My Garden Volunteers

the garden in late june 2011
The garden in late June 2011

There’s a lot going on in my garden right now and the growth is impressive – it seems like there is recognizable growth every day. I love this time in the garden, as it is full of hope and promise. And the green colors are just amazing.

This year I have a good number of volunteers. Volunteers are those plants that just grow on their own out in the dirt, without any planning on my part. In my garden the source is usually something in the compost that I add to the dirt. Or seeds from last season that drop into the dirt, and then sprout the following season.

There are four volunteers in my garden – a cucumber, some kind of summer squash, ground cherries, and a tomatillo plant. I think this is a cucumber:

cucumber flowers
Cucumber flower from volunteer

And this is some sort of summer squash – could be zucchini, could be yellow crookneck, could be some other kind. I hope it’s crookneck.

summer squash volunteer
Summer squash volunteer

If it is indeed a kind of summer squash, I hope to make something tasty with the squash blossoms.

A lone tomatillo plant grows in the back of the garden, and it’s flowering!

tomatillo flowering
Tomatillo flowering

I’ve been told that you need at least two tomatillo plants in order to get fruit, but last year I had two plants and nothing happened. Both plants flowered but no fruit resulted. So frustrating! Maybe it will work out differently for me this year. I sure hope so, as I love tomatillos!

Finally, my ground cherries. So many of these little plants popped up this spring – probably close to 3 dozen, no doubt from dropped seeds in the ground from last year.

ground cherries growth
Ground cherries

They are even starting to fruit! I hope to make some ground cherry jam this year.

Let’s hear it for volunteers!

The Best Tapenade

spicy tapenade
Spicy tapenade

Recently, we hosted an event thanking friends who had given to a great project, the Astoria Park Shore Fest. It was a really fun time, and part of the fun was preparing the food – I love making food for parties. I used to spend at least a few days preparing the food for my grad school recital receptions, and the food would be gone in about 15 minutes. It was very satistfying.

One thing I learned to make in those years was tapenade. Tapenade is an olive spread – here’s more of a description from Wikipedia:

Tapenade is a Provençal dish consisting of puréed or finely chopped olives, capers, anchovies and olive oil. Its name comes from the provençal word for capers, tapenas (Occitan pronunciation: [ta?pen?]). It is a popular food in the south of France, where it is generally eaten as an hors d’œuvre, spread on bread. Sometimes it is also used to stuff fillets for a main course.

The recipe I use doesn’t have anchovies, but I can see how they would be a wonderful addition to this spread. This recipe I use is from a terrific vegetarian cookbook by Deborah Madison’s called Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. Deborah Madison cooked at Chez Panisse and was the founding chef at Greens restaurant, two of my favorite Bay Area restaurants.

This tapenade is spicy and lemony and uses an unusual ingredient – green peppercorns. These are tiny little things that are preserved in a salt water brine, and they add a wonderful salty peppery flavor to the tapenade. I’ve never seen them in another recipe; I love their flavor.

I enjoy this savory spread immensely. It’s especially good with chevre on bread or crackers.

Update On My Green Onion Regrowth

green onion regrowth
Green onions

I just wanted to update you on the status of my green onions – the ones I planted in dirt not even a couple weeks ago. Well, as you can see, they’ve done quite well!  Almost all of them have regrown and are looking really healthy. A couple of them are a little pokey but are still growing.

I hope I’ll be able to continue to harvest green onion tops from these onions for quite some time. Thanks again to AJ for the tip!

Hellgate CSA Week 3

CSA week 3 collage
Our third share of the season

This week’s superstar element in the CSA share was the two quarts of strawberries from Hepworth Farms – they are spectacular. Wonderful strawberry flavor and the texture is fantastic. Firm yet silky. We also got apples in our fruit share, which was a surprise, but shouldn’t have been – Hepworth Farms grows something like 40 different kinds of apples on their land in Milton, NY.

For the vegetable share, we also got:

1 HUGE head of green leaf lettuce (we are overwhelmed with greens)
1 bunch swiss chard
1 larger bag of snap peas
1 bunch of lavender (smells amazing)
1 pint of strawberries

All told, we received 10 cups of strawberries. Just… wow. I love this time of year!

More exciting news – next week I’ll be hosting at my apartment a canning workshop for my CSA, taught by my friend and fellow core group member AJ. He’ll be teaching us how to can strawberry lemon preserves, as well as teaching basic water bath canning best practices. It should be awesome.

Millet Tabbouleh

millet tabbouleh
Millet Tabbouleh

Back in July 2009, I volunteered to do some recipe testing for a new cookbook being written by Shauna and Danny Ahern. You probably know them as Gluten Free Girl and the Chef. I was sworn to secrecy at the time, but since their book is out, I can share this.

I only was able to test one recipe, but the one I tested was a total winner: millet tabbouleh.

Now, I don’t need to eat gluten-free, but I have friends who do, and it’s always interesting to work with new recipes. Millet is a delicious alternative to using bulgur wheat for tabbouleh, too. And it’s got a lot going for it: it’s high in manganese, phosphorous and magnesium. I love the taste and texture. And I always prepare this whole grain by soaking it with an acid to reduce the amount of the anti-nutrient phytic acid in it. This makes the grain more digestable and more nutritious.

I made this for an event over the weekend, and everyone loved it. The resident picky eater also loves it. I hope you do, too.

Hellgate CSA Week 2

hellgate csa week 2 share
Our second share of the season

This was Hellgate CSA‘s second week and we got another terrific share. Our vegetable share consisted of:

1 bunch of very aromatic savory (I love the smell!)
1 head of lettuce
1 bag of sugar snap peas
1 small bag of asparagus
1 quart of fantastic strawberries

I plan to eat a large salad on Thursday, combining the savory, the lettuce I got from the CSA, and my own lettuces growing out back. That and the arugula have just exploded in the past week:

overgrown lettuces and arugula
Lettuce and arugula have exploded

Asparagus will be delicious with eggs, and the strawberries will likely be gone in a day or two. Too bad, as I have some raw cream in my future that will be in my hands a few days after these berries are gone. Here’s hoping more strawberries come next weekend so that I can enjoy these two treasures together.

So far, so good. Everything has been gorgeous and delicious!

Extending the Life of Green Onions

I was really happy to read this post about extending the life of green onions by my friend AJ, who writes the terrific blog Handjobs (For the Home). What a great idea – I’ve already taken some of the green onions we got in our CSA share last week, and planted them in a pot with soil.

regrowing scallions
Green onion bulbs in soil

I’ll keep an eye on them to make sure nothing goes awry. I may have to push them down a little bit more, but maybe not. There were little rootlets growing out of the bottom of the green onions when I put them in there, which I think is a good thing.

Exciting learning new stuff!