Milkweed, fennel and lablab beans - late summer's compensation

Very, very late summer and the tall things are bending in the breeze. The South African milkweed and the fennel are irresistible to pollinating insects. So many bees, iridescent hover flies, wasps and hornets visit them. The creatures with stings don't bother us, so we don't mind them. It's good to see their free, flying life while the wider world's confusion and collapse press on us.

Beyond their airy stems, the lablab bean is in bloom. Yesterday we saw a hummingbird buzz its flowers. It's usually sold as an ornamental, as hyacinth bean or hyacinth vine, with occasional and vexingly ignorant warnings of toxicity. This is an ancient crop, hailing either from East Africa or South Asia (so far, its very early domestication has made its origin hard to pinpoint). 

I can't wait to have enough pods to make the two early fall bean dishes I've come to anticipate: a Southeast Asian-style curry made form from the sliced young pods, and a spicy and addictively good dish laced with berbere (an Eritrean and Ethiopean spice mix). 

You'll find both those recipes, and more about lablab beans, via the Gardenista story below.

Lablab Beans: An Ancient Crop and Stunning Vine

A tall, cool drink

Mugwort-raspberry hooch, cut with cold tonic water and piled with ice. In a pretty glass given to me by a Frenchwoman. 

I have cut back the Agastache, and the terrace-bees are cross, searching for what is missing (it's OK - they have plenty of basil, mint, fennel flowers, roses and citrus blossom to feast on). 

I'm hoping that it will flush again with fresh flowers in about three weeks. Mid-September. I'm not sure how summer disappeared, but it's on its way. Nights are noticeably longer and when we eat outdoors, the string lights come on.

(The luscious hooch is in the mugwort chapter of Forage, Harvest, Feast if you're curious.)

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Forage, Harvest, Feast - A Wild-Inspired Cuisine

Moonflower

6.37pm.

Moonflowers are beginning to open on our terrace. I planted their seeds in May with some feelings of guilt. The guilt doesn't take, though, and they climb and twine and now bloom at the end of summer. The guilt is from Cape Town, where morning glory vines wreak havoc, climbing and scrambling and toppling tree limbs. 

But this is cold weather country. For now.  And the seeds of Ipomea alba drop harmlessly. For now.

For now. It all changes so fast. Or is that age? Or is it age plus, this-is-all-changing-so-fast? 

7.59pm.

The bud is open, and listening. 

 Listening, listening.

Scent beginning to fall into the small space, to call moths, and hold off despair.

For now.

Goldfinches to the rescue

A hot, dry walk yesterday in search of hummingbirds - we did see one - was rescued at the last minute by a small flock of goldfinches feeding on woodland sunflowers (Helianthus divaricatus) in a meadow atop Lookout Hill, in nearby Prospect Park.

The day before, a different and rather disappointing outing (so dry, so many crisp and dead plants) was also revived by goldfinches doing exactly the same on Governor's Island, their beaks busy with the seeds of spent echinacea flowers.

I hereby co-name the recent full moon (the Sturgeon Moon for Native American fishing tribes) as the Goldfinch Moon.

The cat's tale

Nkwe Pirelli, two years and six months after being kidnapped from the streets of Bed Stuy and hustled south across Brooklyn to Windsor Terrace. Or South Slope. Depending on the New York map you ask.

He was really kidnapped from Serena Bass's kitchen. She had coaxed him in off the streets weeks or months before, with meals. He would come for food when she whistled and she'd let him back out when he asked, every evening. She said he slept under a tarp in an empty lot. But then he started sleeping on her bed. I fell in love with him when I visited: First, he bit me, then he jumped on my lap and curled into a ball. Smitten. I had been wanting a cat again for a long, long time, and had been waiting for one to find me. Here he was.

The day we came to fetch him, Serena tried hard (and failed) to suppress her amusement as the Frenchman and I scooted about her kitchen on all fours for over an hour, trying to coax this handsome but very streetwise cat into a carrier. The cute little soft carrier I had bought online wasn't going to cut it. Like trying to pack a ball of electric eels into a very snug purse. She wanted us to wrap him in a towel and sausage him inside. We didn't want to traumatize him. Snicker. The Frenchman disappeared for a while and returned with a giant carrier, large-dog sized, froma neighborhood pet shop. We put treats in the back of it. Serena snorted and went to put on lipstick. She was going out. Stay as long as you like, she said. She left, wearing a magnificent, oversized, voluminous white puffer jacket, snickering audibly and wishing us luck.

In the end, her gentleman-cat Tiger helped us out, taking pity on us, or perhaps recognizing that we were trying to remove this interloper from his kingdom. Tiger strode into the giant carrier and ate the treats, purposefully. Percy - that was Serena's name for him - followed. Smart Tiger exited. I leapt, the Frenchman pounced, we slammed the door shut a little loudly and the poor cat was trapped. He rolled madly like an otter spinning in water, but was stuck. We had him. Half an hour later he was home, and he is now Nkwe Pirelli, King of Prrrrp.

 He likes to sleep under things. 

It is International Cat Day.

Be nice to cats.

Food

Our local greenmarket is just a five minute walk away from where we live. On Sundays and Wednesdays trucks arrive early in the day from farms in New Jersey and New York, filled with vegetables and fruit and flowers ripe right now. The farmers or their vendors unpack and set everything up. These harvests were sown months earlier, tended, gathered, cleaned, packed, made beautiful for New York shoppers who've seen it all. At the end of the market day, back it goes, back they go. Long day, New York traffic. 

I don't know what the profit margin is or how real farmers survive. The produce is not cheap - it can't be. It's much more expensive than what you'd pay in a nearby store for similar (looking) and seasonless produce shipped hundreds or thousands of miles, and it's about double to triple what the equivalent quality would cost in markets in Europe. 

I think a lot about food. How it is grown. How to grow it. Who grows it. Who harvests it. Who eats it. How little so many people know about the food they eat. How it is eaten. Who gets to eat it. How much of it there is, in the world. How obscene it is that it is kept from people by other people, who have the power to prevent death by famine. 

This okra and these aubergines were very pretty.

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Pawpaw Cake with Spicebush Streusel

Recently, I served this Pawpaw Spicebush Cake - coffee-cake style, with spicebush-pecan streusel - after a plant walk at the Queens Country Farm Museum, a small but remarkably rural-looking farm in the heart of Queens. Because I needed to feed about 16 people I double my recipe and baked it in a big rectangular pan. It worked!

The pawpaw purée for the recipe was from my frozen stash, circa September 2024. The pulp freezes beautifully, and I keep it in half-cup portions for later baking or ice

cream.

And in case you are in doubt, we're talking the native American fruit, Asimina triloba, a custard apple relative, not papaya, which is also called pawpaw in countries with Commonwealth ties, past or present.

And pawpaw season is coming. And the hunt will be on. 

This recipe is in the pawapw chapter of Forage, Harvest, Feast (of course). The streusel in the original is for hazelnuts, but I think pecans work very well indeed. 

A nightly netting

 

Our evening suppers are now netted, which is normal for summer. Usually, it's for tiny flying insects (smaller than fruit flies, but what are they?) that are attracted to anything acidic, like salad dressing, or wine, into which they hurl themselves to perish. But these last few evenings we have been joined by a persistent, chunky hornet, who buzzes our dinner relentlessly. I don't really mind it, but the Frenchman feels about hornets the way I feel about spiders. Heebie jeebies. We both know that both are beneficial, yet neither of us can stand being near them. So, net. 

Supper was a tangle of tiny wax beans soused while warm in shoyu with finely ribboned shiso leaves from the terrace, and dropped onto crisp-skinned, curry-powder-dusted roasted chicken thighs. Before adding the steamed beans I deglazed the hot pan with elderflower vinegar and honeysuckle cordial (the methods for these delightful concoctions are in Forage, Harvest, Feast).

It's 99°F as I write, and the African basil continues to persecute me (see previous post). It's been watered twice, today. But the bees are happy. Very, very happy.

Too much basil

I made a gardening mistake, this year. Enthused by the success of the African basil last summer, and the endlessly interesting pollinator show that unfolded in its airspace from dawn to dusk, I doubled up this late spring, and placed two plants in each of the windowboxes lining our terrace.  

After a slow spring start - the plants really don't like cold nights (did you know that basils are native to Africa and to Asia?) - this long-stemmed hybrid is now bustling with bees. That's not the problem. The problem is that it has to be watered at least twice, and sometimes three times, a day. This morning I watered it at 10am. By 2pm the plants were drooping. Granted, it is extremely hot (96°F), but at the very least this basil asks for two waterings a day. Two minutes to fill the watering can; in out, in, out. It feels like a persecution. 

The other basils, growing mostly in cooler spots or in full shade, are much less thirsty.

In other hot-weather news, the lablab beans have taken off and the bronze fennel is six feet tall. If we are lucky the fennel flowers will attract some cicada killers. They did, last year. The lablab beans we eat, and the hummingbirds visit their flowers on their way south, in September. 

Dirty rice: Just add daylilies

Have you ever made dirty rice? It's a delicious mess of rice made exciting with all sorts of bits and pieces. The Southern Creole dish looks a bit different in our house, but I hope I capture its spirit. One of the staple ingredients  in my various versions is dried daylilies. Hemerocallis fulva is still in bloom here in Brooklyn, and the spent flowers are a delicacy (I think), once dried, with an unexpected flavor of carob. Daylilies are dead easy to dry, and last pretty much indefinitely.

My recipe for dirty daylily rice is now up on Gardenista, along with the how-to of drying. Bon appétit!

(Oh: the salad above? Just watermelon pieces with various basils from our terrace, a little salt, and little olive oil, and a drizzle of good balsamic vinegar.)

Summer's flowers

Summer flowers, wild and weedy, aromatic and opportunistic. Knapweed, Queen Anne's lace, white sweet clover and mugwort are feral fillers for this tangle of two bee balms and rudbeckia. 

Monarda punctata to the right, an underrated cut flower and edible herb. Plant more. 

And on the windowsill, some extras from the terrace: liatris and hyssop, and more obliging mugwort. Aside from being a very useful herb, this super-invader lasts exceptionally well in water. Just strip off the lower leaves and immerse it for 30 minutes to revive it after picking. Florists? Mugwort is everywhere, and it is free.

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.