Persimmons

Over at 66 Square Feet (the Food) I posted a recipe for this deliciously autumnal persimmon loaf. It's good just with butter, or with this tart viburnum jelly (I used invasive linden viburnum - Viburnum dilatatum). Red currant jam would be nice, or even a sharp cheese, grated roughly and packed on top with a schmear of chutney.

I love persimmons.

Locally the little American persimmons are ripe (above) - the trees are so tall that windstorms are helpful for shaking off the ripe fruits.  And the large Asian persimmons are arriving at delis, bodegas and markets.

Some quick persimmon tips:

Native persimmons and big Asian Hachiyas must be jelly-soft to be ripe. 
Fat-bottomed Fuyu persimmons are sweet when still firm.
Freeze very ripe Hachiyas for instant sorbet. Take out of the freezer 15 minutes before slicing them in half and scooping.

For baking or drink mixing, pulp ripe persimmons.

The small naive persimmons smell like roses and ripe apricots when very ripe. I put them through my foodmill's medium mesh to remove the occasional seeds and the thin skin.

The pulp is like taffy and very aromatic. I freeze it by the half-cupful.

The freezer is getting full.

Lots more persimmon tips and recipes in Forage, Harvest, Feast.

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4 tickets left: Fall Ramble, Central Park, 2 November

Autumn olives - a mast year

Early last Saturday I finished working (a freelance writing assignment) unexpectedly early, and so the Frenchman and I decided to hop into Ntini and drive to the beach. The weather was beautiful and crisp. He would run on the low tide beach and I would walk and forage in the dunes. I expected to find some fragrant bayberry.

Instead, I found trees groaning with the weight of autumn olives. You may know them as oleaster. Or autumn berry. Or Japanese silverberry. Regardless, as far as I am aware, these autumn olives are Elaeagnus umbellata, a very invasive small tree, with roots in Asia. There are many species of Elaeagnus.

There is a native American species: commutata. Also commonly called autumn olive. Or silverthorn. But its fruits are green and mealy. The perfumed flowers look almost identical, though. Another spring lookalike is Russian olive, Elaeagnus angustifolia, and it also has green fruit.

Like gummi bears on trees.

I had found some early fruit ripe on Staten Island just before I left for South Africa to visit my mom, in late September. I had been happy about those handfuls. So this ridiculously heavy crop in mid October in Brooklyn was a big  and very nice surprise.

I picked and picked and picked. I also ate a lot and got very sticky. The flesh is juicy, slightly tannic, lightly sweet, and little sour. The flavour is almost like red currant meets sweet tomato but not quite. Some pomegranate. I collected a couple of large branches, too - not something I usually do - because I found what looked very much like two different species, and I wanted to compare leaves and fruit closely.

The ones on the left were clustered in tight bunches and tasted as described. The ones on the right were on a larger tree with larger leaves, the fruit more sparse, on longer stalks, individually larger, and very sour, like lemon juice. Possibly a hybrid, or perhaps even the goumi, Elaeagnus multiflora? Or native silver buffaloberry - Shepherdia argentea, in an unusual eastern occurrence? I need to check to see if its leaves are opposite.

In the kitchen, after washing and sorting, the measuring and milling began. When I work with wild ingredients I measure and weigh them because there are close to no resources telling you, for example, how much a cup of autumn olives weighs, or how much juice you can expect to extract from that cup. This is basic information that is required for a recipe to work.

In the jug you can see how autumn olive juice separates after a few minutes. It has very high lycopene content, and working with it is like working with tomatoes, whose lycopene is a little more famous (lycopene is an antioxidant best known for contributing to heart health).

The autumn olive kitchen.

I know. Now what?

Wait and see!

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Fall Ramble, Central Park

Columbus Day Walk

Origins and Consequences Walk
Prospect Park
14 October, 11am - 1.30pm
$52

Once upon a time Columbus discovered America.  Or did he? Oh, dear...

It was here all the time, of course.

Filled with indigenous peoples and plants. In the wake of European settlement unfamiliar plants appeared, and began to alter the botanical landscape.

Use this federal holiday celebrating Columbus (and was he Italian or Portuguese, anyway?) to come and meet and celebrate the delicious native plants of the Northeast, learn some of the traditional ways of using them, and discover the exotic and useful plants that have naturalized here. Our wild-inspired picnic will feature native American ingredients (think fermented, dried serviceberries), as well as Portuguese treats (pastéis de nata, anyone?), reinterpreted with native and invasive ingredients.

Please bring your opinions. There may even be a food fight.

Walk Complete

The tropical terrace

I was away in Cape Town - working remotely and keeping my mom company - for the month of September. Despite my absence, the plants on the terrace just kept growing, watered almost daily by the Frenchman. Despite its tiny size, relative to the garden I just left, returning to this terrace - my fourth New York garden - is still a homecoming. And right now it feels distinctly tropical.

The Thai limes (you can also call them makrut, as they are known in Thailand - Citrus hystrix) are flourishing.

While they are better known for their aromatic leaves, the fruits' rind is intensely fragrant. I used some in a Thai green curry a couple of nights ago.

After looking peaky (I would describe it as a failure thrive - FFT - a medical diagnosis that I first encountered with reference to child deaths in 19th century English workhouses. Cause? "Failure to thrive.") in mid summer, with drooping top growth and yellowing mature leaves, the curry leaf tree (Murraya koenigii) revived after some serious June intervention: root pruning, repotting in the same pot, and a heavy prune of its branches. It revived. Of all the plants I have grown curry leaf has been the most challenging. But I think I understand it, now. For vigor it will require frequent pruning - top and bottom. And unlike every other plant I know it likes a little water, every day. This is the opposite of the deep watering I usually recommend. To complicate matters, indoors in winter I water it only once a week...

Galangal! I harvested some of the rhizome for that same green curry, making it about as authentic as it gets. The leaves are also very fragrant. This is Alpinia galanga.

And my other galangal - Kaempferia galanga. The coolest plant on the terrace. It was dormant all winter (indoors), meaning no leaves at all. So I was thrilled to see the first green shoots appear in May. It has spread extra fast since August, and is still making tiny, remarkably pretty white flowers that last a day, giving it another common name of resurrection lily. The leaves are delicious shredded into curries and braises and have an affinity for vinegar (I slow-cook often with the vinegars I make at home).

The curry leaf and both galangals came from Companion Plants in Ohio, all in four-inch pots. You can read more about the galangals' journey here.

These subtropicals and tropicals must come in, soon. Night time temperatures are dipping down to 50'F and when they stay below, I make the move. We brought the curry leaf in last night when 45' were predicted: Miss Fussy Pants.

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Botanical Walks and Picnics

By the dawn's early light

It's a long ride, from ORT in Johannesburg to JFK. Fifteen hours. But they can pass easily enough. If your usual last row is empty and you can actually lie yourself mostly flat, and you wake with only three hours to go. Through the window New York appears in lights in the changing night's darkness.

And it is only after the grumpy customs officer has stamped your passport and said grudgingly, Welcome home, and after the baggage has been collected (the fragile-marked box filled with wine deeply dented as usual by the spewing chute at this airport), and after walking through the double doors to the arrivals hall, and you see this tall man and his instant smile, not seen for four weeks, that you realize again how good it is to be met by him, at dawn.

My nose told me something had broken in that box. And my friend Don's fragrant bay extract was the victim of the chute. But everything else was spared.

We have been looking at the biltong I bought from The Biltong Shop (above, in Constantia Village, Cape Town) for days - it made it past the sniffer beagles, and tonight I think we will taste some thin slices. They are to savored. There is really nothing like it, Stateside.