Day lilies for lunch?

Photo: Vincent Mounier, from Strange Brooklyn Shores

I saw my first day lily buds a couple of days ago. The season approaches.

For salads, pickles, and a steamed vegetable, head for your closest stand of Hemerocallis fulva: that's the naturalized, extra-long-stemmed, fulvous day lily (deep, rich orange, in plain English).

I would say more, but then you wouldn't be tempted to read my essay about eating day lilies for Edible Manhattan. 

(And see if you can spot the sentence I did not write...)

Up top

On Sunday we returned from our wide, green weekend. Sometimes you do not know that you are missing something until you are wrapped in it. I'll write about the woods near Tarrytown, tomorrow.

We came from a perfect day in the Hudson Valley to a perfect day in South Brooklyn, and after giving my last Edibles class at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden I joined Vincent on the roof for a G&B. Yes, B. Bitter lemon. T has been shoved aside. As we sat facing the still very much unset 7pm sun, a long straight wall of dark lilac-grey appeared in the south, from east to west. New weather. New season. By the time I was back in the kitchen grilling our four-alarm chicken, the wall was a roof between us and all that perfect blue. Good light, though.

The Icebergs, above, the New Dawn, below. In a month I'll take the same picture and you'll see the difference - I hope. Big tomatoes, dwarfing big pots. Almost unimaginable, now.

I deadhead roses every day, coaxing a second flush from the climbers, whose petals drop daily to the terrace floor. 

Good night, New Dawn.

Soon the terrace shrub roses will bloom. I look forward to Munstead Wood, especially. How will the red roses cope with summer's approaching heat?

We shall see.

Pause

Not too impressive right now. But as of Friday evening, everything has been planted, and now we wait. The heirloom zucchini (Cocozelle di Napoli) grow almost perceptibly. Secondary leaves appeared overnight. I can't wait to see how wide their apparently compact plants finally spread. Progress on the lemon and Spacemaster cucumbers seems arrested for now. Then there are Green Zebra, Brandywine, Silver Fir, San Marco, Yellow Pear and Black Krim tomatoes. I mean, why not? And purple peppers and long purple eggplant. And scarlet runner  beans. That long skinny thing is bok choy gone to seed. I have a Plan for it. And yes, I may have picked up some black cherry tomatoes from GRDN today, with some other heirloom tomatoes as gifts for Gabrielle Langholtz,  my editor at Edible Brooklyn and Manhattan. We're visiting her this weekend in the Hudson Valley, where her husband is the livestock manager at Stone Barns. We will forage for greens, grill lamb burgers and ride on trains. Not in that order.

Have a lovely weekend, wherever you are.

We'll be back.

The Book

So. About the book. I have muttered about it coyly a couple of times but now that the contract with Abrams is signed I think it's fair to explain the process and then to shut up about it until its release date nears, which is Fall 2013. I know! That's forever!

The manuscript - known as the MS in writing circles - is due this fall. And not only the manuscript, but all the images, too, as this will be a hardcover with lots of my own pictures. I am taking thousands of pictures. I already have thousands. Suppressed eek.

So here's how it happened (and if you are thinking about writing a book and have questions, ask me. I knew nothing in the beginning and asked a lot of what seemed like very dumb questions - of writers, authors, editors. People were very patient, and very kind):

The idea for a book based on 66 Square Feet has been percolating for a while. I wanted to write something about New York and food and flowers, and about living well in this small space; a book that was also beautiful to look at. People have many preconceptions about New York City, and I really wanted to share the intimate and domestic and green side of living in the impersonal steel and concrete jungle. We will not be in 66 Square Feet forever, and this will be, I hope, a love letter to living in a small space in an enormous city.

I did not want to write a How To. I think there are plenty of very good How To garden books out there. If anything this will be about living well, wherever you are, by paying attention to the details around you. While I read a lot of novels, some of my most treasured books have glossy, thick pages whose photographs I want to lick. I am hoping to write that kind of book. They are useful as resources,  but they are beautiful as objects in their own right. Our tiny apartment would not be the same without them. As paper books become marginalised by digital readers, I think that books as objects are becoming more important. A thing we can touch and turn and look at for pure pleasure, forever. So I wrote some sample chapters. A highly seasonal approach to living, gardening and cooking in this big bad city.

Fast forward about a year, with much waiting around for another publisher to make an offer, which I eventually turned down (very nice people people but other issues involved). Then the lovely Stephen Orr, author of Tomorrow's Gardens, and the garden director of Martha Stewart Living, introduced me to his agent, Carla Glasser. Carla really got the ball rolling. Early this year I found myself in some meetings with the big boys; except, they were all girls! Big conferenceroomsful of editors and directors. Heady stuff. I received two offers from two very good houses, a position I had hardly imagined being in, and had to choose. At the same time yet another publisher asked me to write a book about container gardening and a fourth was talking seriously about another book idea I had. I was, for a spell, overwhelmed. Then I slapped myself and calmed down. One thing at a time.

Stewart, Tabori and Chang is a division of Abrams Books, and talking with them felt very natural. We seemed to be - pardon me - on the same page about what the book could and should be, and how it should look, and how to get there. Sitting at the same table was a director who, as an editor, had worked on the book I would save if this apartment were to go up in flames: Roger Verge's Entertaining in the French Style. A gorgeous book of menus and drinks and flowers (I would also save Elizabeth David. And the cat). And I also met Dervla Kelly, my editor-to-be.

My challenge now - apart from trying to stay calm, because trust me, I am not - is to pay attention to the blog while I write and photograph for the book; taking care not to repeat myself, so that the book is nice and fresh. I am paying close attention to each month, as each chapter will be a month's exploration of the edible and botanical city (with a little foraging thrown in for seasoning), before returning to the terrace and roof farm, and landing up around the dinner table, with menus and a picnic or two. Central Park or East River? Dead Horse Bay (see the Frenchman's most recent post)? You tell me. Where would you like to go?

So, that's it. You won't hear any more about it until it's Time. But I've kept my lips zipped for so long it is helpful to have exhaled.

Phew.

The first strawberries!

At the Borough Hall Farmers Market this afternoon, sold by Kernan Farms, from New Jersey. The first one I tasted five minutes ago swept me right back to the stretch of road in the forest between Knysna and Plettenberg Bay, where a man with a beard once lived in a real old wooden gypsy caravan and sold the strawberries he grew in a cleared field, flanked by walls of old trees. For years after he disappeared we would still stop and hunt the rapidly rising new growth to discover the sweet red berries. I collected them once in a tiny pillow slip that my mother had sewn for one of my bears, who always traveled with me. A red juice stain crept through the soft cream fabric.

These are real, perfumed strawberries, worth the long, long wait. Our evening roof drink will be strawberries,  red wine and ice, somehow. A delicate, buttery pastry is about to be made. Something simple, with heaps of the fruit in the middle, on a soft pile of sour cream laced with sugar.

It's May.

Pad thai, at last

Experimenting with pad thai, also called pat thai. I miss The Elephant, on East 1st Street. They made wonderful pad thai. But at last, driven in desperation to make it myself, I've landed up with the taste I remember. Not the colour, though - but that's because I did not use tamarind, which is dark brown...

What I had not used enough of before, in this order, was: oil, onion, eggs, sugar, lime juice. Very interesting. But the sour-sweet thing is there. I just need to tinker a little more. I've made it now with shrimp (pictured) and with tofu, also pretty good, if it's marinated first and then seared till sticky on the outside...

The ginger on the chopping board is a red herring. I did not use it.

All my favourite Thai-ish pad places have closed: Phat pong and The Elephant, both in the East Village, and Long tan, in Park Slope.

What to do?

Plants for a roof garden: up and down

  
The spotted trout lettuce seedlings are beginning to look spotted, but they don't look like trout, yet. 

On the left is the latest sowing of spicy mesclun mix (Botanical Interests). The first batch went yellow. This was in the Organic Mechanics Soil, my first year using it. Coincidence, roofbug in soil, too much nitrogen (chicken manure) in soil mix? I don't know. But it's happened with a few seedlings, as well as my pansies, and all in that soil mix. The seedlings are now in a Fafard/Whitney Farms blend.

See my squash! I waited for warmer temperatures before planting them on the roof, and every single one came up, so I have to thin them to two plants. Guilt.

Pat Austin, now on the roof, is festooned with short-lived blooms.

The pots on the edge of the terrace are beginning to fluff out slowly. That is the new Abraham Darby, behind the catnip (Walker's Low). I bought two new sage plants, purple and variegated. And I need to pot up my basil seedlings. Oh! I ate my first strawberry yesterday, and the first Alpine strawberry (below - oops: picked a baby, too,  by accident) the day before...

Back down, round about the time I start to make dinner, a drink. This is crème de cassis with sparkling water, ice. Perfect for May.

And it reminds me that I must buy black currants from Wilklow Orchards at the farmers market this year to make jam. It is the best kind of jam, and I didn't make any, last year. Mistake. Reading Nigel Slater's Ripe (titled Tender II in the UK - why two titles?) made me long for black currants.

But that will be June...