Weird Garden Vegetables

Stalling just a bit more before doing some scarier kinds of writing (of the dissertation variety) and wanting to know if this sudden springtime weather was going to hold up, I flipped through the S.F. Chronicle lying on my dining room table--I'm convinced I'm the last remaining subscriber to the paper version of the paper who is under 50 years old--and came across this article on garden trends for 2010. Signs point to: more vegetables. Ooh la la!

The article profiles mainly veggies that grow well in the Bay Area's fickle and fog-bound climate. Some highlights include the exciting-sounding Guatemalan Blue banana squash, Gigante 3 San Marzano canning tomatoes (pictured above), the Cincinatti Market heirloom radish, which looks like a red carrot, the Apollo broccoli, called broccoli but more like a broccolini, and the Amsterdam seasoning celery, though its description is a little confusing: "Use this kitchen herb when you want the flavor of celery without the actual vegetable." I'm not sure how you can get flavor from an actual vegetable (as opposed to its seasoning salt equivalent) without the, well, actual vegetable. Curious. Maybe the writer meant you can use the parsley-like leaves without the stalk? But you can do that with regular celery too. Maybe this celery has a more potent flavor? Anyways, I seem to be a little cranky today (see end of previous post), so I'll let it lie and go drink some chamomile tea.