Strawberry breakfast

My son and I woke up today and went to pick strawberries in the still-cool morning. The first crop hung red and ripe from the plants, and in a few minutes we had a bowlful. We sat quietly, eating the berries, juice dribbling down our chins. Our neighborhood, normally raucous with music, cars and conversation, was still silent in the pre-six-o'clock-hour. This one moment -- of bucolic peace, of lush serenity in the midst of the inner city -- was worth the hassle of caring for these plants all winter. I went through a long season of mulching, of watching frost warnings and covering blossoms with bedsheets, for this....so that my son and I could eat breakfast together, from our own backyard, in contented togetherness.

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.

My Bohemian Perennials

Hops and horseradish are both new to my garden this year, but historically appropriate to this area of Chicago. Indeed, I expect someone has raised the plants on this land at some point in the last century. While my neighborhood, Hermosa, is now known mostly as a Puerto Rican and Mexican community, it once housed mostly German and Czech immigrants. The neighborhood is bordered by rail yards and factories and this was a haven for local labor. Some of the older denizens of this area -- the 80 and 90 year-old African-Americans -- still recall to me when this area was "Bohemian". "Mind you," said one, "that was when there was still an ice man and coal carts".

Both of these newly planted perennials have not grown according to my book-learned expectations. I expected the hops to come up much sooner. They just popped up yesterday, in mid-May! Hardly the "early spring" oft cited in my garden reading. When I was visiting friends in chilly Oregon in early April, they already had long, winding vines trained up their arbor (I use "vines" colloquially, as I think the right label for hops is actually a bine -- but I don't want to put on horticultural airs). Perhaps this delay in popping up is due to languorous first-year growth. Maybe next year the hops will be up with the asparagus. According to my sources, hops grows like gangbusters once it gets going, up to half a meter a week. I plan to train the strongest shoots up my porch, which looks painfully new against my old, worn house. Hopefully, the graceful green vines will soften the raw edges of the construction.

The horseradish did come up early, but I am surprised about how it has been struggling. Everything I had read seemed to imply that it was generally repellent to all forms of garden pests: "no major insect problems" and "no diseases" is repeated everywhere in the "garden wisdom" literature. Usually, the authors write that the plant itself is the pest and it will take over the whole garden if you aren't careful. Well, my plant can't seem to keep more than two leaves on it at once -- every time there is new growth, I come out in the morning to see the leaves nibbled or snapped off. I can't figure out what it is -- I assume slugs or snails, since those seem to be damaging everything else in the garden. As usual, I am pretty suspicious of the information in the gardening books and websites. Who among these authors has actually grown everything in their books? Read just a few websites or "encyclopedias" and you find the same tidbits and tips repeated over and over again, often verbatim. It's like all the cookbooks that talk about browning meat to "seal in the juices" even though Harold McGee disproved this theory long ago.

Anyway, I did find an excellent online article on horseradish by a woman who seems to have actual experience. Interestingly enough, she calls into question another popular "fact": is horseradish really the ideal companion plant for potatoes? As for pests, she points to the flea beetle as the usually culprit for springtime damage. Now, my leaves do not have the "shot-hole" appearance that seems to be classic for the flea beetle. I am glad, however, to find someone that admits that horseradish isn't the absolute problem-free plant that the majority makes it out to be. Even she, though, attests to it's aggressive spreading habit, so I am going out to sink a bottomless pot around my plant right now. While it is currently struggling, I fear that when it does settle in and start real growth, it could be the end of my tiny vegetable bed!

Self-sowing flowers

The hot-colored blossoms of California poppies are my first harbingers of summer. There is much to recommend these easy plants; I love the ferny foliage, the silken texture of the blossoms, and the long blooming season. Multiple sources write that they make good cut flowers, though I have never had much luck. I can't say I regret that, as the informal, nodding stems seem more at home in a casual garden border than stuffed in a vase.

I first sprinkled the seed in my front bed four years ago, rather naive about the "self-sowing" qualities described on the packet. Good thing I love these plants, for eradication would be a dismal project. The seed heads are bursting with tiny seeds, readily sown by wind and gravity all over my garden and beyond. I have noticed the seedlings popping up in sidewalk cracks halfway down the block. Even in desired locations, the seedlings come up very thickly, and must be thinned aggressively for a nice display. The one year I did not thin them out, thanks to the torpor of late pregnancy, I ended up with a dense mat of underperforming, leggy plants.

Self-sowing plants entice me with their care-free attitude. If one has anxiety about formal "garden design" and or feels self-conscious about plant placement, self-sowers are an easy out; just let the plants make the decisions. And, as Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd point out, the plants tend to pop up just where they belong, though one would have never chosen that site intentionally.

Of course, it is a fine line between self-sowing garden plant and weed. Feverfew is rampant in my garden. I'm unsure if it was purposefully planted by the former owner, or if it is just a weed that has drifted in from surrounding areas. I can't begrudge its presence, however. It grows in the areas -- the dry and the hardscrabble -- that would otherwise be visual wastelands. The seedlings are easy to pull out, but I will leave them where they are. I have never tried it out medicinally, and am content to welcome the daisy-like flowers and pleasant citrusy scent to my "wildflower" bouquets.

This is not to say I am at peace with all self-sowers. I could do with less dill popping up all over my herb garden and, even this early in the season, I am tired of pulling out chives from every corner of my yard. A responsible gardener would deadhead these plants before they scatter their seed all over the place. But in late summer, I am charmed by the seed heads, and prefer to pay the piper later. I must also admit that a few extra dill plants-- with their airy yellow heads -- will look nice among my cosmos. I would have never thought of that.

The Patron Saint of Lost Garden Causes

I stopped by the Kilbourn Park Organic Plant Sale today and as I was settling the bill, the cashier pointed out a forlorn group of plants. They had literally been kicked to the curb. There they sat, leggy and wilting, along the harsh sunny asphalt of the greenhouse driveway. She told me they were free for the taking and encouraged me to pick up a few. Sigh. I am not one to ever turn down a chance at plant redemption -- no matter how many bitter disappointments trail in my gardening wake.

Just moments before, I had been congratulating myself on my purchasing restraint. My garden is already bursting at the seams, and I still have many potted seedlings sitting around the patio. To further restrain myself, I had even arrived with just one $10 bill. I was careful in selecting a mere two herb plants -- anise hyssop and lovage. Both were herbs that I wanted to try out this year despite forgetting to purchase seed over the winter. Yet nothing quickens my pulse like the words "free plants" (except maybe "free seeds"). I inevitably looked over the sorry pots and found two that I didn't have the heart to abandon, a yarrow and some johnny-jump-ups. I love violas and am trying to get them to self-seed the whole northern edge of my backyard. The yarrow -- well, it looked horrible:

Yarrows are, however, such obliging plants, and do well in poor soil. After the harrowing ordeal of the porch reconstruction, my front bed is a mess of compacted, debris-laden dirt. Yarrow, peonies and poppies are my best bet at this point. I decided that a cutting-back and some gentle treatment might rescue this sorrowful specimen. If it dies, oh well! It was free. My husband just gave me a sad, unsurprised look as I came back to the car juggling an armful of pots. "Couldn't you have found more basil?" he sighed, eying the ferny, dying mess of the yarrow plant. This is what he gets for marrying the patron saint of lost garden causes. I pointed out that at least it is a cheap vice, unlike cigarettes or shoes.

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.