A vegetable love

When local greenmarkets spill over with produce it's hard not to be vegetarian. Corn is ritually peeled of its outer husks, the tender silk removed (it's very good to eat in a coconut milk soup), and then the inner husks folded back carefully over the kernels so that they are not burned by the fire that cooks them. 

We ate this corn with basil butter (heaps of basil whizzed in a food processor with as much or as little butter as you like), and an anchovy butter. So...not quite vegetarian. A quick cabbage slaw, and broccolini dressed with ramp leaf salt and a Palestinian olive oil made by Al'Ard. 

Late bees still buzzed the hyssop and African basil while we ate. 

Outside

 

Hot days, hot nights, heat advisories. Turning on the oven seems insane, so if we're not eating cool and cold food, we're cooking outside on the tiny terrace. 

The charcoal is always Red Oak's lump charcoal, never briquettes; the firelighters I use (I am the braai mistress!) are the little chunks made by If You Care. The lightweight charcoal lights fast and burns hot, so one doesn't need too much. 

Lillet, seltzer, rosemary, ice. A drink to sip while watching the chimneys swifts on insect patrol above us. Every night there are more and more fireflies, and every night they fly higher, coming right up to the terrace to blink as we eat.

Wax Bean Salad for Summer

The last week of June has resembled the first week of August. Daytime temperatures of 100 degrees. Watering the terrace two, and sometimes three, times a day. (How? A two-gallon watering can, carried from the kitchen - strangely I don't count the trips. But I do know that it take about two minutes to fill the can. I have to view the unavoidable task as a combination of patience and strength training.)

The weekend was better, and suppers returned outside after some evenings of respite in the cool of the air-conditioned indoors. Cooking indoors has been minimal, but the braai on the terrace has been in frequent use. Last night it was boneless short ribs marinated in shoyu with scallion greens - one rib for our supper, one to eat cold, tonight; with a wax bean salad and a farmers market salad of tomato, snap peas and purslane.

You know it's summer when the hyssop is tall and in bloom. It makes the bees very happy.

Wax Bean and Shoyu Salad with Perilla (or Shiso) Pickle

I use frilly shiso or perilla (also called sesame) leaves for this riff on the method for Korean kkaenip jangajji (sesame leaf pickle). They turn limp and soft but their rosewater flavor holds its own. 

Sesame Leaf Pickle:

15 young sesame leaves

1/4 cup shoyu (Ohsawa nama shoyu) or soy sauce

1/4 cup chopped scallion greens

1 teaspoon crushed garlic

1/2 teaspoon sugar 

1/4 teaspoon Korean chile flakes (gochugaru)

Beans:

8 oz wax beans

Toasted sesame oil

For the pickle: Layer the sesame leaves in a small bowl with the scallions. Add all the other ingredients. (Make sure the leaves are submerged.) Allow to marinate for an hour before using.

Cook the beans in boiling water (or steam)until bite-tender. Drain. 

Roll up and thinly slice 6 of your pickled sesame leaves (keep the rest in the fridge) and add them to the still-warm beans. Add two spoons of the marinade. Toss, and add a drizzle of toasted sesame oil and shower of chile flakes. Serve warm or at room temperature

No-Cook Food

 

Too hot. To trot.

So it's Caprese salads all the way, whee, whee, whee. 

We are so very, very lucky to have central air on days like these. That has not always been the case. The feel-like is allegedly 107°F. The crazy (cough, determined) Frenchman went for his five-mile run, regardless. 

I have some other insalata do Caprese ideas over here, at Gardenista.

Where are you? What is the temperature?

Tuna Mousse: Food for a Heatwave

It wobbles, it jiggles, it's straight out of the beginning of the middle of the last century. It's wonderful. It's tuna mousse. Wrong, somehow. But wonderful. And inhalable. I revive the recipe every year when heat threatens and I won't cook indoors. We are in for a possibly unprecedented week.

We  - the Frenchman and I - used to eat it on our rooftop in Cobble Hill, accompanied by Don Estorbo (de la Bodega Dominicana - a bodega cat before bodega cats were cool), with a wide view over New York Harbor. In those days we had a single, room airconditioner, whose roaring was no match for the baking heat. The rooftop was our evening escape.

Tuna...is overfished. Try and find pole-caught tuna: American Tuna, Wild Planet, or Whole Foods 365 brand are better choices. Walk past the Starkist. You are better than Starkist.

Tuna Mousse

The beauty of this decadent, 60's-suggestive mousse is that it goes with all the crunchy, healthy things: celery stalks, crisp cucumber spears, carrot sticks, endive leaves, snap peas (halved lengthwise), long breakfast radishes or round, stout ones, quartered.

Tuna Mixture:

2 cans tuna in olive oil, drained
1/4 cup mayonnaise
1 Tablespoon ketchup
4 cornichons (tiny cucumber pickles) 
1 Tablespoon capers
2 Tablespoons lemon or lime juice
Freshly ground black pepper

Wobble Mixture:

1/3 cup just-boiled water
1 packet (1 Tablespoon) gelatin

For the tuna mixture: Combine the ingredients and whizz in a food processor till smooth. No food processor? Chop the capers and cornichons finely, then mash everything with a fork in a mixing bowl bowl.

Wobble mixture: In a small bowl, combine the gelatin and the extremely hot water and stir until the gelatin has dissolved. 

Add the gelatin mixture to the tuna mixture and whizz/mash again.

Taste. Assess the salt, pepper and lemon juice situation. Adjust.

Transfer the tuna mousse mixture into a small bowl or mold. Chill for at least 2 hours. To unmold, slide a knife dipped in hot water around its edges, cover with the serving plate, and shake until it plops out.

It wobbles. See?

Of course, you can also eat it with a good baguette, or dark brown Scandi bread. Or crackers. Or a spoon. Or on your own, with no one else watching.

Here's a bonus picture of Storbie, aka Estorbo loco, aka The Don. 

Gone, never forgotten. Eeep.

A tea to soothe sleep

 

Standing on the terrace recently I snuffed the air and smelled an unmistakable and welcome scent. Lindens were in city-wide bloom. Some still are.

Feeling besieged by the sense that the world is about to break over our heads?

Sip some linden tea.

Are the trees still in bloom, yet to bloom, soon to bloom, near you?

In New York, lindens are planted very, very widely. Littleleaf, bigleaf, European species, native North American species. 

Their flowers dry easily, and rehydrate gracefully. Linden tea has been used for a long, long time, to calm nerves, and soothe the sleepless. I am a convert.

Find the recipe and some gathering tips in my linden tea story for Gardenista.

Supper edition

Cool, grey, misty mid-June days and evenings have sent us back indoors for supper. 

Tonight's was a salmon oven-roast that we've fallen in love with and repeated many times. I first started cooking it in Maine, where we had access to superb - if farmed - Gulf of Maine salmon, and it has translated well to Brooklyn (with salmon farmed in the Faroe Islands; eating fish is...tricky, to say the least). 

The recipe is based on this one: spicy slow-roasted salmon, from The New York Times. I riff a lot with the spices, and often use berbere (the fragrant East African spice blend). And tonight's version included three tender, sliceable heads of spring garlic.

I was lucky to sip an exceptional 2020 dry Riesling this evening, from our friends at Storm Cellar, in Colorado. I treated myself to a six-bottle box of their wines, which arrived at our door last week. 

We had company. Pirelli enjoys salmon nights. He was a little impatient for the meal to begin.

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Green

It is all very green, where lately it had been brown. Lately is months ago. Lately was March and April, the tentative days of spring. But time compresses. Now, the terrace, the parks, the streets of the city, are very green. 

Raindrops sparkle on jewelweed's leaves. The jewelweed (Impatiens capensis) blooms in late summer, and in fall. It is there for the ruby-throated hummingbirds. It is there for us, to lure the hummingbirds, for us to see.

The jewelweed is self-sown, from seeds detonated last year by spring-loaded capsules. Just two plants share a pot - come their height, they will be extremely thirsty, and the pot might be replenished twice a day. Jewelweed likes damp places. At night, it folds its leaves. 

On the terrace its companion, in another pot, is Thalictrum pubescens, tall meadow rue, a perennial whose shallow roots also relish water. Its parent grows in the Catskills, its feet in deep moss watered by a stream that trickles perennially down a clean mountain.

The raccoons are afoot again in the evenings, on the roof above the Boston ivy.

We wonder where they come from, and where they go.

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Refuge

The little garden is very green, a small echo of the park and wild spaces nearby. There has been a lot of rain. In the pots perennials are growing taller daily, working towards summer bloom that will last until frost.

 The green suits me. It's restful and varied, and the older I get the longer I can look at leaves. They're very quiet. The world is not.

Morse

Meet Morse Jones. They're a groundhog (he/she, we don't know). Morse, for obvious reasons, and Jones, because since the pandemic's worst days, when Green-Wood's side gates first opened permanently to the community, we have been calling a family of groundhogs that emanates from a burrow nearby The Joneses. 

Morse is very pleased with the grass situation, currently. Nice and tender.

Morse has been sending SOS's into the ether, but we're not sure any help is coming.

Peonies, two ways

On Monday I bought pink peonies in tight bud. $15 for three stems. Around the corner they are $20, and fully blown. Walking an extra 10 minutes gives me more days of flowers and money to spare. I photographed them today, Wednesday, in the evening. They have opened and smell exactly like roses.

I moved their vase to the stone table for our supper. After supper, they stay out on the terrace in the cool evening and cooler night, so they last a little longer. It's warmer indoors, and we're probably still a few weeks away - I hope - from succumbing to central air. 

Early in the month, when we had a brief heat wave, we closed all the windows and turned on that chilled air, and felt coccooned and shut off. It's better now, with open windows and doors, a through-draft, air clogged with pollen, and the singing of robins and mockingbirds, the warning of the kestrel, and the black headed gulls cracking hilarious jokes as they fly high above us, their voices beneath the jets and the choppers and the trucks and modified cars that ride like gunshots down the street.

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Daily, on Instagram

Cassis

I rediscovered a bottle of black currant (cassis, in French) syrup living in the back of the fridge. I made it in that briefest of black currant seasons, in 2023, by layering sugar with the pungent, musky fruit. The dark syrup forms quickly but I leave it in its glass jar for a week or more before straining it. The fermented syrup stays active and alive, so that's why it resides in the cold. Leave that chilled bottle closed at room temperature for even half an hour, and it goes fffft! when you open it. It lives. A delightful probiotic.

The flavor is deep and tart and sweetly intense. And here about a tablespoonful went into a Bombay Sapphire G&T. To be sipped on the terrace with the singing of the robins and the mockingbirds, the constant morse of the sparrows, the high chase-calls of the tilting chimney swifts.

(After the syrup is strained, the leftover black currants do not go to waste. It's either a black currant chutney, a jam, or dried fruit, as an imperative Step 2. In 2023 it was chutney, because I eat more of it than I do jam. At least, I did then. Things change.) 

Seed Bread - nuttily delicious

I served my seed loaves at a picnic recently, and, as is usual with this particular bread, the recipe was requested. Now it's up on Gardenista, via my weekly column.

It can take a long time to develop a recipe, and many, many tests. This is now a regular in my baking rotation, and has been for about two years.  

What's the  neon topping? An intensely savory bean pâté with some raw beet microplaned in at the last minute. The bean recipe is also on Gardenista, if you're desperately curious (it doesn't have to be puréed, but can be eaten as a warm casserole or a cool salad. It's divine).

The bread's appeal, I think, is threefold. One, it tastes very good: The toasted nuttinesss of a flock of seeds is very compelling. Two, it contains no flour, so is gluten-free: That also means it is far healthier than any bread that is flour-based because it is loaded with nutrition and fiber. Still, you feel like you're eating bread, and not something you have to, because it's "good for you." (And if you are sensitive to gluten, what do you miss the most? Bread!) Three - it's easy to make. There is no kneading. After a pan-toast, you mix, pour, and bake. Done.

Four, but no one knows this until after it's made: This seed bread makes the best toast. Ever. For that reason alone I keep it in the freezer, pre-sliced, to toast as needed.

Happy baking! Go and buy your sunflowers seeds now...

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Gluten Free Seed Bread

Magnificat

Nkwe Pirelli. Pirelli to his friends. Puss-Puss to his intimates. Bushy-Brooks to the disrespectful. The cat formerly known as Percy. And Inky, before that.

Outside, now

Evenings have moved outdoors, again, and if we are very lucky, Pirelli joins us. 

Beyond the terrace the horse chestnuts are in bloom, and all around us black locust* trees are dripping with scented white flowers. At flower sellers outside bodegas,  bucketsful of peonies have replaced cold-weather tulips.

Black locust is North American Robinia pseudoacacia. In New York it is a sturdy street tree, and very welcome to bees and foragers. 

Behind the cat and the man, the calamondin tree is loaded. Today, the little, aromatic and very sour fruit will be picked, halved, and laid in salt. 

Let's hear it for the ...

...boys. Both beloved.

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Feral Goddess Dressing

A posy of garlic mustard. One of its common names in the UK is sauce alone. Which gives one ideas...

I was reminded of green goddess dressing by Winner, a local restaurant where we sometimes order a chicken dinner on nights when I have been preparing a multi-course picnic all day, for a plant walk the following day. Their rotisserie bird comes with a slew of sauce-choices, and their green goddess is one of the best. 

Adding invasive plants and handful of ramp leaves turns it feral: tingling and singing and vibrating with fresh green herbs.

You'll find my recipe here, for Gardenista: Feral Goddess Dressing - Rewilding a California Classic.

...or just pour it in a tall glass and drink it through a straw!

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My Books

Quince

These things are bone-familiar, yet rare. The quinces ripe on the trees. The shadowed light of a kitchen where a thin cloth in the window softens the sun. An old wooden table. 

I grated one small quince and squeezed lemon juice across it. Salt, some chile/chili/chilli, and it was a quick sambal, ready for the lamb chops we cooked over coals under a shimmering southern sky. The sheep eat the bushes that grow in the veld we can see.

In this old house  where we are staying, with thick walls, low doors, and and high gables and layers of thatch, I wondered how many hands had prepared quinces, before me.

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Candelabras, at last

Sometimes, dreams come true. A small whisper of an idea stayed with me as I booked a ticket to Cape Town for April. Maybe, maybe...maybe the Brunsvigias would bloom while I was here. And if they did, I would see them. 

The ones in Nieuwoudtville. About four hours north of Cape Town, in the Northern Cape's Namakwa region. At the end of a dry summer, rain comes. Maybe. And about three weeks after that rain, these geophytes - Brunsvigia bosmaniae - emerge and bloom like vivid pink candelabras. There's no fine-tuning the planning. Bear all possibilities in mind, but it has to be serendipitous. 

Word came, phone calls were made (I never call anyone), and here we are. It has been ten years since we visited this high escarpment, and then it was for its brilliant spring display.

There is so much more, too. There is Brunsvigia flava, another, yellow species that blooms earlier. There are thousands - hundreds of thousands - of tiny green seedlings softening the sand in the grey veld. They have risen after these rains and will be mature by spring (August, September) and will bloom in those famous carpets of flowers. 

There are blue cranes in the fields, and bokmakieries ringing in the thorn trees. There are glittering stars at night.

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The ramps have risen!

The ramps on the tiny terrace have broken their long hibernation. They made flowers last year, in summer, long after their leaves had disappeared in the heat. Several seeds formed and matured and I dug them back in. I wonder if they will germinate?

It takes around, give-or-take, roughly, approximately, more or less, seven years for a ramp grown from seed to be able to make its own flowers, and seeds. 

Don't encourage vendors to sell mountains of ramps. Do ask them to sell ramp leaves only. They can be packaged just like delicate leaves like chicories and salad. And do soak some of the rooted plants overnight before planting them in pots or in the soil where they will get spring sunlight and summer shade. They are an Eastern US native, and appreciate cold winters. Compost, leaf litter, and slightly acidic soil help, too. But mine just grow in potting soil, with some of their woodland neighbors. 

Many of my overwintered bulbs did not make it and turned to mush: lilies, alliums (the ornamental kind).  It's not the cold that bothers them, but a repeat freeze-thaw cycle, and wet feet. Ramps like wet feet, for a bit. And here they are.

Read all about how to grow ramps in this story. And what ramp habitat looks like in spot we visist every spring, in the Catskills.

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Who said clouds were lonely?

A host. A host, I tell you! 

The daffodils have opened in Prospect Park.

Seeing red?

"But why make it pink?" asked my faraway friend Bevan, crossly, via WhatsApp, after I sent him a picture of this beet hummus. "And why the sumac?" he continued. 

"It is pretty," he conceded.

Bevan is a purist.

My answer, unsent, is:"Why the hell not?" Also, he's living with a crisis in Turkey, which can make anyone short-tempered.

The real reasons to make beet hummus include, but are not limited to: 

1. It IS pretty! We need beauty, and if we can eat it, and smile at its ephemeral pleasure, let's do that.

2. I am seeing red and I'd rather be creative about it than burst my heart. Speaking of hearts - the raw as well as cooked beets in this hummus are loaded with nitrates, which dilate blood vessels and potentially lower blood pressure and improve oxygen uptake (good for all of us, and especially athletes). Beets are heart healthy.

3. Combined with the high-fibre chickpeas in hummus, the extra fibre in the beets load this dip-spread with that essential aspect of nutrition that so many Americans lack. 

4. Antioxidants! Lots. Which means anti-inflammatory. Inflammation is has been accused of my bad health associations than I can name, here.

5. Flavor. Perhaps that's the only argument. The sweetly earthy flavor of beets is wonderful with the garlic-singing smoothness of the chickpeas.

6. Spring. Put this beet hummus on platter with petals and pretty leaves. 

7. It's quick. It's filling. It's beautiful. It's nutritious.

The recipe is up on Gardenista: A Petal Party Platter for Spring.

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Walk with Me

Forage walks for spring

New spring Plant Walks and Forage Picnics are ready. Find them and book your tickets via the link.

Pictured above? Bloodroot, and ephemeral native wildflower, doing battle with English ivy. Who are your rooting for (sorry...)?

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Bud break

 

Cloudy days, but on Saturday we went for a long walk in the park (Prospect Park). A milestone walk, because, at five miles, door to door, it was the longest stroll for me since early December, when I began to take some serious foot pain seriously and had to simply stop. Walking. I don't know what injured the plantar fascia muscles, but it's been a steep and then very long and dauntingly gradual learning curve and recovery process. I mean, I had to join a gym! For cardio exercise that didn't involve weight-bearing. 

Blablabla. So this walk, albeit not at my usual pace, which is fast, was a test. It seemed to go A-OK. No pain the day after. It's mending.

Plus, there were pre-spring blossoms. Prunus x subhirtella always startles everyone by flowering in early winter, and then again in very early spring (which is less alarming). It's the first cherry blossom of the year, always. The fat, frilly Kanzan's are still about six weeks away.

Cornelian cherry (Cornus mas) blossoms are about to erupt. In September their tart red fruits will be ripe.

Native spicebush  (Lindera benzoin) has fat round buds.

Hazel (species?) - the pollen-laden male catkins with the tiny red female flower above.

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