foliage.

The other big producer in my garden has been the Armenian cucumber, also known as the yard long cucumber. These are long, narrow, snake-like melons that have a taste and texture very close to a citrusy cucumber. These melons grow very quickly and, unlike my regular cukes, seem only to become more productive the hotter it gets.

I have read they don't pickle well, and we simply cannot keep up with production. I have started giving them away in zucchini-like fashion. Most of my victims are too intrigued by the novelty of a melon the size and shape of a child's arm to turn it down. Soon they will learn that one can make only so many salads and raita before calling it a day on these suckers. I have three of these plants this year, and next year I will definitely only plant one.

Yard-long vegetables are tempting to the home cook and gorgeous in their shape and size. But yards and yards of produce can be a kitchen challenge for a small family. If you plan to go the yard-long route, you better have lined up a stable of friends ready to receive August garden overflow.

Bogus "seasonal" recipes

I went to a Barnes and Noble for the first time in a long while and was shocked by the rack of newly released cookbooks -- nearly two prominently displayed shelves of glossy hardcovers emphasized local food, seasonal produce and kitchen gardening. Snark all you want about trends and recession-era fashions, but it warms my heart to see this ethic become mainstream. There was even a thick stack of one of my favorite recent books, The Seasons on Henry's Farm. A decade ago, this book would have been sold only in health food stores and garden catalogs. Three cheers for it holding it's own next to the table of teen vampire novels.

I flipped through the books and, as with most genres, they were of varying quality. They were uniformly beautiful, with close up shots of garlic scapes and oil-slicked greens. The recipes are what separated out the wheat from the chaff. Clearly, some authors knew what they were talking about and others, well, had jumped a little too quickly on the locavore bandwagon. One book that proclaimed an ethic of "growing your local community" featured pineapple salsa. Unless your local community is Hawaii, that ain't local, baby. I have nothing against recipes featuring fresh fruit, and love a good pineapple now and then. But pretending that you can march over to the farmer's market and pick-up a pineapple to go with your grass-fed pork chop is a little silly.

More subtle, but entirely more irritating to me as someone who truly sweats out the season in her vegetable patch, were some of the garden-based cookbooks. The authors nailed the basics: tomatoes in summer, kale in the late fall. Their lack of gardening chops -- or even their lack of a keen eye for farmer's markets week in and week out -- was shown in the many of the dishes featuring combinations of produce. Apricot and rhubarb marmalade? My rhubarb is long past harvest when the apricots ripen. Corn and melon salad? My corn was picked this week, and my melons are just the size of baby's fists. Most annoying to me are the "summer" recipes featuring greens and tender lettuces. By the time tomatoes are ripe on the vine, any lettuce left in the garden will be bolted and bitter. I just planted my fall lettuce seed in the shadow of tomato plants, heavy with ripe fruit. That's as far as these two garden products will come to each other in my house, unfortunately.

Even my current favorite food writer, Francis Lam of Salon.com, is not immune to "seasonal" gaffes. He wrote a column last week waxing poetic on the powerful flavor of local eating but then gave a recipe for a tomato and arugula pasta. My arugula peters out in early May, and I get another crop in late September. Even the farmer's markets are low on greens this time of year. My list of examples goes on and on, but I am starting to feel a little too grumpy. After all, if these books get someone to plant their own flat of lettuce or raise a tomato or two, that is a good thing. And, as my husband observed after I concluded my bogus-garden-recipe rant, most of the real hard-core gardeners are too busy weeding to sit back and write a cookbook.

Homegrown luxury

There are those in my generation who may remember a TV game show from the early 1990's: Supermarket Sweep. The show pitted two couples against each other in a supermarket and culminated in a frenzied shopping spree. The point of the spree was to fill your cart with the highest-value items in the allotted time. Everyone went for the shallots, which were inexplicably located on a dry-goods shelf, individually packaged in a cardboard box. Why weren't they in the produce section? Could they have tasted any good packaged like that? This pop-culture childhood memory has colored my opinion of shallots to this day. They are luxury, high-value, worthy of a shopping spree. So please understand the thrill I get at the above picture of my most recent accomplishment: a braid of homegrown shallots.

This spring, while the soil was still cold and the weather raw, I planted big, fat shallot bulbs in my backyard. They cheerily sprouted and produced....lots of small shallots. Apparently big bulbs yield many small shallots and small bulbs yield a few big shallots. So, I'm saving my small shallots and replanting them next spring to see if this advice holds. I saved the biggest (most are the size of a fat garlic clove) and braided them into clusters, for drying by the kitchen window. I can twist them off for a vinaigrette or Thai fried rice and luxuriate in their abundance.

If I wanted to blow all of my shallot treasure in one wildly delicious meal, I would make a bowl of shallot and cherry confit. This is possibly the single best recipe I have ever clipped from Martha Stewart Living -- and that is saying a lot, coming from me, an inveterate recipe clipper and unabashed Martha fan. This is more of a jam than a true confit. It is rich, sweet and packed with flavor. Cut a baguette into slices, smear it with some warm, soft goat cheese and pile a heaping spoonful of this confit on top. This is the humble allium at its finest, and most luxurious.

A wedding offering

My sister is getting married this weekend and we are all looking forward to celebrating with the happy couple. I leave my garden with some trepidation, knowing that a few days of not picking cucumbers or tomatoes could promise a pathetic vegetable patch on my return. I have promised the neighbor kids a monetary reward for keeping the vegetables picked and the containers watered. Twelve year-olds, however, have better things to do than maintain my garden, so we'll see how well it goes. No matter. I have put up plenty of dill pickles over the weekend, so if this is the last of the cukes, it won't be a tragedy.

The night before the official nuptials, my sister and her husband-to-be are hosting a pot-luck picnic, with fried chicken and beer. Price of admission is a side dish and I know just what I would bring, if I weren't travelling across the country with a three-year old. So I am posting it here, as a kind of virtual offering. This is a perfect picnic dish and one that, for me, evokes a wealth of childhood memories. And what is the point of family at a wedding if not to remind the bride and groom from whence they came, of their past and of the way it will shape their future? I would bring the dish because it is a bowlful of our younger selves. The taste is of summers at the town pool and playing softball at the park and riding our bikes home from babysitting jobs. One bite and I am back. This is the dish I would bring because it is my mother's recipe, and it tastes of her, and her kitchen and everything she loved about lazy summer afternoons.

My mother passed away five years ago and as the eldest daughter, I feel I somehow need to let my sister feel her presence at the wedding. I could stand up and give a toast, but I would probably cry if I spoke of my mother. I prefer joke-filled, upbeat toasts, and I am loathe to give a damp, weepy speech. Also, toasts weren't my mom's style. She was humble and calm and not given to public speaking. If she was brash and loud, it was in the kitchen, with her food. My mother was an exuberant cook and her summer fare was rich with tomatoes, corn, and basil. This dish, full of onions and bright dressing, is just what she would have brought to the pot-luck. She would have put down the bowl with a smile on her face and joy in her heart. She would have cracked open a cold beer and raised it in celebration. So here's to the happy couple. I give you a recipe that perhaps you will make one day with your own kids, creating their own lazy summer memories.

Better late than never

My strawberry patch had a second flush of ripe berries over the weekend. Given the wealth of fresh plums, cherries and peaches on our counter right now, I feared that the strawberries would go uneaten. What? Homegrown strawberries uneaten? Well, we find these July berries to be a little less luscious then the first June crop -- blander and drier, likely secondary to the inevitable heat and water issues of high summer. Come fall, they sweeten up again.

I had never gotten around to canning strawberry jam in the peak of the June harvest -- I made a refrigerator batch that was gobbled up in a day and then all the extra berries went to a friend with a weakness for late-night strawberry shortcake. I figured now was the time to put up some jars of preserves. If you are planning on serious strawberry preservation (either freezing or canning), June-bearing varieties are probably a better bet than everbearing. The problem with everbearings is that, after a relatively sizable June crop, they put out a few berries every few days. This is fine for garden snacking, but you rarely have enough ripe all at once to make a cobbler or a big amount of jam. I had read that putting some white-shouldered berries in jam is a good idea, because they have higher pectin levels, so I put some under-ripe berries into my jam pot. I had just enough to make 5 half-pints. If I hadn't also been canning apricot jam, it would have hardly been worth it to clean and sterilize all the equipment, let alone heat up my whole house with the water-canner!

I made a new recipe, strawberry balsamic jam, from Eugenia Bone's Well Preserved. This is the first of Bone's recipes that has disappointed. One, there's too much vinegar, making for an overwhelming sweet-and-sour effect; two, the balsamic gives the jam a very dark, unappetizing color; and three, the recipe inexplicably instructs the cook to scoop out the cooked fruit with a slotted spoon and just can that. I had trouble understanding how this made any sense -- the fruit had given up most of its liquid to the sugar syrup. I couldn't have filled one half-pint jar with the actual fruit solids. Bone tells the reader to can the syrup separately. Anyway, I canned everything together.

In the end, the jam tastes fine -- definitely usable, especially if I pair it with cheese or other savory dishes. It just doesn't have a bright, clean strawberry taste. Dialing back the balsamic to 2 tablespoons instead of 5 might really help the recipe, but I am too much of a scaredy-cat to mess with canning recipes. I never tinker with the ingredients or processing times and I never use amateur Internet recipes. I like to see that the recipes published in books have been safety tested per government standards, or whatever such bureaucratic nonsense. Normally I snicker at stuff like that, but I fear the botulism, and will take my canning recipes government-approved.

So here I am with five jars of "sophisticated" jam. Sigh. Classic strawberry jam may be simple and naive, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes "gourmet" recipes --in their effort to make foods taste more complex or nuanced -- end up overshadowing the key ingredient. Have we all become such fancy chefs in the kitchen that we can't serve up a simple dish? Next time, I'm just going to let the strawberries be strawberries, and save the balsamic for my salad dressing.

Grape leaves

I invited friends over to dinner last weekend -- promising fare from my garden -- only to realize that my edibles were either fading out (rhubarb, lettuce) or still in their infancy (tomatoes, peppers). I scavenged beet greens, herbs and pea shoots, and then the grapevine caught my eye. The new vines were springing out all over their trellis -- lush and leafy, and threatening as usual to overtake the whole garage roof. I had cooked with brined jarred grape leaves before -- why not fresh ones?

My extensive cookbook collection yielded little information on preparation of fresh grape leaves, and even the internet yielded scant results -- a lot of "I'm planning to try this" articles, rather than articles speaking with the wisdom of hindsight. The most authoritative article, or at least the most confident, gave several different blanching methods. I picked young, undamaged leaves and carefully trimmed out the thicker stems and veins. As for blanching, I went with "plunge into boiling salted water, turn off the heat, and wait 3 to 5 minutes". Fishing them out of the water, they had the consistency of wet paper towel, although they didn't rip quite as much as I expected.

Now, the traditional Greek way to prepare these would be dolmades, those lemony packets of rice often served room temperature and slick with olive oil at Mediterranean restaurants. In retrospect, this would have been a good choice, if only because this preparation adds another hour of simmering to the leaves. But no, I had to be Little-Miss-Locavore. I spurned exotic rice and lemon in favor of home-preserved figs and local cheese. I rolled each leaf with half a brandied fig, a sprinkle of sea salt and a chunk of black pepper goat cheese from the farmer's market. I briefly considered grilling them, but it was 90 degrees and just the blanching had been so unpleasantly hot that I decided to keep cool and serve them as is. I wasn't in left-field with this approach -- I had found several recipes with similar serving suggestions, albeit with the more processed brined and jarred leaves.

I served them in the backyard, in sight of the original vines. The finished product looked nice, but the leaves were tough. No, they were beyond tough -- it was like chewing cud. My husband had to take a discreet walk over to the compost pile. The salty-sweet filling was very good, and it made me realize I just should have stuffed the figs with goat cheese and left it at that. What is the point of the grape leaf anyway? To bundle up a filling, like rice or meat, that would otherwise crumble out. The brined leaves add a sour-salty taste to dishes, but the fresh ones tasted bland and green and were tough to bite through. I'm not sure if grilling would have helped -- it might have just made the leaf tough and charred. So, there's a local food failure. I don't think I care enough about eating grape leaves to try again -- in the end they are just a finger-food delivery system for better tasting morsels. I can use lettuce or rice paper for that. Maybe one day I'll find a Greek grandma to teach me the age old ways, but my guess is that the wisdom lies in simmering them for a good hour before attempting to take a bite.

Spring slump

The kitchen garden is in a bit of a Spring slump this week. The rhubarb is looking raggedy and the asparagus is ferned out. The cold weather greens have been pulled for the table to make way for warm weather crops. The peas have barely started to bloom. While a few fruits are nearing ripeness, we are still a few weeks away from a real strawberry harvest:

This gives me little to use in the kitchen, beyond herbs and spring onions. The lush grapevines are also leafing out with abandon, so I may blanch some leaves and stuff them with a savory rice filling for dinner. This is not to knock my dear alliums. The chives and scallions make their way onto the table almost nightly. My current favorite is the flat, wide garlic chives:

For those with more of a savory than a sweet tooth, there is no more pleasant breakfast than these garlic chives, chopped, stir-fried, then folded into a few scrambled eggs.

If only these were my own eggs! Alas, I remain chicken-less. Fortunately, after shopping around the local meat CSA's for the past few years, and I have finally found one that satisfies me. For a very reasonable price, Grass is Greener Gardens has loaded me up with a wide variety of lamb, pork and beef cuts, as well as honey and eggs. No chicken this month, so the jury is still out on that one. So my breakfast this morning was seriously local: CSA eggs, Wisconsin butter, homegrown garlic chives and homegrown mint tea, sweetened with CSA honey. Perhaps I'm not in such a slump after all.

In praise of the daikon

I often read praise for the productivity of the greens of early Spring, especially kale. Eliot Coleman, among others, waxes poetic on how hardy and productive kale can be, growing even in the snow. Never mind that one can tire quickly of earnest stir-fries and nutrition-filled omelets! But what of the daikon radish? Pound for pound, it has far outpaced the greens in my garden. I planted the daikon radish seed on March 6th and the first seedlings popped up ten days later. Today -- after exactly two months of generally cold and wet weather -- I pulled up 3 radishes. After trimming, each weighed in at over 3 ounces. Pretty impressive, especially considering that my other Spring root vegetables -- beets and carrots -- are still fetal, boasting the barest wisp of a root.

While radishes are a staple across Asia and the subcontinent, they are low in food energy -- each of my radishes is probably under 20 calories. But what the daikon lacks in stored energy, it makes up for in Vitamin C. No scurvy for my family this Spring! According to A Cook's Guide to Asian Vegetables, daikon leaves are edible and quite rich in calcium and iron, but seldom used in Asian cooking. The guide suggests using the leaves in braises and stir-fries, similar to other bitter greens. My favorite culinary vegetable reference, the indispensable Vegetables From Amaranth to Zucchini, also testifies that radish greens "in good shape" are "worth saving and cooking as much for their flavor as for their nutrient value". Finally, let us not forget the daikon's other importance: Elizabeth Schneider writes that "no vegetable is as beloved by vegetable-carvers world-wide, particularly in China".

So how to cook my bounty? Usually, I make a quick daikon pickle to stuff into my banh mi sandwiches. I also have a jar of effervescent radish kimchi, hauled out of the fridge on Korean dinner nights. But I need some new ideas: Amaranth to Zucchini suggests a radish-ginger stir-fry. My dearest friends simmer slices of daikon in their rich Taiwanese braises. Both recipes on are on the docket in the coming week. Food journalists are also beginning to feature more radishes. (As an aside, while I appreciate that cooking magazines are increasingly featuring seasonal ingredients, I find their timing frustrating. In January, I was deluged with chive and radish recipes. Now, just as the last frost date arrives, I am up to my neck in late summer recipes for tomatoes and zucchini. I suspect this mostly has to do with the advanced production schedule, though perhaps these food writers are based in warmer climes, like California. Either way, the seasonal time-warp requires that the organized cook clip and save the interesting recipes, anticipating the time of plenty). One of the few Spring recipes that made it into my file over the winter featured roasted radishes, courtesy of Saveur. I wouldn't have even remembered that I clipped it except that the New York Times ran a similar recipe last week, excavating the winter memory from the rubble of my Spring-gardening mind.

I am happy to report that this recipe is a keeper! The texture and flavor are genuinely transformed. Gone is the crisp, peppery bite of the raw vegetable. The slow-roasting yields a soft, sweet product, reminiscent of a turnip. I roasted daikon and French breakfast radishes. The daikon stood up better to the treatment: the French radishes, though tasty, were a bit watery.

I also stir-fried the greens. Normally I throw in the stems, but the daikon stems have uncomfortably prickly surfaces, so I just chopped up the leaves themselves. They were so-so, a bit chewy, with no flavor to recommend them as superior to other hardy greens. If I were a hungry pioneer, the radish leaves would happily find their way into the soup pot. As a dilettante urban gardener, I'll stick to my spinach and mizuna, and invest the nutrient wealth of the radish leaves into my worm bins.

Patchy frost after midnight

After a cold, rainy day more reminiscent of March than May, we here in Chicago are threatened with "patchy frost after midnight", mostly the western suburbs. After an obsessive scouring of all weather-related media, I am reasonably sure my garden will be safe from ice. However, with many of my annuals in the ground already, I'm not taking any chances. Late afternoon found me scrambling around the house for old sheets to cover up all the plants that I couldn't bring into the basement for the night.

I wasn't sure what to do about the worm bins, which left the sheltered confines of my basement a few weeks back. They are sitting up against the side of the house, and they are a pain to move: heavy and drippy with wormy compost juice. I found a website attesting to the general hardiness of redworms, so I'm going to take my chances and let them stay outside. It probably wouldn't hurt for my worms to take a hit, anyway. A little natural selection may be in order, given the general explosion in the population in the past month.

As I was fussing over the strawberries and potted tomatoes, I noticed that my second round of French breakfast radishes were ready for harvest. With chilled fingers, I yanked them up on the way inside to the kitchen. I planted some seed from Renee's and some from Pinetree. The Renee's radishes, elongated and relatively slim, are what I have come to expect for the variety. The Pinetree seeds came up globe-shaped, even though they were billed as French breakfast. What gives? They taste similar, though. Tonight for dinner, we will have radishes, butter and salt on baguette, followed by chicken with tarragon and a salad of spinach and mizuna. Each dish has a homegrown component! So it must be late Spring, no matter what the weather feels like.

Spring preserves

The backyard homestead has become more lush in the past week. Every day, there is the possibility of one, or even two, homegrown ingredients on the dinner table. Last night, we had mizuna in our stir fry. Tonight, freshly picked radishes and rhubarb will grace our May Day table. The radishes will be served simply, with homemade bread, salt and butter. The rhubarb will become a small dish of cobbler -- oh, if only the strawberries were a little further along! After dicing up the rhubarb for dessert, I found I had some extra stalks. Thus, I launched into my first garden preserves of 2010: rhubarb pickles.

Now, at first I had planned to make rhubarb pickles with this recipe. Then I noticed that it called for sherry vinegar and grenadine. Now, I am not above purchasing specialty ingredients....my overflowing pantry attests to my habit of buying all too many one-use bottles for my various recipe experiments. I could probably use the sherry vinegar again for some Spanish tapas extravaganza, but the grenadine distressed me. I don't really use it in cocktails, and the most readily accessible brand seems to be little more than red-colored high fructose corn syrup.

Never one to abandon a recipe, I started researching various homemade substitutions, like reducing pomegranate juice with sugar. At this point, however, I was going to be spending more time making the grenadine than I would spend making the actual pickles. I also don't have pomegranate juice sitting around the house, so this would mean a car trip, more grocery money, etc. It all seemed too tiresome and expensive, not to mention against the pioneer ethos of making do with what ya' got. It was time for a new recipe.

Mother Earth news to the rescue! I found an interesting recipe, calling for ingredients I had lying about. This also gave me a use for the last of my homegrown dried chili peppers. Now my jars are cooling. I am tempted to dig right in, but I know they will taste better in a few days, so I will eat a radish and wait patiently. This is a refrigerator pickle recipe, as the hot-water canning process would soften the stalks to a mushy consistency. It makes sense to focus on quicker preservation processes in the spring and summer: the coming abundance means there is no need to stretch the vegetables into the dark of winter. Gather ye rhubarb while ye may, and leave the late-summer cucumbers to the more shelf-stable pickling methods.

Candied violets

I have to remind myself next year to not schedule so many business trips in the tender weeks of late Spring. While in Vancouver, I missed the sprouting of the shallots, the first blossom of the Early Girl tomato, and the initial burst of intense forget-me-not blue now edging my front bed. I missed the unveiling of the 2010 One Seed Chicago plant: bee balm (I voted for it!). I also missed my husband's birthday, and while he is not one for big occasions, it is sad to pass a milestone alone in the house while son and wife are off eating halibut.

To make it up to him, I have constructed a mile-high chocolate cake garnished with candied violets from our backyard. I couldn't resist a homegrown garnish, even though the cake is replete with exotic ingredients. I had never candied violets before, and learned some lessons in the approach. The general idea is simple: coat the flowers in egg white, dust with sugar and let dry. Most recipes advise painting the egg white on with a paintbrush. I was put off by the preciousness of the individual petal painting, and was glad when I found a recipe that instructed the cook to swirl long-stemmed violets in frothy egg whites, "roll" in sugar, and dry them. Unfortunately, this method gave me a series of gloopy blossoms, barely recognizable under a thick lava of wet sugar.

When Martha Stewart tells me to do it her way, I should listen. It always works. So, I raided my son's craft box for a clean paintbrush and painted each delicate petal. I did ignore the call for superfine sugar. Regular granulated looked just fine. I organized the violets on waxed paper, snipping each stem off, and dried them in a warm oven for a few hours. Thanks to the egg white, many of the violets stuck to the paper and were too delicate to remove without incurring serious structural damage. After all of that work, I have six violets to show for it. This is all further evidence that I was not made to be a pastry chef. So I will use what I have and break out the grill. For though violet petals may be delicate, big hunks of marinated meat are not, and this is what the birthday boy wants for dinner.

Dandelions on the table

The annual torrent of curses is now pouring forth from my usually mild-mannered husband as he digs the first crop of dandelions out of our lawn. Weed though they are, I can't say I begrudge their presence. Dandelions bring a bright, cheery punch of yellow to otherwise neglected lots in our neighborhood. My son is having great fun following his father with the "compost wagon" and collecting the yanked plants for our various piles.

Had we been a little earlier in the season, my husband's efforts could have been directed towards the kitchen rather than the compost pile. All of our recent travel made us lag in the lawn foraging and by now, in full flower, the dandelion greens are bitter. The new rosettes are the tastiest, but even they are an acquired taste in the era of the mild tasting plastic-packed "spring mix" available at the supermarket. Last year, I collected enough rosettes to make a filling for Greek hand-pies, basically a fried turnover oozing with a feta, onion and dandelion greens stuffing. Even tricked out with the onions, cheese and fried dough, the greens were a tough sell for my dinner guests. I admit I ate them mostly on principle and with a copious amount of wine to wash them down.

On a more palatable note, I made dandelion wine long ago and am pondering the manufacture of another batch. There is a dilemma, however: the recipe I used came from the king of all foragers, Euell Gibbons, and calls for a large bucket of blossoms. Even without my husband's manual war on weeds, our paltry lot would hardly yield enough blossoms for a quart jar, let alone a bucket. But where should I turn for more? I am pretty skittish about urban foraging in these parts....who knows what pesticides and heavy metals and residues lurk in the vacant lots and fields. I watch my neighbors pour large bottles of chemicals all over their yards courtesy of Home Depot. The wine may be a project stowed away until I have the time to access a more reliably pollutant-free area of land.

So, I have made a note to try to catch the young rosettes in time for eating next year. This time, forget the feta. I'm going with bacon. As most chefs have tiresomely proved in every restaurant I've visited this year, add bacon to anything and people will order it in droves. In her excellent memoir, Little Heathens, Mildred Kalish recalls the bacon-drenched dandelions of her childhood in Depression-era Iowa. Though now eighty years have passed, she still recalls with relish the first Spring days with new dandelion greens on the table, braised in a hearty amount of bacon fat. They surely tasted ambrosial to her hungry six year-old body after months of canned- and dried-food drudgery. Be you gardener or cook, if you have yet to read this book, I suggest you immediately place it on the reading list. It is full of such gentle wisdom and kind judgement that one leaves the pages almost jealous of the deprivation Kalish suffered, dandelions and all.

Let the garden scrounging begin!

There is a tipping point every year when the garden saves me, and I know that -- from a culinary perspective -- Spring has truly arrived. Last night, I came home late from work and I looked at my hungry family and then at my sparsely stocked pantry. I realized the only thing between us and a restaurant was the garden and -- joy of joys! -- the garden saved us. Hooray for the seasonal miracle of the first garden scrounge!

Now, I cannot pretend that a garden scrounge means the difference between eating and not eating. It's not like we are old-time pioneers or dogmatically self-sufficient homesteaders earnestly eating the stored pinto beans and sauerkraut until the first of the dandelions spring up in our yard. In a charming passage in their beautiful book of essays, Our Life in Gardens, Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd tell an old Vermonter neighbor that the scorned barberry bush was once a plant of great medicinal and edible value to early Americans. The neighbor scoffs "Well, in those days they had to eat just about anything they could find". Barberries are indeed a true garden scrounge.

For me, a garden scrounge just means the difference between eating well and eating indifferently (PBJ at home), or between eating well or eating expensively (restaurant food). But it is a wonderful thing to face the prospect of takeout pizza or jelly sandwiches, and realize that by your own gardening efforts you can scrounge up a tasty dinner. So last night, armed with a sharp knife, I crept around the garden in the waning light. I found a good handful asparagus as well as the first of the mint, and with the help of some butter this became a quick pasta sauce. I sprinkled it with finely sliced chives to finish, and the whole dish tasted bright and green, just like Spring itself. The tarragon is in full leaf, and I took a good amount of leaves to make a dressing for the tired old romaine lettuce wallowing in the vegetable bin. I thought about using the cold-frame lettuces (tom thumb and little gem) but we already had thinned out the first round for a nibble last weekend, so I let them alone. The romaine leaves almost tasted fresh with the delicate anise flavor of the tarragon clinging to every bite.

All in all it was a successful garden scrounge. Had it been a lazy Saturday instead of a tired Tuesday night, I could have even scrounged a dessert: stewed rhubarb. And if I wanted to put on airs, I could have garnished it with mint.

Rhubarb and ... tomatoes?

Up came the rhubarb this weekend. Already I feel oppressed by the looming harvest, and I am down to just one plant this year. I always make a pie or cobbler, maybe a fancy cocktail like a Rhubarb Collins, and then I scratch my head. There are plenty of quick bread and muffin recipes out there, but my family doesn't eat a lot of sweet baked goods. Orangette recently posted a roasted rhubarb recipe, so I may give that a whirl, though it looks fairly similar to several stewed rhubarb recipes I have made in years past. Unfortunately, these recipes were lauded mostly for the amount of whipped cream or creme fraiche I piled on top of the unsightly rhubarb melange. I could can the rhubarb, but we are still trying to eat down the other sweet preserves I put up in the fall....pickles go much more quickly at our house. This pickle idea got me thinking and with a quick google, I have found my recipe for 2010: rhubarb pickles. I will report back if they are worthy for the recipe file.

So why do I grow rhubarb? Mainly because of the season: aside from asparagus and radishes, this is a reliable early harvest in my zone. I like the color, and the plant does well in a forgotten part-sun location behind the grape arbor. It also chafes me to see rhubarb for sale at local supermarkets for ridiculous sums....$5.99 a pound? Are you kidding? This plant requires little besides letting it alone, and not harvesting too many stalks all at once. In the end, I always end up foisting off the extra rhubarb on the poor souls who have expressed modest interest in my gardening endeavors. The unsolicited stalks are just a foretaste of the zucchini feast to come, my dearies.

Speaking of summer harvests, my early tomato trial has begun! I put out three seedlings this weekend, one under a wall-o-water, one inside a DIY ring of 2L pop bottles, and one out in the elements. This is a flawed study, as a majority of my tomato seedlings suffered irreparable damage while I was off gallivanting in Paris. Ideally, the plants in my experiment would all be of the same variety, but currently I only have two sweet 100's and one early girl to play with. I left the early girl out in the elements, to see if she lives up to her name. I have another round of tomatoes started in my greenhouse, just in case none of these experimental plants works out. With opalkas and sungolds added to the mix, we will, as per usual, have too many tomatoes (see above discussion on foisting off harvests).

Finally, I noticed yesterday that my wintersown tomato seed is up! Pretty early, likely secondary to to the freakish warm weather we've been having. Is this a sign that my experiment is going to do well? They are peiping chieh tomatoes sent by the wintersown lady, Trudi. I have been web searching for taste descriptions of this seed, as I had never heard of it until Trudi sent a package to me this winter. I found several references attesting that it is a good cropper (sigh) and an ominous post from Trudi herself on gardenweb about how they taste delicious with mayonnaise. What doesn't taste delicious with mayonnaise? If this is all that can be said about the taste of this variety, should I be worried?

A taste of Paris

What can one write about food in Paris that hasn't been written a thousand times before? I arrived in France steeped in a lifetime of cookbooks, memoirs, and novels about French food. Thanks to a voracious reading habit, I have dined many times over with Liebling, cooked in a pre-war kitchen with M.F.K. Fisher and parsed the finer points of egg dishes with Escoffier. Thanks to Julia Child and Jacques Pepin, among others, two whole generations of Americans before me have calibrated their taste to Francophile standards. Julie and Julia was an uneven movie, but must be watched for the parts with Meryl Streep as Julia Child, especially in her early years in Paris. One of the more charming scenes in the movie -- and in Child's memoirs -- was her first taste of French food and the utter epiphany she experiences in what food should be. Her whole life is transformed -- it is as if she is tasting fish and butter and cheese for the first time. I envy her this epiphany.

I have already tasted artisanal charcuterie and eaten seasonal greens dressed in the lightest of vinaigrettes. Much of what I prepare for my family is informed by French methods. I did not arrive in Paris with a lifetime of only meatloaf and ranch dressing and overcooked vegetables behind me. I was skeptical about having any true culinary epiphanies, and a little bit sad. I looked forward to Paris for the architecture and art, and I looked forward to good food. But would it be new food? Would the good food even live up to the memory of my rich literary experiences?

I was surprised by a general lack of seasonality in the menus of the many restaurants we tried over the course of our stay....and yes, we did eat mostly outside of the usual tourist haunts and ate across a wide price range. Partly, this lack of seasonality can be blamed on the season itself. It was too early even for asparagus and artichokes, so there was hardly a seasonal abundance of produce. Morels were scattered throughout a few of the higher-end places, with the best dish being a simple poached egg swimming in a puree of morels and cream, accompanied by thick garlicky croutons. I do suspect, however, that the lack of seasonality has to do more with the dilemma I discussed above. Tourists --and perhaps French people themselves -- arrive in Paris with a set expectation of what they are to eat. They have been informed by guidebooks, cookbooks, and decades of television shows to expect a rigid set of dishes. Duck confit, steak tartare, escargot, onion soup....the list of expected classics goes on. Is experimentation and seasonality rewarding to brasseries that thrive on their ability to provide an "authentic" Parisian experience?

On the shopping front, things were more inspiring. The butchers and cheese mongers were stunning....incredibly high quality food and well informed employees. The bakeries -- even the chains -- were of the highest quality and the bread almost invariably delicious. I also had to love a city that charges 4 Euro for a can of diet coke, but where you can buy a loaf of bread or a glass of wine for half that price. These folks have their priorities straight. The produce markets were dispiritingly similar to our own....mostly imported produce, much from the Americas. Many a cheese plate in the restaurants was garnished with a physalis fruit....ground cherry or cape gooseberry, I am unsure (picture above). I hadn't tasted any before this trip and they were delicious, but when I inspected the boxes in the street markets, they were all from Chile! Who knows if this is par for the course or if, again, we were just too early to see French agriculture in all its glory. The few locally grown lettuces and radishes I found were beautifully displayed. I have never seen a white lettuce with red speckles like this one:

But did I experience anything transformative? Did I have any epiphanies a la Julia Child? Perhaps it is a little over dramatic, but I did have two culinary moments when I was perfectly, absolutely satisfied. In those moments, I knew that I would have never understood these experiences by just reading about them or trying the American equivalent. The first was in the restaurant supply store, E. Dehillerin. Old, and a bit musty, it is a dark shop crammed with all the pots, pans and utensils any budding French chef would need to build her batterie de cuisine. Oh, to have such a quaint, ancient store on these shores! The closest I have found is Broadway Panhandler in New York City. I could have poked around Dehillerin for hours, and had I more money and larger suitcases, I would have left with more than a knife and some brioche molds.

The second moment is hard to admit. I have been generally sneering at the macaron craze sweeping the food scene here in the U.S. for the past few years. And yes, it is Passover, and no, I am not talking about the coconut lumps served at many a Seder this week called macaroons. I am talking about the meringue-like sandwich cookie -- one "o" only -- and I am tired of reading articles and blog posts that worship it. The photos of the precious pastel-hued confections bored me, reminding me of the insufferable cupcake cult I witnessed in New York City in the early 2000's (aughts? 00's? how am I to refer to this time period?). Yet in the course of my wanderings through Paris one afternoon, I happened upon Laduree, one of the world-renowned pinnacles of macaron craft. It looked more like Tiffany than a confectioner, with employees dressed to the nines and pastel containers more akin to jewelry boxes than bakery cardboard. The prices were heart stopping. The woman ahead of me in line spent over 70 Euro on a cake -- a small cake. I selected a few macarons, the two more interesting-colored ones being cassis-violet (lavender purple) and pistachio (bilious green). The cassis-violet had unfortunate flavor references to soap, but the pistachio one! Oh, the pistachio one! It was light and dense at the same time, with an intense but fleeting flavor...I am failing with my adjectives. Writing about this confection is like trying to write about wine. Even good writers can barely make it tolerable. So I will stop, but just know that it was an amazing cookie. Just know that it is now what I will ask for as the dessert at my last meal. It was so good that I don't even want to try to recreate it at home, because I would fear tarnishing the memory. I concede to the macaron-crazed foodie elite. This is a food deserving of worship.

My favorite grain

One of the more welcome trends in food magazines of late has been a genuine emphasis on recipes featuring whole grains. In years past, many magazines would have but one or two such recipes, usually relegated to the diet or healthy living column. Either that or they were designated as the token vegetarian option amidst recipes for braised pork belly, grilled steaks and their ilk. Too many of these older recipes were reminiscent of earnest 1960's melanges of minimally seasoned nuts and grains that sprang from such books as Diet for a Small Planet and The Moosewood Cookbook. I forget where I read this but it is true: look at any of the recipes from Moosewood and mentally add bacon. It would taste much better, wouldn't it? So here's to the mainstream culinary press, who are finally putting out whole-grain recipes that can actually compete in flavor with a platter of pork belly.

I also am relieved to see the introduction of more variety in the whole grains featured in the recipes. No longer is the emphasis solely on brown rice or barley. Quinoa has stopped being presented as an undiscovered "exotic grain" and spelt is popping up with increasing frequency. But my absolute favorite whole grain is farro. Food editors too have seemed to recently discover that farro adds a rich nutty flavor to any dish. Farro has a very pleasing texture, the ideal of "al dente". Farro prepared risotto-style is far more flavorful and satisfying than than a true risotto made with arborio rice. Indeed, it boosts the texture and flavor of the dish so much that I find it unnecessary to trick it out with the usual risotto finishes of butter and a huge handful of parmigianno.

Farro's exact definition is murky and controversial. In a few recipes it is presented as another name for spelt, which adds to the confusion. Everyone agrees farro is a type of wheat, but beyond that, disagreements abound. According to wikipedia, this confusion arises from regional differences in Italy as to which type of wheat is grown and labeled as farro: emmer, einkorn or spelt. The type I use is emmer wheat, as best I can tell. It is hard to find, even in a big city like Chicago. I haven't checked Whole Foods, they must have a box somewhere on their shelves. I know I can reliably purchase farro from Caputo's, the independent Italian grocery chain to the west of the city. I make sure there is always a bag of farro on my pantry shelf.

I first tasted farro in Siena, Italy, where it was served in a thick vegetable-grain soup. It was a stick-to-your ribs meal --classic peasant fare -- and I thrilled to the depth and flavor of the dish. When I finally found farro stateside, I tried to recreate the soup. It tasted so-so, not at all living up to the intoxicating memory. Of course, this was likely because even a humble soup tastes better when you are newly married and sitting in a rustic osteria in a gorgeous medieval Italian town. Martha Stewart, as usual, came to the rescue and published a recipe for farro risotto so delicious that it has become one of my special "company" dishes. I have found it to be a hit with small children as well, if they are adventurous and willing to taste something that doesn't look like buttered pasta.

More recently, I found another winning farro recipe, a warm salad of farro and red cabbage, redolent of thyme. In the picture is above, it is the dish on the left. The other dish is a platter of roasted root vegetables tossed in a mustard vinaigrette and sprinkled with homemade feta. This was a real late-winter vegetarian feast! My weak photography skills do not capture the real color of the farro dish -- thanks to the cabbage, the whole platter of food had a gentle purple hue. This pleased my son to no end, who asked for seconds and thirds of the "purple pasta". My husband was a little more wary -- especially as the purple color deepened as the dish cooled. But it was hard for him -- even with the reservations about the color palate -- to deny that it was filling and bursting with flavor. I made both the root vegetables and this dish because I was afraid neither one would "be enough" to serve on its own. What folly! Both were incredibly filling and we are still eating the leftovers days later. And I didn't even think about adding bacon.

When plants and food are better store bought

While I do always appreciate the handmade and homegrown, I am a sucker for florists' plants in full bloom. I love coaxing plants into blooming, but there is such a thrill when someone else does all the work under professional plant-growing conditions, and I get to enjoy the fruit, or blossoms rather, of their labor. For me, this red florists' cyclamen is a far superior gift to a box of Valentine chocolates. I spent my morning sipping coffee and appreciating the gorgeous leaves and flowers. My house is cool, so it may do well, though humidity is an issue. I'll put it near my fern, to remind me to mist.

I have also learned the hard way about certain store bought products being superior for cooking. The lesson came last weekend, when I decided to cook ahead and freeze some dumplings to eat on Chinese New Year. Yesterday was our Valentine's party and it went off quite well, if I do say so myself. Here's a picture of the sweets I made:

Of course, I overcooked and spent most of last night packing away all of the cheeses, roasted vegetables, cookies and candies, desperately trying to shoehorn one last container into the fridge. After an epic day of cooking, hosting and cleaning, I knew I would be left with little desire to dive in to my usual Sunday cooking projects. If I hadn't thrown the party, I would have probably spent all day making the insanely delicious Shanghai soup dumplings that I wrote about a while ago. Yet I knew I would not have the energy for dicing aspic. So last weekend, when I came upon a Fine Cooking article on traditional foods to celebrate the Year of the Tiger, I decided to make these dumplings and freeze them for a quick heat-and-eat meal in my haze of post-party fatigue.

The article waxed poetic on the authentic way to make dumpling wrappers, complete with instructions for fashioning a small rolling pin from a wooden dowel. To me, instructions for projects like this are nearly irresistible. I am a moth to the flame. Make a recipe harder and more intricate, especially in the name of authenticity, and I must cook the dish, no matter what hurdles are set before me. Obscure ingredient? Who cares! I have a toddler who loves quests of all sorts and gladly hops into the car seat for "dinner adventures". He has ridden with me to the ends of Chicago in search of specialty products. This particular dumpling recipe involved no such quest, but rather a time-consuming and generally unnecessary process of rolling my own wrappers. I could understand this coming in handy, especially when one lives in a region that has few supermarket options. But I live within short driving distance of multiple Asian supermarkets. They all sell locally made dumpling wrappers in generous stacks for less than two dollars. And, to be honest, Chinese cooking is popular enough that even my Grandma who lives in a small town in Wyoming can pick up won-ton wrappers at the local Albertson's. This general accessibility was yet another enticement for me to kick it up a notch on the DIY difficulty level and roll my own wrappers. I had a spare dowel, and all it took was a saw and some mineral oil to fashion the proper tool.

It will come as no surprise that the wrappers took hours to produce. Even with careful rolling by an experienced cook, they were uneven, misshapen and prone to tearing. Additionally, the recipe yielded about twice the filling necessary for the amount of wrappers provided by the dough. A reasonable person would have called it a day and made meatballs with the rest of the filling mix, but of course, this was just a siren call to try the wrapper-production process all over again. Sadly, my rolling skills showed no measurable improvement during the second attempt.

Eaten on the day of, the dumplings tasted great and held up okay when boiled, but did better when pan-fried pot sticker style. Most of the dumplings, though, were carefully frozen for today. This morning, I inspected our planned lunch and found that the dough had done something odd: each dumpling was encased in a fragile mosaic of frozen dough shards. The shards seemed held together by a thin web of dough, with the surface of each dumpling sporting a museum-quality craquelure finish. I freeze dumplings all the time, and I have never seen this happen with store bought wrappers. Nor does it happen with my frozen homemade ravioli, although, with an egg base, that dough has more structure. I tested a few of these morphed dumplings on the stove top and the filling promptly oozed out and made the water a chunky, greasy mess. I would post a picture of the dumplings except that I quickly threw them out in a fit of disappointment. So much for planning ahead -- at least we have tons of party leftovers! From this day forward, dumpling wrappers are a thing better store bought. Complicated recipes be damned! The year of the tiger has started inauspiciously from a culinary standpoint.

Food writing and France

I picked up some local cream this week from a farm in nearby Wisconsin. I am astounded how thick and rich it is compared to the usual "ultra heat treated" cream I find at the grocery store. This local product is close to the consistency of yogurt. Just a few spoonfuls have added a silky richness to my sauces that I can usually only achieve with a beurre manie. This thick, intense cream brings to mind M.F.K. Fisher's writing on the cream of France. Her books no longer live on my shelves -- they were long ago loaned out to kindred spirits -- so forgive me if I am short on details. In one of the most charming passages in her long body of work, she recounts cooking with French heavy cream in her first humble kitchen in France. For a quick lunch for friends and family, all she needed to do was pour a few cups of the rich cream over a pan of cauliflower, bake it, - et voila! -- she had an unctuous, full-bodied gratin. Even 50 years ago, she was lamenting how the cream had changed since her first youthful culinary adventures. She complained that the cream of yore had been replaced by a liquidy light cream that required careful reduction over a low flame prior to use in a gratin, lest you be left with a soupy mess (as an aside, Marcella Hazan echoes a similar lament about Italian cream in her Classic Italian Cook Book).

I adore M.F.K. Fisher. Along with her memoirs of her early French experiences, her essays on wartime scrounging and hunger - "the wolf at the door"- rank among my all-time favorite food writing. Other Francophile writing also has much to recommend it; I always enjoy returning to Waverly Root's exhaustive Food of France, Peter Mayle's first Provence book, and the recent Julia Child memoir My Life in France. One can hardly discuss the food writing of France without mentioning A.J. Liebling and Hemmingway, but I find them less compelling than the aforementioned writers, perhaps because these two men are so intensely focused on the consumption, rather than production, of food. But my "desert island pick" of French food writing is The Apprentice by Jacques Pepin. If you enjoy cooking and writing, I urge you to run, not walk, to the nearest library, and get a copy of this book.

I generally have a low opinion of celebrity chefs, who are more focused on promotion than actual innovation or authenticity. Everything this breed of chef puts out seems to have been shellacked into a carefully edited product that promotes their ever-expanding brand. I approached this book with trepidation, yet after a few pages was completely enthralled. Who knew Jacques Pepin was such a marvelous writer? And he is writing in his adopted language, no less! Putting aside the evident technical skills of the author, the narrative itself is so engaging that the reader turns the pages with an alacrity usually reserved for guilty-pleasure books like Lee Child mysteries. Pepin shares the often painful details of his harsh childhood, yet writes with such a generosity of spirit that the reader almost wishes to be fourteen and poor and working 16 hour days in a resort hotel kitchen.

After befriending Jacques on the pages of his memoir, I sought out his cookbooks and TV programs. The PBS series that he put together on the basic techniques of French cooking is probably the best set of instructional programs I have ever watched. My favorite episode involves Jacques breaking down a side of salmon with deceptive ease. His gentle guidance changed my entire approach to preparing fish. Jacques' rigorous training in thrifty kitchens always bubbles through in his teaching: he has a suggestion for little dishes based on almost every scrap and discarded morsel he generates in the production of the main meal.

After smugly proclaiming my disdain for celebrity chef culture, I must now admit that my favorite show on television is Top Chef. If you are unfamiliar with the series, it is essentially Iron Chef meets American Idol. And if you somehow have escaped all knowledge of American reality TV, then I will tell you that it is a contest wherein young chefs are given culinary challenges and they are eliminated one by one until the finalists meet in a three-course all-out kitchen battle. The series has gone through many seasons, but my favorite moment ever on the show involves none other than Jacques Pepin, invited to participate in one episode on a panel of celebrity guest judges.

The scene: Carla, an eccentric Southern caterer, is facing an uphill battle against more traditional chef contestants. The battle: each celebrity guest judge picks the food they want for a hypothetical "Last Meal". Jacques picks squab and peas and Carla is assigned to prepare this "last meal". In a bold move, edited by the producers to foreshadow guaranteed elimination, Carla simply roasts the squab and serves the peas with tarragon. No risottos, no foams, no gelees. Just a plain preparation that most decent home cooks could crank out on a weeknight (albeit with chicken not squab). Jacques, master technician, takes a bite. He tells Carla that, if this were his last meal, he would die happy. Can one ask for more than hearing that from Jacques Pepin?

Perfect peas bring me back to another treasured passage from M.F.K. Fisher, in which she documents her quest for ideally cooked peas. On the hillside of a French -- or is it Swiss? -- farm, she has the water boiling in an outdoor pot prior to even picking the peas. Fisher recounts in hurried paragraphs the rush to get the new-shelled peas cooked and buttered and on the table prior to losing their ephemeral garden freshness. The whole event is written with a breathlessness and suspense normally reserved for tales of Olympic-level athleticism. She wrote this at a time pre-Alice Waters, when most gourmet recipes still involved processed and packaged ingredients. What foresight! What simplicity! As a gardener, cook and writer, can I ask for more inspiration than to read these pages prior to planting my spring pea seeds? Which reminds me...who did I loan those books to? I need them back before April.

On frugality

My garden reading (both blog and book) tends towards the rural homesteading variety. I am not raising my own livestock, grinding my own grain or eating solely off of my winter-grown greens. Thus, I tend to think of myself mostly as a homesteading dilettante -- if a home-cooked dinner doesn't come together one night, it ain't like I'm gonna starve! Just dial the phone or head out to the nearest taqueria and my family is fed. This past week has been a lesson to me, that, yes, my family will be fed, but it may not be fed well, and even this will come at a steep price.

Deadlines, emergency meetings, and weekend call schedules have recently conspired to dislodge me from my usual homemaking groove. Thanks to a series of unfortunate scheduling events, for the past two weekends I have been unable to perform the Saturday morning ritual taught to me by my mother. This three-step process involves 1) a careful appraisal of my refrigerator, freezer and pantry (and garden, too, if this was the season); 2) the design of a week's worth of meals, with make-ahead dishes for my late-work nights; and then 3) construction of a shopping list, divided into categories of produce, dairy, meat, staples, etc. Then I embark on my hunting and gathering expeditions -- crossing off items as they are purchased, or modifying the menu if I find a bag of well-priced apples, etc. I have rarely deviated from this ritual since the day I set foot in my first apartment ten years ago. Sure, it's anal-retentive. Yet, it's the only way I know how to put healthy homemade food on the table most nights of the week given the extraordinary demands of a two-career household, especially since both of us have long and often unpredictable hours.

Feminists, start your engines here, and curtly remind me that my partner could do his share of the shopping and cooking. Unfortunately, we have a marriage that does not flourish with 50%-50% division of household chores, since it means that neither person ends up accountable for anything. This has been a hard lesson learned, and we realize that 100%-0% responsibility for all-chores-not-child-related works better for us. Hence I never touch a dirty dish, vacuum or laundry basket; but I do all shopping, cooking and de-cluttering. The magic -- and this I suspect is usually the magic with most negotiations -- is that each of us secretly thinks we got the better end of the deal.

Anyway, this well-calibrated system had a meltdown over the past ten days, leading to no shopping expeditions or even menu designs out of the pantry and fridge storage. I have been shocked by how expensive it has been to eat "cheaply". We weren't going to fancy restaurants -- taco joints and pizza places-- yet expenditures are still more than double my usual grocery bill for the week. We also have not had enough fruits and vegetables and have eaten too much salt and fat, and our guts and mental health are the worse for it. In desperation, I made a run to the nearest chain grocery store - I realized I hadn't been there in probably 6 months. I just "didn't have time" to go to my usual local food purveyors or even Whole Foods (never mind that this would have added but 10 minutes in the car -- when you are in scheduling-crisis mode, you don't make rational decisions). The prices were high, everything looked waxy and unappetizing, and the fish and produce I bought tasted terrible. Also, I realized the terrible reality of shopping at 6 PM on a weeknight rather than 6 AM on a Saturday. The store was packed with tired, hungry shoppers and employees with short tempers. No wonder most people just order Domino's!

Last night found my small family exhausted, hungry and out of appealing options. I fully understand that this is an upper-class dilemma. We had options for food, and I know that many don't. But the options we had at that moment were either expensive, unhealthy or both, and they all required us to leave our house yet again, so there we sat, inert. Finally, the deadlines had been met. This next week promised to be easier -- no dinner meetings, no late-night calls, no extra shifts. But it was 7 PM and I couldn't bear to go to the store, and none of us could stomach the thought of more restaurant food. The cupboard was bare -- even for simple things like pancakes (no flour), rice or pasta. The fridge was a grim wasteland -- 3 jars of kimchi and a big bag of dried out carrots. So, I rallied, and made "Pennies from Heaven", as my husband calls them: I peeled the carrots, cut them into coins, blanched them, then sauteed them in my last scrap of butter, sprinkled with sugar, salt and black pepper. I would have put grated lemon or ginger if I had them. But I didn't. We sat and ate and my toddler was happy. My husband announced it was the best thing he'd eaten in a week. I even had a big pile of peels to tuck into the worm bin. Pennies from heaven, indeed.

Today, I have an unusual day off from work, to compensate for the recent heavy scheduling. I am using the day to shop and stock up. Normally, I avoid stocking up too heavily on pantry staples, mostly because I just have one narrow cupboard set aside for food storage. But I have a big hallway closet, cool and dry. I am buying bulk rice, beans, pasta and flour. I am making chicken stock today with all the scraps I have tucked away in my freezer. I am making my list and checking it twice. And I'll get a big bag of storage carrots to tuck into the bottom of my fridge -- at least this way, there will always be an option before Domino's.

Quality versus quantity

At my current job, I am occasionally required to provide breakfast for a working group of 16 colleagues. This is always a source of unnecessary anxiety for me: what should I make? what ingredients to use? how much to spend? Most people bring boxes of supermarket-purchased croissants, or Dunkin Donuts or McDonald's. On principle, I am opposed to giving any money to the fast food chains. The temptation is great though: it is quick and easy to procure at six in the morning. Nor do I work with a bunch of foodies -- everyone greets the Egg McMuffins with guilty joy. The same can't be said for the homemade granola I brought a few months ago.

I just read a great post on another garden blog, Daphne's Dandelions, wherein the author admitted that she didn't use her home-grown and carefully-stored produce for a Christmas potluck. She decided to cook with store-bought ingredients. Though she felt this really wasn't in the Christmas spirit, she wanted to save the good stuff for herself and her family. I face this same dilemma with the breakfast I must provide tomorrow. Do I stay up tonight baking bread, and bring in one of my precious cheeses or garden-grown preserves? Do I spend a lot of money on organic and locally-sourced ingredients for a crowd of people who are just as -- if not more -- happy with fast food? On the other hand, why would I serve my respected colleagues food of lesser quality than that which I would feed my own family? In the larger scheme of things, this is a small issue. I have many better things to ponder and wring my hands over. It's not like my own pantry is free of cheap supermarket staples, or that everything I put in my mouth is the hard-won fruit of my own labor. But the tension between quality and quantity is never more apparent to me than with these breakfasts.

It comes to this: no one likes to be up at 6 in the morning in a Chicago winter. I assume that most of us would rather be sipping coffee with our families. I want my colleagues to feel appreciated and valued, especially given the sacrifice they are making of their own time. The way I would demonstrate that appreciation to my own family would be with homemade food, usually a long time in the making. That being said, granola or homemade yogurt -- no matter how lovingly made-- won't be comfort food to a colleague used to more standard American breakfast fare. I am tempted to make McMuffin-like sandwiches with local eggs, home-baked biscuits and home-cured bacon. But I don't want to wake up at 4 in the morning to do so, and I couldn't bear it if it got a bad review. So I'm going to low-ball it with something sweet and rich: scones. These are a crowd-pleaser -- these scones were my mother's signature baked good at her bed and breakfast. They are quick to whip together -- especially if you bake them in a large circle scored into wedges, rather than individual rounds.

In place of the raisins, I will fold in some chopped figs that I preserved in a brandy-laced syrup in the fall. To another batch I will add some dried cherries I've been looking to use up. Will my colleagues care that the scones are made with homemade yogurt instead of store-bought buttermilk? Who knows? Likely not. They'll probably just think I'm crazy for not stopping at Dunkin Donuts on the way in. But hopefully they will feel comforted, and I will have fed a crowd with just enough homemade love to let me breathe easily.

Sarah's Scones

2 cups flour

1/3 cup sugar

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

6 Tbsp butter, cold and cut into small pieces

1/2 c yogurt or buttermilk

1 egg

2 tsp vanilla

2/3 cup raisins or other dried fruit (cut into raisin-size pieces if large)

1. Preheat to oven to 400 degrees

2. Mix together all the dry ingredients. When well blended, cut in the butter with a pastry blender.

3. In another bowl, stir together the yogurt, egg and vanilla. Add to the flour mixture, mixing just until moistened. Gently fold in the raisins.

4. Pat the dough into an eight-inch circle on an ungreased cookie sheet. Score into eight wedges.

5. Bake for 18-20 minutes, cool 5 minutes, then serve.