weird vegetables

Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Roots. Roots. Roots.

2012-01-27T14:59:00.001-02:00

Ahoy!! Here I am, just washed ashore in Rio de Janeiro, where I crawled and then climbed up into the green profusion of its rainforest hills to settle into my hermit hole for awhile. I was off for a couple months of vagabondage and checking in with the proper dissertation authorities and libraries back in California. I had little down time to post, though I've taken lots of pictures of vegetable friends I've met along the way (the WV pantry mountain continues to grow ever higher with yet-to-be consumed future posts). So after traveling over routes --> routes --> routes --> routes of hemispheric and ocean criss-crossings, I'm hoping to sprout some fast and glorious roots --> roots --> roots in my recently reinstated tropical environment in as little time as it took this sweet little potato to spread its slender fuschia root-arms in a great big hula welcome to the world. More roots = more vegetables = more WV posts!

p.s. "Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes." is a phrase that runs through my head every now and then. It's from the English translation of Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade's amazing and confounding "Cannibalist Manifesto," (Manifesto Antropófago), which you can read about here. And here is a pdf of Leslie Bary's translation, which is much better than other versions with cringe-worthy errors that are floating around the web and that shall remain uncited here.

Solid Borscht (or Beet & Carrot Latkes)

2011-12-24T06:32:00.002-02:00

Hello from Jerusalem! I've gone to the Holy Land for the holidays to be with some good friends who live here... and am learning a great deal from the intensity of life within a deeply interwoven knot of three major religions and their innumerable sects. A dizzying experience: mingling in with Greek Orthodox, Coptic Christian, Franciscan, and Ethiopian priests, pilgrims singing and kissing relics, and tourists looking bewildered at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, feeling the divine spirit with Jewish worshipers at the Western Wall and feeling out-of-step for not backing away from it, drinking sweet mint tea offered by Muslim vendors in the narrow, curving passageways of the old city and studying the façades of mosques I cannot enter. The vegetable backlog has grown past the top of my head, but here is a special morsel to tide you over through the holidays.

These are beet & carrot latkes, which are perhaps not so very strange, but I had only ever had the Hanukkah treat in its more traditional potato form. And thus, these make it into the pantheon of Weird Vegetables by virtue of their unorthodox chutzpah and extra-ordinary deliciousness. Made with love by my friend Zoe's mom Paula and eaten with generous dollops of applesauce and plain yogurt, these latkes caused one happy eater to exclaim, "Wow, together with the yogurt, it's like solid borscht!" Which, in our vegetable-loving context, is akin to saying "It's like solid gold!", but better because you cannot eat solid gold. The recipe is from The Joy of Cooking.

May you eat well and light some candles of love and merriment over these next few days.

Volunteer Corn

2011-11-29T20:17:00.001-02:00

Our weird vegetable field has lain fallow for a spell as your virtual farmer-forager takes a pause from her Brazilian sojourn to touch down in Occupied U.S. territory and witness what's been sprouting in the late North American autumn. Despite this writer's preoccupation with the bruised hands and ribs of her colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley and the violent peppering of peaceful bodies across this state and country, as well as her fulfillment of non-vegetable-related tasks with non-negotiable deadlines, others have been pitching in to help keep up production. And so, as in the natural world, what seems to be abandoned by human activity, is in fact not forgotten by all. Seeds germinate in the minds of others, photos are snapped and forwarded on behalf of the site, guest posts are written, and long-dormant co-bloggers begin to turn over their fertile plots in preparation for winter crops. Pictured above is the first of a few offerings made by kindred vegetable spirits: volunteer corn.

Yes, what you see is a corn plant that has sprouted in the sewage-soiled cracks of a city gutter. The evidence was forwarded by Bay Area curator-writer Christian Frock (creator of projects both invisible and visible), who spotted it in San Leandro, which she describes as "the wee sleepy suburban village next to Oakland." Of this newly born green guerrilla, Christian writes:

I saw this ambitious little corn growing in the gutter while out for a walk with my kids around the block. We have actually had some volunteer corn spring up in our very inhospitable backyard recently too. It is amazing on two fronts--one, I have no idea where it came from because there are no farms that I know of nearby and two, corn will apparently grow under the most incomprehensible conditions. The corn we saw in the gutter is growing out of a pretty small crack in an otherwise cement-bound area. That photograph makes me wonder at the absolute tenacity of living things, whether or not the world is conducive to their existence.

I like to imagine the ways the corn might have gotten there: a child spits out a mealy mouthful just to see the yellow spray splatter against the sidewalk. An ear tumbles out of someone's full bag of farmers' market produce or bounces off the top of a truck's abundant corn bed. A pigeon got too greedy somewhere and landed here to hurl politely into the gutter. The wind got curious about its powers and decided to fling some corn bits along the road.

One thing leads to another and the next thing you know, the city sidewalk finds itself becoming-field without active human intervention. Which leads to another question: what's the difference between a volunteer and a weed? Who determines which is which? A volunteer is "a plant that grows on its own, rather than being deliberately planted by a farmer or gardener," says Wikipedia , the key defining factor being that this plant is desirable and has decided to labor for its own life, while appearing as though a natural gift to the grateful farmer or gardener: "Unlike weeds, which are unwanted plants, a volunteer may be encouraged once it appears, being watered, fertilized, or otherwise cared for." This blog gives an entertaining account of volunteer vegetables as her cream of the crop Garden Army.

A weed, too, is talented at surviving on its own, yet to the displeasure or detriment of the human who plots and pines for its removal. It is "a plant that is not valued where it is growing and is usually of vigorous growth; especially : one that tends to overgrow or choke out more desirable plants," according to Merriam-Webster.

At the heart of this volunteer/weed divide is a value judgment applied to occupying space. Which plant deserves to thrive in a determinate patch of ground and which must be pulled up by its roots and disposed of to make way for others? But how are we to judge how to distribute (or redistribute) the soil's riches properly? Is this corn a weed if it disturbs the sidewalk and no human wants to eat it? Is it a volunteer only if it is deemed a vegetable by means of its edibility? Does its conversational value, the pleasure of surprise it gives by springing up unexpectedly from a gutter, make it a volunteer and not a weed?

Perhaps it is a matter of reinventing our definition of a weed. Books have been written in praise of weeds, including Joseph A. Cocannouer's 1950 Weeds: Guardians of the Soil, which broadens the definition of a weed from something unwanted to, "any plant growing out of place," though he immediately complicates the idea of any plant being "out of place" by asking us to take the perspective of the farmer trying to protect his beet crop from a certain weed and then that of the soil that is simultaneously being fertilized and strengthened by this same "weed." He writes: "Nature may at times compel us to discover the value of her wild plants; her weeds," which emphasizes how one inherent value of a weed is its wildness, its spontaneity.

Or perhaps weeds are vagabonds, invasive species that travel and set up camp in open areas or pioneer new systems of life in spaces cleared then abandoned by humans, as French "planetary gardener" Gilles Clément writes in his book Éloge des vagabondes (In Praise of Vagabonds), which devotes whole chapters to vegetable weeds like fennel and Tibetan rhubarb. Readers of French can find more of his writings here.

Clément's defense of invasive species asks us to suspend our opinions about what species "belong" where, challenging the assumed superior value of the local, the indigenous, and the diverse in order to open the doors to the possibilities tracked in by plants that go wandering, even those that threaten to take over an area of their own. Though Clément's writings have been influenced by Marxist philosophies, here his arguments are radical without falling neatly on any defined points along the left-right political spectrum. Here, I leave you with a tiny sampling from poet-ecocritic Jonathan Skinner's translation from In Praise of Vagabonds that appeared in an environmentally-themed issue of the journal Qui Parle that I edited last year. (Issues can be hard to track down and difficult to download if you don't have university library access, but if you email weirdvegetables AT gmail.com I can send you a pdf version of the excerpt.)

A troubledworld decries the invasion of life-forms from elsewhere. Strangers, plants,animals, how dare you reach our shores? Articles on the topic abound. We holdconferences, organize world summits on the urgency of the struggle against allthat is not indigenous, local, and national. We advise the user to eradicate byany means necessary species not featured on the authorized lists. We pass laws,set up quarantines, insure. Once the system is in place, it damages anextravagant process: that of evolution.

You have no right, you vagabonds, to occupy the land of another. Go away, donot crowd our floral classifications with your abusive and deadly presence. Youchase away our species, sometimes you kill them. You are pollution. In the nameof national identity we fight you, we protect our citizens, our landscape, ourenvironment. In the name of diversity we wage war on you because we wantpeace. 

Peace: a human delusion, withoutbiological foundation. Whenever it is at hand, elements erupt. The rest of thetime life goes on in its own way. 

That’s how the process goes, andeveryone knows it’s accelerating.  

Fantastic.

If anyone else has favorite publications or sites that think about weeds or volunteer vegetables in interesting ways, post them in the comments section.

Banana Flower Power

2011-10-21T02:09:00.004-02:00

One month ago, when I was in the Brazilian mountain town of Ouro Preto, I came across the last dregs of the Thursday farmers' market, a somewhat small but very high quality gathering for its being so close to the countryside. In one of the almost-bare shallow wooden boxes, I saw the scattered forms of what I recognized to be banana flowers, the heartsblood cone that dangles from the end of a thick umbilical cord extending down from the prized banana bunch that hangs off the brilliant green plant (there's a lot of dangling and hanging involved in banana plants, a lot to fit into one sentence, much less droop off of one plant). If you live in a tropical place, you see these all the time, but I'd never thought about eating them (though apparently they're used in Vietnamese cuisine—shows how much I know about my own mother culture. Banana flower salads are also very much associated with Thai and Indian cuisine).

In English we know these as banana flowers, or the more lyrical banana blossoms (adds a fragrant quality to a menu), but sometimes things get darker and they are known as banana hearts. In Portuguese, they also like to say "flor" and "coração" de bananeira but also sometimes use the gross-cute "umbigo," which means "bellybutton," or "navel" if you prefer a more elegant feel.

I asked the farmer and the cleaning crew what I was supposed to do with them, and their eyes got all dreamy as they listed all their favorite banana flower dishes, mostly variations on a sautee with ground meat. Here were the basic preparation instructions they offered:

- peel off the outer layers until you get to the creamy cone in the middle
- wash, slice in half, then in little slivers
- then drop in a pot of water and bring to a boil three times
- yes three times, dumping the water out each time and starting anew
(this is to take away the mature flower's strong bitter flavor)
- strain and then sautee with some ground meat, maybe some onions

It seemed a little labor intensive to me for just a couple flower hearts, but they all threw their hands up in the air and exclaimed, "Vale a pena! Você vai gostar!" ("It's worth it! You're gonna like it!")

So I bought a couple blossoms and tried it at home. First, I peeled back the layers, one scab-colored petal at a time. It felt a little gruesome, like mutilating some living thing, the flower is so heavy and almost fleshy in its thickness. Also, while we're peeling back layers, I should mention that the "flower" is actually an inflorescence,, which starts out as the stem, known technically as the peduncle (how I love that awkward word), and then starts to mutate as clusters of flowers grow off of it.

I am really not the person to be explaining what I've only just read and half-absorbed from wikipedia and I think my head is going to explode from this sentence on the nature of the inflorescence's mutation or "modification," as the entry calls it:

The modifications can involve the length and the nature of the internodes and the phyllotaxis, as well as variations in the proportions, compressions, swellings, adnations, connations and reduction of main and secondary axes.

That is to say: I've shone a strobe light on the situation and I leave you to your own biological modifications...

It was morbidly fascinating and mildly disturbing to peel away the layers and to examine the delicate proto-bananas (flowers?) that looked like tiny monkey fingers, then to peel each one of these fragile "fingers" off of the cone. I guess I don't feel this way when peeling artichoke, which is the most similar thing I can think of, because its colors and forms aren't so uncannily animal-like as the banana flower's.

After awhile, the purple petals fell away to reveal a creamier center that looked almost painted, with its dark-stained tip. Slicing the inflorescence open into two spearheads revealed even more traces of ghostly bananas that would never be. I wasn't quite sure what the proper slicing technique was and have never been good at making precise cuts, so I kind of just hacked the whole thing into diagonal slivers, some thicker than others, some pointy and others more of a blunt, rectangular shape.

Then during the labor intensive boiling session, I prepared some sides. After boiling the fairy-tale number of times (why do important events in fairy tales always happen in threes?), I placed the slivers into a plastic flower bowl (visual pun intended) to await their next adventure.

I had the idea to sautee the banana flower with garlic, cilantro, and a little salt, which turned out to be a stroke of tasty-time genius.

Opting out of the meat enthusiasm from the farmers' market, I served (to myself) the cilantro-sauteed banana slivers with sliced cucumber, okra stewed with tomatoes, and one of my favorite South American roots, batata baroa, aka mandioquinha, or the less graceful sounding "Peruvian parsnip," a tuber with a delicately sweet yet distinctively potato-y taste and a cheery, translucent egg-yolk color.

And what did the banana flower taste like?

Not at all like a flower or any other vegetable I've had, but more like a mushroom, in its meatiness and a certain umami quality (that elusive fifth flavor), though with a lighter texture and flavor than a mushroom. It was difficult to detect a banana aroma, though I imagine this is stronger when eating more tender, uncooked flowers that are often used in Southeast Asian and South Asian banana blossom salads. Yes, I liked it, and yes, it was worth the effort, though perhaps not a daily endeavor.

A while back I wrote a post on edible flowers in which I quoted Adorno and Horkheimer on the way that eating flowers is something of a gesture toward the aesthetics of food detached from the practical injunctions of "rationally planned eating." The banana flower is of a different edible order, it seems. Seeming more aesthetic to prepare and for the idea of a flower than how it looks on the plate, the banana flower is decidedly undelicate and unflowerlike, of a hearty rather than delicate nature. And, like banana the fruit, it contains plenty of potassium and other nutrients sought out by rational eaters that you can read about here.

Neverthless, some irrationality abounds in this episode. When I told the guys at the evangelical luncheonette across the street that I had gotten banana flowers at the market, they laughed at my silly gringa ways and said, "Around here, no one buys banana flowers. They grow everywhere!" Point taken.

Read more about banana flowers at what I've come to think of as my Brazilian sister site, Flavors of Brazil.

The Indomitable Ninja Broccoli (Brócolis Ninja)

2011-10-06T00:49:00.001-03:00

SÃO PAULO.
Victory, at last. For months now, ever since a hot tip came in on the wire from Paulistano WV agent Ervilho Frita ("Pea Fry," though I've happily butchered the Portuguese rules of masculino/feminina and reinvented "ervilha" as a macho pea-o), I've been stalking the (in)famous Ninja Broccoli, part of the stealth gang of green mercenaries known in these parts as Brócolis Ninja.

It may look like a normal head of broccoli, but this is no ordinary inflorescent, no. Its floret might look rotund and jolly like its average American counterpart but the ninja broccoli's cat-like swiftness and diabolical cunning are dead serious.

The ninja broccoli is a variant that cropped up mysteriously amidst fields of the previously more common (in Brazil) sprouting broccoli, or brócolis ramoso, which has more numerous branchings and thinner stalks. Another complication is that this chubby ninja known as "normal" broccoli in the U.S. is called "calabrese" in Britain (from Calabria in Italy), a name whose fancy foreign connotation U.S. farmers apply to the other, thinner, more exotic, usually heirloom, and sometimes royally purple-tinged sprouting type. An insane amount of broccoli lore can be had here.

As might be expected, the origins of the "ninja" identity of this broccoli in Brazil are somewhat obscure. In Rio, no one at the farmers' markets had even heard of "brócolis ninja." "Must be from São Paulo," many of the vendors mused about the Japanese-sounding name. São Paulo state has the largest population of Japanese descent in Brazil, a country that has has the largest population of Japanese descent outside of Japan. Most Japanese immigrants originally came as farmers, beginning at the end of the nineteenth century. If you are surprised by this, read more here.

Sprouting broccoli is considered tastier but the "one-headed broccoli," or ninja broccoli (brócoli de cabeça única) is easier to harvest with one swoop of the blade, more weather resistant, and holds up well in the freezer section, so its popularity in the veggie marketplace has risen.

To return to our origin tale... this site (in Portuguese) claims that ninja broccoli began to sprout as a genetic accident, a hybrid among fields of "normal," or sprouting broccoli (recall that the U.S. "normal" broccoli is this genetic aberration). At first, farmers considered it an undesirable variant but could not get rid of this broccoli that kept appearing and spreading mysteriously. A Japanese scientist, who preferred to remain anonymous, compared these cunning broccoli to ninjas, and the name stuck, immediately snatched up by marketing professionals as a stroke of genius: Ninja broccoli, your kid's favorite vegetable. Sounds suspicious? Well, the site is called "Crazy Train" (Trem Doido), so factor that into whether you believe it or not. Maybe we are to believe this story to the extent that we believe that this guy is a deadly Broccoli Ninja:

left on my virtual doorstep by
Brazilian vegetable queen V. Berinjela

So far, I haven't been able to find any other explanation of why it's called "ninja broccoli," and for now we might come to the simple conclusion that it just sounds cool, ninjas being arguably one of the coolest figures to come out of Japanese history and lore (unless you're partial to samurais. It's kind of like that old Goddard or Truffaut debate). Anyone with more information, please comment. I will update if I find anything at the library (the Internet has exhausted me for the time being).

image source

Sophisticated Corn

2011-09-30T13:47:00.001-03:00

São Paulo is one sophisticated town. People don't live their lives in flip-flops, the best coffee isn't just for export, the graffiti is better than gallery art, and the homeless people have more style than anyone with money, assembling outfits with that impossible-to-imitate creative intuition for pitch-perfect clashing normally achieved only by the most talented Japanese hipsters and Marc Jacobs.

One of my favorite mid-afternoon snacks in Rio de Janeiro was something from the corn man: a pamonha, curau (a kind of corn pudding made with sugar and condensed milk), or boiled corn-on-the-cob served in its pale green husk. On one of my first days here in São Paulo, while wandering alone down Avenida Paulista, one of the city's main arteries of finance, commerce, and culture, I spotted a happily familiar sight: corn man!

Only something was different. I couldn't put my finger on it at first, but something about his piles of candied coconut chunks and sweet roasted peanuts seemed a little too tidy. I ordered: "One corn, please." Using a long, two-tined barbecue fork, corn man fished out a bright yellow corn cob from the vat of boiling salted water, but instead of placing it into its snug corn husk jacket, he set it over a small plastic bowl and started carving it with an elegant efficiency I had never witnessed in Rio. I stared and pulled out my camera. He looked annoyed at my bumpkin tourist antics, like the best of the New York hot dog vendors (note the NY baseball cap):

I remarked that while living in Rio I had never seen anything like what he was doing, shaving off the corn kernels into such a civilized spoonable snack, and he seemed somewhat pleased by the contrast (São Paulo and Rio being rivals in the same sort of way that San Francisco and Los Angeles thrive on their differences from each other, though the particular stereotypes between each pair differ). I paid my R$3 and continued on down the avenue, spooning steaming fresh corn kernels into my mouth like a contented baby, free from anxieties of hot water spilling down the husk onto my forearms or corn getting stuck between my teeth for the rest of the afternoon. While there's something satisfying about tearing off a row of kernels with the toothy force of your own hunger, the corn carving is a clever idea for a pre-meeting (or pre-museum, in my case) snack.

see how neat his stacks are?

São Paulo: Garden of Kosher Delights

2011-09-29T14:08:00.002-03:00

Shana tova, vegetable lovers! Happy Rosh Hoshanah. We are on the second day of the new year. How does a non-practicing Protestant-vestigial Catholic, Vietnamese-Pennsylvania Dutch-English American living in Brazil know what's happening on the Jewish calendar? In addition to friends' Facebook posts with muppets singing catchy high holiday tunes in Hebrew, I happen to be spending the month living on the edge of a neighborhood of São Paulo marked by some real deal orthodox kosher livin' (or Kosher Livenn):

I walk by this plaque, "livenn Kosher Today," on my way to the private-seeming but open-to-the-public Senac library in Higienópolis, a relatively tranquil, tree-lined region to the northwest of the city center, highly recommended by yeahthatskosher.com (note: "Senac library" sounds pleasantly like "snack library" but is the library of one of many nationwide centers of professional training—fashion, computer magic, graphic design, etc.—funded by a 1% tax on the goods, services, and tourism sector. It remains something of a mystery to me, but I appreciate how quiet and underused its library is compared to many of the sadly overburdened and underfunded public libraries in San Francisco, though this varies by wealth and accessibility of neighborhood.)

traffic & trees

graffiti outside my building

sidewalk in Higienópolis

family time

At first I thought Livenn Kosher Today was a lifestyle magazine, but one day the sun pierced through the building's tinted windows so as to reveal food displays: a kosher butcher!

dialogue between São Paulo graffiti & Livenn Kosher Today

Too shy to whip out my camera and take photos of the mysterious packaged vegetable products labeled in Hebrew on the wall facing the rows of shrink-wrapped, chilled kosher cuts, I waited until I got to Kosher Delight to investigate further. (Portuguese pronunciation of "delight": dee-LIE-chee), which proclaims itself one of the foremost suppliers of kosher foods (lots of baked goods, yum) in Brazil and prides itself on "helping the planet to live longer."

I picked up many, many delights that I had very much been missing, including fresh hummus (it's hard to find good hummus around these parts), olive spread, and a cute-as-a-button raisin challah swirl (the size of an overgrown cinnamon bun). The "shana tova" pastry (top photo, with my housemates' painfully adorable Lhasa apso, Marley) is a Jewish take on a Brazilian classic: pão de mel, or honey bread covered in chocolate. Our woman in Rio, vegname Celery Kabbage, observes that this new year's message on a sweet pastry operates as a bit of "poetisserie." She writes:

I  really like the concrete poetisserie of writing "shana tova" on a  little cake. The full greeting is "l'shana tova u'metuka"--to a good  and sweet year. The dessert itself conveys the second half of the  phrase! Kosher Delight is totally avant-garde.

olive spread from Kosher Delight

My most exciting Weird Vegetables find was the Bissli Falafel flavour Wheat Party Snack. Who says fun can only be had with meat or sugar? There's a whole wheat party happening in that bag of falafel flavor.

These wheat sticks taste somewhat like a condensed, dehydrated version of Funyuns. The overall flavor was marked by an onion note that stood out above the wheaty grit, though I don't recall actual falafels being so overpowered by onions. Still, the Funyun connection makes sense with the lemon sunshine packaging and the suggestion of loads of fun and laughs in every package, that onions and wheat can be fun and funny (I prefer to read "party snack" as meaning "party in a snack" rather than merely something you lay out in a bowl for your human party).

Here is the party-for-one platter that I laid out after my festival of delights at the kosher bakery:

On a final note, all this Kosher Livenn got me thinking about the kosher status of vegetables. Judaism 101 informed me that all fruits and vegetables, with the exception of grape products due to the danger of their falling into the hands of idolators, are kosher, no rabbi necessary (in general rabbis are involved in verifying kosher food production practices more as a result of the complications of our industrialized system rather than for their blessing skills). A further explanation and important caveat:

All fruits and vegetables are kosher (but see the note regarding  Grape Products below). However, bugs and worms that may be  found in some fruits and vegetables are not kosher. Fruits and vegetables that  are prone to this sort of thing should be inspected to ensure that they contain  no bugs. Leafy vegetables like lettuce and herbs and flowery vegetables like  broccoli and cauliflower are particularly prone to bugs and should be inspected  carefully. Strawberries and raspberries can also be problematic. The  Star-K kosher  certification organization has a very nice overview of the fruits and  vegetables prone to this and the procedure for addressing it in each type.  

I wholeheartedly recommend checking out the very involved, very illuminating Star-K vegetable insect-checking guidelines, which include detailed guidelines for leafy vegetables, floreted vegetables, and a really intense (and kind of bizarrely gorgeous) photo gallery of insects-on-vegetables. What's so treif about insects? According to the Torah, "every swarming thing that swarms upon the earth is a detestable thing; it shall not be eaten." Many many learnings to absorb today. But the main moral of today's lesson is this: that vegetables are a kosher delight! (as we suspected all along...) You may eat them with a feeling of both goodness and pleasure.

Neurogastronomical Isis and the "Mouthfeel" of Cassava

2011-09-27T23:02:00.000-03:00

"Isis," Romera's signature vegetable dish (photo: New York magazine)

A few weeks ago a very talented and keenly observant poet friend visited me in Brazil and left behind his copy of New York magazine so I could catch up on a little stateside culture. Ever since some invisible eminence decided to start sending New York to my apartment in San Francisco free of charge last year, I'd become familiar with the weekly and now appreciate it as an easily digestible finger on the pulse of what's new in urban culture (though perhaps a finger is not that easy to digest; please excuse my indulgently grotesque figures). The most startling item in the magazine's fall food section was a short piece on neurologist-turned-chef Dr. Miguel Sánchez Romera, an Argentine who recently decided to close his Michelin-bespangled restaurant L'Esguard, located outside of Barcelona, thus ditching the avant-garde Spanish molecular gastronomy set for the grittier pastures of New York City, where he has opened a new fancypants restaurant, Romera.

Drawing on his expertise in neuroscience and haute cuisine, as well as his background in fine art, Romero has invented the term and practice of "neurogastronomy," a culinary blend of philosophy, art, and science that aims to transport the eater to sensory and affective heights of Proustian intensity. The restaurant's site explains it thus:

Neurogastronomy embodies a holistic approach to food by means of a thoughtful study of the organoleptic properties of each ingredient. The result is a natural cuisine driven by the importance of the neurosensory perceptions, the taste-memory and the emotions of food. 

I hope I've saved some of you a few clicks by explaining that "organoleptic" means "acting on or involving the use of the sense organs." With his Renaissance-man immersion in multiple, distinct fields and his confident elucidations of the eclectic and ambiguous science of gastronomy, Romera strikes me as a 21st-century Brillat-Savarin, the French lawyer, politician, and aristocrat gourmand whose obsessive interest in food matters led him to write The Physiology of Taste (1825), a collection of essays on the art of choosing, cooking, and eating good food, including meditations on the definition of gastronomy, the role of the senses, the concept of “taste,” and gastronomically crucial matters such as the "Erratic Virtue of Truffles." The now-ubiquitous truism, “You are what you eat,” originates in Brillat-Savarin’s line, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” Romera appears to have written two books, though his written work has yet to achieve the influence of a Brillat-Savarin, Alice Waters, or Harold McGee: La Cocina de los Sentidos (The Kitchen of the Senses, not yet translated into English), and La Neurogastronomia, which seems to be a special order from a Danish pharmaceutical company for its favorite neuroscientist customers, also in Spanish.

Without knowing more about Romera's food, and never having experienced it, I'm not sure what to make of his claim to activate "the taste-memory and the emotions of food," since our taste-memory and emotional associations are so particular to individual cultures and to each individual person. Being presented with a tiny carrot nestled on greens laid upon a tightly regulated field of vegetable squares may trigger aesthetically excited endorphins in some systems or panicked memories of childhood in a too-strict, too-clean household in others.

Regardless of claims to memory and emotion, however, the dishes at least look exquisite. Pictured above is one of Romera's signature creations, a vegetable tour-de-force entitled "Isis," after the Egyptian goddess of fertility, nature, and magic (also sister-wife to Osiris, lord of the underworld, and namesake of my mysterious black Wu Tang cat). This article further describes the earthy, edible palette:

The dish is comprised of 48 tiny dried  squares of vegetables from  beets to potato and spinach, served with even tinier  micro-veggies -  leeks, onions, cabbage, carrots.

The vegetables all get  steam-cooked and stewed together,  then cooked in a homemade vegetable broth, a  simple yet at the same  time complex preparation.

In reading about Romera, I noticed a curious detail that I've never before seen or heard of in a chef's cuisine, a tiny daub of three bright colors—green, yellow, and red—that seem to act as his artist's signature. It appears in the Isis platter as three mini vegetable bits placed at the top right edge of the plate "frame" (some perverse part of me enjoys referring to it as the "platter," like it's merely the rich cousin to the $12.99 seafood platter).

I wasn't sure what to make of that seeming non sequitur until I saw that the "E" in the R O M E R A logo is made of three horizontal lines in precisely the same shades of green, yellow, red. After this, I began to notice the tri-color signature on every dish photographed.

Chef as egomaniac is nothing new, but I'm not sure I've ever heard of such an overtly Picasso move in the culinary world. Maybe one of WV's food-obsessed readers has?

pile o' cassava (photo source)

The second part of the article that made my eyes go wide was the description of one of the esteemed doctor's culinary inventions, a natural additive known as Micri, "an odorless, tasteless gel derived from cassava, which when used in cooking can replace fats and extend flavor without sacrificing mouthfeel." Hmm. I had to read that line a few times. How does one extend flavor without sacrificing mouthfeel? What exactly is "mouthfeel"? Texture? With taste? The emotional geography of our oral cavities? What are the additives that extend flavor but that crudely block out what must be something quite pleasant that we would prefer not to sacrifice in our enhanced food: mouthfeel? Was Mouthfeel part of the secret arsenal of the Vietcong, who won the war through fierce determination and a diet of cassava that kept them going in underground tunnels outside of Saigon for so long? Cassava, also known as manioc and very popular in Brazil as well, does have a certain gummy je ne sais quoi that distinguishes its root texture from plain old mealy potatoes. Could this slippery starchiness be the source of its superlative mouthfeel properties?

Despite the scientific- and not-very-holistic-sounding Micri, and its successor Cassavia, Romera differentiates his process from the Frankensteinian tinkerings of molecular gastronomy, saying "I don't have any technology. . . . A kitchen is made to work with one's hands. All of technological cuisine sacrifices something, which is the taste. And to solve this problem, you have to add chemical additivies." I couldn't track down in-depth Internet information on either of the doctor's own natural (hm, "natural"? not sure if that word alone still retains any meaning in our fallen age of food production) additives, but he assures the readers of New York that his Hippocratic oath prevents him from making anything that's "against nutrition." The site Food from Spain describes Cassavia as "a fat-free paste made from yucca root and, like magic, it can transmit any flavor and take on any texture." It is a merging of magic and science on the site of a chameleon root powerful enough to win wars and nourish populations; in short, a very weird vegetable tale.

Tree of Life

2011-09-21T13:50:00.000-03:00

Opa! It's been like a million years since I last posted and everyone I once knew has probably moved on to greener online pastures. But phooooooo! That's the sound of me blowing the dust off this space so we can pick up from where we left off. I am still in Brazil, had to take an unintended hiatus from Weird Vegetables because I was up in the highlands of Minas Gerais (the General Mines, very mystical, very mineral, northwest of Rio de Janeiro) doing my Sir Richard Burton thing, living about a half-hour walk from the Internet cafe where the keyboards were sticky and the bandwidth was excruciatingly narrow.

Here are some views of my near-daily sojourn into the old colonial center of Ouro Preto (Black Gold, yargh!), a town that boomed during the 18th-century gold rush, from which sprang a disproportionate number of impressive baroque churches filled with golden altars and black saints, all surrounded by a chain of dark green mountains forming the Serra do Espinhaço.

mineral spirits

ouro preto

igreja são francisco (the church of my hometown's namesake)

ouro preto city center, a good place for a university student protest

Aside from my jaunts into town, where I found some small but very satisfying farmers' markets (more on that to come), I sat reading and writing in front of my little red window with its little green banana palm view while drinking miner's coffee from a little red mug.

But you came for vegetables, and here I am giving you mineral nuggets from my recent life. But it all comes around because on my travels, I met the sweetest Mineiro couple, a pair of retired university professors, one a geologist and the other a chemical engineer, Dimas and Claudia. Claudia's work centers on the Moringa oleifera, a tree of most magical properties, which include purifying water into a potable state, healing and disinfecting wounds, and restoring the vital vitamins to malnourished souls. After inviting me to lunch one day (Mineiros are famous for their hospitality and home cooking), they showed me around their home, and let me take a sprig from the Moringa oleifera sapling they were cultivating in the backyard. I crushed its delicate, benevolent fringe of leaves into my notebook for safekeeping (top photo). In another room, they had laid out fronds of leaves and the tree's small yellow-white flowers to dry in order to crush into a powder to sprinkle on food.

The leaves have a distinctly bitter taste but not so strong as to be unbearable and gave me the sensation of chewing on tiny, fresh tea leaves. Here is a site that calls it "The Miracle Tree" and enumerates the many benefits of its seed pods, leaves, flowers, bark, and roots. The tree originates in tropical Africa and India and is known commonly in English as the horseradish tree, clarifier tree, and drumstick tree. The site also reports its East African alias as "mother's best friend." In Brazil, it is also known as the horseradish tree, good nut or "do-gooder" nut (noz-de-bem), and "corner okra" (chiabo-de-quina) for its long, okra-looking seed pods (also the origin of the "drumstick" nickname). It seems that every single part of this tree has some amazing restorative properties, as our good friend Wikipedia affirms.

sweet botanical assemblage from this site.

Engaging in corroborative library research, I came across some very nutritious tree books by Harri Lorenzi, who seems to be the reigning king of popular plant literature here in Brazil. He tells us that in India the seeds are ground into a paste to treat wounds or are toasted and enjoyed as a nutritious snack. In the northeast of Brazil, they cook the leaves with beans or eat them in a salad with tangy vinagreira, or purple hibiscus leaves. The tree has natural antibacterial components, and it is this (as far as I understand it!) that makes the seeds absorb impurities in water and thus drinkable for our delicately calibrated human systems. The leaves, roots, and seeds also have anti-inflammatory abilities, which make them good for treating wounds. As if that weren't enough, the leaves are also said to be helpful for diabetics to decrease their blood glucose levels, while the seed pods contain all the essential amino acids (super food alert), plus high levels of beta-carotene, Vitamin C, iron, and potassium.

In short, this tree is a crazy miracle. I am glad to have befriended it and to pass it on to you all. Though North American climates are not ideal for the Moringa, your local or online health store may offer the oil essence of this tree of life.

Now that I am in São Paulo, land of cultural over-stimulation and limitless wi-fi, the posts will return to their regular once-a-week (or more!) frequency.

Vegetarian “Feijoada” What?!

2011-08-06T02:17:00.000-03:00

So there’s this girl who goes by the vegname of Kale Daikon and tells everyone she’s in Brazil investigating South American weird vegetables (and the intersection of Brazilian and North American poetry), but it’s all on the Internet, so for all anyone knows, she could be in Pittsburg making up stories based on a 2005 edition of the Lonely Planet Brazil found in the free box of a used bookstore and posting photos ripped from random websites. But really, I assure you, It’s All True and being broadcast from Rio de Janeiro.

She sits in a room on a Friday night taping three months of receipts into a graph-paper notebook and taking photos of the carefully arranged and labeled receipts so that the U.S. government will reimburse her for every centavo spent on books, photocopies, and subway transportation. Feeling spleenetique and saturated in the thumping sounds of the baile funk blasting from the favela across the way, she gets up, spies on the neighbor’s chubby goat, and takes a break from the tedium to write about the vegetarian “feijoada” she recently made.

This is a Kale that grew up believing a meal wasn’t a meal without meat but who in the last five years has moved steadily toward eating mostly vegetables and “happy” meat (there is no such thing as happily murdered meat, you disgusting human, say the real vegetarians and militant vegans). Her current predicament is that, now finding herself in the land of meat-only meals but with little information on where to find non-industrial “happy” (less tragic?) meat, she finds herself caught in a strange limbo land where she doesn’t exactly call herself vegetarian but has stopped eating meat almost entirely--exceptions made here and there for the torresmo that gets sprinkled on her caldo de feijão at the botecos (the corner bar classic of black bean soup that always arrives with a topping of parsley and crackly pork skin bits).

Not historically a fan of mock meat (seitanic substitutes and suspiciously processed soy), but recovering from a bout of dengue fever that has left her weakened and with blood tests showing a serious dip in B12, she finds herself powerfully drawn to the package of vegetarian feijoada “meat” blops offered for purchase at her favorite local natural foods store, Grão Integral, or “Whole Grain.” The ingredients in this "Mistura para feijoada vegetariana" are listed as: smoked gluten (what?), smoked soy protein (smoked? is there another translation for defumado?), smoked tofu, and "aromatic herbs." Verrrry mysterious.

Feijoada, it should be noted, is the typical national Brazilian dish, famous for its mix of mysterious meat parts (pork scraps, ears, tails, assorted beef parts, sausage slices) camouflaged in a black bean stew. Debate continues over whether this all-day slow-cooked meal to serve at Saturday family feasts, birthdays, and graduation get-togethers is the now-valorized dish derived from a necessarily resourceful slave culture or the descendent of European stews enjoyed by colonial aristocrats, such as the Portuguese cozido and the French cassoulet. It is hard from this vantage point to determine where exactly the truth lies, but the black bean bears its factual weight as the great unifying legume of Brazil (with manioc as the country’s prime root).

This is all to say that bestowing the name “feijoada” on this dish that I cooked up on a Sunday when the pressure cooker was calling out to be used is a serious travesty on two counts: 1) it contains no trace of random pig and cow bits and bobs and 2) is made with brown beans instead of the signature black beans.

This dish may be a poorly-disguised impostor, but it is authentic in at least one aspect relevant to this blog: the smoked soy mock meat blops, which were intentionally varied in shape and color to simulate the vaguely disturbing and curious lumps that one finds buried in the black swirl of traditional feijoada, were very much indeed the Weirdest of Vegetables. They bore an unsettling resemblance to kibble when poured into a shallow dish:

Once boiled for almost an hour with the beans (taking the pressure cooker shortcut), the blops became chewy and bean-juice-saturated and slightly salty, bearing an uncannily meaty texture of alien familiarity. Their buoyant spongency also made them float to the top. The "meat" was a little freaky, but the beans were reassuringly tasty in their broth fortified with the flavors of bay leaf, salt, garlic, and hot pepper oil.

Despite this freakshow experiment that I was ashamed to serve to any true Brazilian, I must claim some credit for at least attempting to complete the “feijoada” with the proper accompaniments: rice (though brown instead of white), sauteed kale (though my chiffonade was too fat), farinha (a yellowish manioc flour that is almost like pouring sand on your meal but is subtly tasty and adds a pleasingly rough layer when mixed into the beans), and sliced oranges meant to be eaten with the meal (not after) to aid digestion.

Feijão Guandu: or Pigeon Peas, aka the Biological Plow!

2011-07-22T01:48:00.000-03:00

Wow wow wow! I bought these magic beans the other day from the sweet Japanese-Brazilian ladies at the Saturday organic farmers' market in my neighborhood (Glória) and was not disappointed. After my brief flirtation with monochromatic meals, I've returned to my usual programming of technicolor eating and these carnivalesque beauties caught my eye immediately.

They are called feijão guandu, or guandu beans, sometimes feijão andu, and seem to be some variant on what is known as the pigeon pea. These came fresh, a tiny bit sprouted, from a farm west of Rio, R$5 for a baggie. Dried, they fade to a light brown and pale green, but these ranged from wine-dark to red, vibrant brown, lime green, and mustard, like a handful of hearty jellybeans.

Why are they magic? Well, this here legume is an old toughie with a heart of gold: drought-resistant, heat-resistant, and produces protein-rich beans even in poor soil conditions, breaks hard ground in search of water, thus opening the soil up for the more fragile roots of other plants, and is one of those special earth-workers known as "nitrogen fixers." This means it makes atmospheric nitrogen biologically available to other plants, causing it to be used as "green manure" (how I love this term!), or a cover crop, to regenerate nutrient-depleted soil.

This informative blog (in Portuguese) tells us feijão guandu is known as the "biological plow" (arado biológico). More scientific information is here (also in Portuguese, sorry). But, ah!, here is a thorough blog post on the guandu bean that I just found in English, with assorted recipes. Apparently, the English name, pigeon pea, comes from the legume's use as poultry feed in the U.S. during the 19th century.

It turns out you can eat them raw, but I cooked these guandus in the normal way I cook beans here, except I added some special wild tomatoes and beautifully twisted, tiny organic carrots (a rarity in Rio, where carrots are normally grotesquely gigantic, over-fertilized, stick-straight and rock-hard monstrosities). They struck me as somewhere between brown beans and lentils and have that deep, dense flavor of nutrient-rich foods (dark leafy greens also strike me as having this hard-to-describe taste, though beans and greens are flavor worlds apart), though with a certain lightness that I think had to do with their freshness. Below is more or less what I did.

BEANS, Weird Vegetables Brazilian Style*

*elaborations on the instructions printed on a bag of dried brown beans (feijão carioquinha) someone left in my kitchen in Rio

1 baggie or 1.5 cups of fresh beans (if dried, then soak overnight)
4 cloves of garlic, 2 peeled & crushed, 2 tiny dice
1 onion, diced
1 tomato, diced (or 2 large handfuls of wild or cherry tomatoes)
1-2 small carrots, diced (optional)
1 small bunch of cilantro

Rinse beans and dump into a pressure cooker pot. If no pressure cooker lives in your kitchen, then use a regular pot, but double the time. Fill with water to about 1.5 inches over the beans. Add the 2 cloves of crushed garlic. Pressure cook that baby for 30 minutes. Some people say that guandu beans can be bitter and they toss out the water after the first boil and refill it, but these fresh beans had no bitterness to them. While the beans are cooking, rinse and chop all that other stuff.

When the beans are soft enough to eat (or pressure cooked and you've let out all the steam by slipping a fork under the whistle-top blow hole thing and lifting), drain them but keep the liquid for later. Mash about a quarter to a third of the beans with a fork. This is what the supermarket bean bag told me to do, and I was really into this tactic of mixing of textures: mashy bean pulp with whole beans. I just mash them against the side of the sieve but you can do it in a bowl with a wooden spoon if that feels more civilized to you.

Heat up two teaspoons of olive oil in a large pan and sautee the rest of the garlic and the onions until the onions are almost transparent. Add the tomatoes and let their juices get nice and mixed up with the rest. And the carrots if you are adding carrots. Then add the beans. Little by little, add as much of the bean liquid as you need to make the whole concoction reach your ideal consistency. Add salt to taste (2-3 teaspoons perhaps) and mix well. Then add the spiciness vehicle of your choice. I've been using my homemade chili pepper oil, which has divine effects, but add a few whole or minced chili peppers would also be tasty.

Finally, sprinkle with cilantro. Sadly, the guandu beans are not so vibrantly varied after being cooked, but are very tasty all the same. Uma delícia!

Monochromatic Mealtime

2011-07-17T01:19:00.000-03:00

Sophie had already made a name for herself by turning aspects of her intimate life into art when Paul borrowed some of these aspects to construct the character Maria in his Leviathan of a novel. The two were friends, Paul and Sophie, and the latter thought she would turn the whole thing into a Double Game by bringing her own life closer to the parts Paul had invented for Maria. One of Maria's obsessions was eating monochromatic meals. The passage from the novel that describes these feasts for the eyes goes:

Some weeks, she would indulge in what she called "the chromatic diet," restricting herself to foods of a single color on any given day. Monday orange: carrots, cantaloupe, boiled shrimp. Tuesday red: tomatoes, persimmons, steak tartare. Wednesday white: flounder, potatoes, cottage cheese. Thursday green: cucumbers, broccoli, spinach—-and so on, all the way through the last meal on Sunday.

While Sophie had never before thought of this particular concept, she shared Maria's pleasure in setting herself certain rules to follow with severity until she tired of the game and moved onto another. Paul was correct in characterizing it as an indulgent restriction. But Sophie, more of a perfectionist than even Paul imagined for Maria, filled in the details for the rest of the days and made the elements adhere even more closely to each day's color scheme. Sophie writes:

To be like Maria, during the week of December 14, 1992, I ate Orange on Monday, Red on Tuesday, White on Wednesday, and Green Thursday. Since Paul Auster had given his character the other days off, I made Friday Yellow and Saturday Pink. As for Sunday, I decided to devote it to the full spectrum of colors, setting out for six guests the six menus tested over the week.

The act of eating involves such a chaotic complex of senses, feelings, memories, and meanings that it can sometimes be comforting to try to simplify the basic elements.

To what extent does eating become a conceptual act so that we care more about the idea of what we eat than the food itself?

In this case, one must imagine that the sense of order and visual harmony of these meals gave more pleasure than their actual taste. I myself would rather gaze at Orange than wash a mouthful of shrimp laced with cantaloupe down with orange juice.

When I was a child, I would often eat my meal in one section at a time, finishing one entire portion before moving clockwise on to the next: first green beans, then mashed potatoes, then the pork chop, and finishing with my apple juice. Other people would be upset by this unnatural method but could never quite give a convincing reason for what was wrong with it.

Nowadays, I find myself most obsessed with the richness of the color variations in my meals and worrying when they are overly monotone, so precisely the opposite of Sophie/Maria. I like multi-colored mosaic meals mainly for their aesthetic balance—my food makes me happy when many colors play together—but varied colors also suggest a fuller range of nutrients, giving me a practical alibi for this personal preference. Once in awhile I find myself suddenly faced with an accidentally monochromatic meal. Ever since I experienced Sophie Calle's Double Game, I am less apt to "fix" it with more color and instead eat these meals in homage to her, smiling to myself about the various games we consciously or unconsciously play in putting a meal together. My most recent monochromatic meal was Off-White: mashed potatoes, cauliflower puree, and mozarella melted on toast. I drank goat milk.

The other night, I decided to revisit my indulgent restriction from childhood of eating my meal in fractions but this time doing it in an even more extreme way, by eating each section separately in the same bowl that I would empty then refill with the next portion.

Green : Beans

Red : Tomatoes

Yellow : Batata Baroa

This last is my favorite kind of potato here in Brazil, batata baroa, also known as Peruvian parsnip, though it tastes like a lighter version of sweet potato.

I ate very slowly and did nothing else besides pay careful, yet leisurely, attention to each part of this meal in thirds.

The taste and texture of the green, crunchy, slightly salty;
the red, grainy-soft, watery, ripe;
the yellow, creamy, sunshine, hearty sweetness.

This is the practical alibi of these seemingly silly food games: to remind us of how to see and taste what we eat. We put down our books, forget our need to make conversation, stop thinking about what we are going to do afterward, and merely look, then taste and feel what has entered our mouths at that moment.

Spooning

2011-07-13T14:44:00.000-03:00

Dear vegetable lovers,

I do apologize for the extended pause in Weird Vegetable adventures. I've been traveling and working on other projects but continue to ponder the mysteries of the vegetable universe. Today, while scraping brown rice crust from the bottom of a pot with a small wooden spoon, I got emotional about how much I love small wooden spoons. That is to say, it's getting a little loopy around here. More reports from Rio as soon as I get my head together again and stop dreaming about fossilized geckos and snakes whose faces spell out the word O V O (egg in Portuguese).

Here is another photo of my beloved wooden spoon, with other objects for scale.

More soon,
KD

In-Flight Asparagus

2011-06-24T08:44:00.000-03:00

Taking a brief interlude from my new marmoset-and-manioc-rich life in Rio de Janeiro, I flew to San Francisco last week for a wedding and a conference (am weary and slightly disoriented in Bloomington, Indiana and my world of vegetables is as bleak as this blank-walled dorm room I am now experiencing insomnia in). On the São Paulo-Washington D.C. leg, the international in-flight vegetarian meal was less despondent than I had anticipated. The broccoli, zucchini, and carrots were no surprise, but a most intriguing effect was made by the lone asparagus spear that lay across my corn-speckled rice. It was as though the gray eminence that determines our airborne culinary fate had experienced a sudden moment of gaiety, a giddy nostalgia for the springtime asparagus that used to shoot up along the country road on his way home from school, and had decided to bestow upon us this single stroke of frivolity. Much was lost in the translation from the bright green spear of that country road to the over-steamed specimen that sagged indifferently in the spot-lit darkness of my red-eye flight. But still, I ate around it and drew that drooping final morsel to my lips with a grand flourish.

Weird Salad

2011-06-05T19:08:00.000-03:00

Radicchio in the tropics?

Balsamic vinegar in a spray bottle?

Packaged fried garlic?

All a bit out of my ordinary.

But I'll try anything once. (spray spray, crunch crunch!)

The Vegetable Butcher of Eataly

2011-05-27T00:40:00.000-03:00

This tropical weather in Rio is making me think of the snowy times back in February when I went to New York for my birthday (star sign Aquarius, thanks for asking). I stayed with my Italian friend Valeria, and of course we both had to poke our curious noses into Mario Batali's Italian grocery extravaganza, Eataly, which opened last fall. Located in the nondescript, in-between territory of Midtown, this food, um, emporium? hall? mall? spreads its assortment of bread, cheese, meat, and produce counters, plus dining zones over 50,000 ample square feet. Like Batali himself, Eataly is an overgrown Americanized version of Italian culinary culture. The heady rows of pasta and panettone glittering under bright spotlights reminded me a little of Wal-Mart even if the packaging of the products retained a classic Italian elegance.

Signorina Valeria at the doors to Eataly

I introduced Valeria to one of her country's most delectable cheeses, Sottocenere, a creamy cow's milk cheese laced with black truffle and whose herbed ashen crust provides its name, "sotto cenere" meaning "under ash." Then we went on to prowl the produce section.

The fruit and veggies were all very well-lit, all very pretty, considering the barren wintry landscape outside, though a lot of it came from Florida and California (there was a smattering of Hudson Valley farms represented). I also found a satisfying variety of weird vegetables and fruit, including red watercress, finger limes, and an admirable mushroom section.

At last, we came to the main attraction, the curiosity that had summoned me to this realm called Eataly in the first place: The Vegetable Butcher.

Someone please tell me why they are put scare quotes
around "Vegetable Butcher." Is it all an ironic joke?

Like the Wizard of Oz, the Vegetable Butcher is a symbolic figure that goes beyond the identity of merely one person, the green mantle having been handed off to various wielders of the bloodless knife since the inauguration of the position last September. The whole concept of this in-store vegetable mascot, a hearty carver of edible plant matter there to slice, delight, instruct, and dice, sprouted to life over late-night glasses of fine wine in the back of a swanky restaurant, as New York creation myths often seem to go. Impresario Mario was chatting up conceptual artist Jennifer Rubell, niece of Studio 54's Steve but more importantly for us connoisseurs of the alimentary fringe, a conjurer of food as art and art as food. Her show Icons, which was a dinner at the Brooklyn Museum of Art's fundraising gala last year, included Fontina cheese casts of her own head suspended upside down to melt (under heat guns) onto stacked snack crackers, carrots to be plucked and munched from a seed bed in the shape of artist Vito Acconci's body, grotesquely decadent meat and vegetable spreads, and for dessert: a 20-foot-tall pinata of Andy Warhol's head, which was bashed in to release rivers of Twinkies, Ding Dongs, Yodels, Sno Balls, Suzy Q’s, and Ho Ho’s. Yum!

cheese head pre-melt...

What if the hors d'oeuvre were the oeuvre d'art?

a chipped pyramid (these & more here)

Jennifer Rubell with cleaver & cucuzza squash
(source: New York Post)

But let us return to the vegetable matter at hand... Rubell's idea as the inaugural Vegetable Butcher was to be part educator, part expediter, making people's lives easier and their culinary risks less daunting by informing them about the more unusual vegetables, suggesting possible combinations, and chopping them up at no extra charge. In assorted interviews, Rubell shows herself to be a weird vegetable kindred spirit:

“I like to expand the vegetable kingdom for people.”

“I’m just like a bartender. But the advice  customers seek from me is about what to do with vegetables, and to  introduce them to unfamiliar ones like cardoons and celery root.”  

Read about the story here, here, and here.

By the time I arrived on the scene, Rubell had already split for stranger pastures, but Valeria and I were able to spend some quality time over sliced celeriac dressed in olive oil, lemon, and salt with the gracious Milan, that day's Vegetable Butcher.

Valeria grills the Vegetable Butcher, Milan (also her hometown)

Responding good-naturedly to my barrage of questions as he selected a hefty celery root for his demonstration, Milan observed that baby artichokes seemed to be the most frequently butchered vagetable at his station (people not knowing how to deal with the thorns and the fuzz, it seems), followed by winter squash. "A lady once asked me to basically scalp a pumpkin for her," he said, while I gasped in shock at the barbarousness of the request, before realizing that that's what we do to all our tough-skinned Cucurbitae, though we call our actions by other names. Truly scandalous, however, was the customer that once had him mince something like forty garlic cloves (I didn't note down the exact number, but it was something ridiculous).

I tried to drag some juicy dirt from him on his job, but the most I could get was that he's bothered by the excess plastic packaging used to box up the sliced veggies and that he's against slicing up mushrooms too far in advance, thus degrading their integrity into a slimy mycological travesty. My main disappointment was that they hadn't come up with any signature vegetable butcher "cuts" with diagrams like the ones you see of cows. But perhaps we of the vegetable community can reflect more on this question and provide further ferment for innovation in vegetable preparation.

As we were talking, a woman came up to have her cauliflower dissected, and Milan sliced it to order ("How small do you want it? Florets?") while she shared with us her preference for pureed cauliflower over mashed potatoes because of its lighter texture. Then we all considered how celery root, also a bit more delicate than the potato, might add a complementary tone to the cauliflower.

Here is Milan's celeriac demonstration, in which I learned that celeriac/celery root can be eaten raw (duh, I know, but I did not know). Please do try this at home. Also, that person who sounds like a total valley girl giving useless color commentary is NOT me.

Sometimes Foods That Look Suspect Are In Fact Delicious...

2011-05-18T01:07:00.000-03:00

...such as:

1. bananas passa, or dried bananas, one of my favorite emergency snacks here. They look like they're on the verge of decay, but are sticky sweet without sugar. However, there is no elegant way to eat them. Peel off a strip, your fingers get gummy, it looks like a sardine swinging in the air over your mouth, then gulp, delicious!

2. pamonha, a Brazilian "tamale" or a polenta of sorts that may look like someone spat out their half-chewed corn because it was too hot in their mouth, but that is pure corn joy. They take fresh corn, grind it up and juice it, then mix it with grated coconut or coconut milk, and wrap it in a corn husk and drop it in boiling water. The corn street vendors always have pamonha, boiled corn, and another corn treat called curau that is corn puréed with coconut milk into a kind of yellow pudding and put into a plastic cup for your convenience. I've heard of savory pamonha (filled with meat) but haven't encountered it yet. The Flavors of Brazil blog does a good job of describing pamonha and distinguishing it from tamales.

3. pão de mel, or honey bread, a sweet but not too sweet, spiced, soft cookie. Despite its homely aspect, it is quite tasty.

I couldn't resist taking the opportunity to play with my food and make a Pac-Man tableau.

4. inhame che

Back when I thought inhame [een-YAH-me], the Brazilian purple hairy yam, was taro, I made it into the Vietnamese dessert known as che khoai mon, or tarot che, "che" being the general name for a whole collection of Vietnamese desserts involving some combination of fruit, tarot, or beans (red beans, mung beans, black-eyed peas), coconut milk, sugar, and tapioca, sticky rice, or jello. But the two are almost the same thing—same purplish tinge, slightly sweet potato flavor, tendency toward viscosity. I made a lazy version: peeled and diced the inhame (with another root veg that I love called batata baroa added on a whim), boiled and strained the cubes, then dumped in a bottle of coconut milk and some sugar (no little tapioca balls, no sticky rice, no accurate measuring of proportions). I like to eat it warm, though some have it at room temperature.

It looks like sad, gray gruel, but I promise you it is so so tasty. Consider it my tropical-tropical South American-Southeast Asian fusion concoction. When I open my Brazilian-Vietnamese restaurant, this will be the dessert special. I'll ladle it into a crystal goblet adorned with a pineapple slice and a tiny paper umbrella so the tourists won't feel afraid. Another added bonus is that inhame seems to be the magic super vegetable that cures all ailments. Everyone here says, "Inhame limpa o sangue," that it "cleanses the blood," and that it helps boost the immune system, decreases inflammation, and cures dengue fever. I've been eating a lot of boiled inhame lately.

Homemade, homemade

2011-05-10T00:23:00.000-03:00

Being in a new environment has got me feeling experimental lately. I made this hot oil a few weeks ago with advice from the spice man at my Sunday market ("the recipe is free! ha! freeee!"). It gives an extra kick to my stir-fries, my fried eggs, my toast (fried in the pan with oil when I run out of butter; we are a toasterless household). It draws little flames around whatever my heart desires. Anyone who's been to Brazil will have seen countless bottles of this stuff on the tables of homes and homey restaurants.

To make it, I took an equal mix of orange, red, and green chili pepppers (the little green ones are the meanest), washed and destemmed them,

put them in a jam jar with this much salt,

et voila! After about a week, the whole thing got spiced up.

I also made this homemade mosquito repellent from really cheap vodka (R$6 a bottle) infused with a packet of cloves and some cinammon. I let it steep for a week, shaking up the mixture every day, then mixed it with sweet-herb-scented body oil. It seemed to work for awhile; at least it made my skin smell really nice, but then I started getting less vigilant about putting on insect repellent. Then I fell ill with dengue fever, which has been something of an epidemic in Rio in the last couple years. My bout was intense, though maybe not as bad as others have had it, and I am now in recovery and have finally been leaving the house. I blame succumbing to the illness on a combination of an evil, gluttonous Aedes egypti plus intense stress from trying to finish a dissertation chapter by a self-imposed deadline. (Dissertations are bad for your health.) I'm going to try another batch using olive oil instead of body oil. The only problem with cloves is that they can stain clothes and some report that clove oil can be a skin irritant, though I haven't had this problem.

My latest and most exciting home project has been making my own compost bin out of an old French fryer. In San Francisco, I got so used to never throwing a single scrap of food in the garbage since the city picks up compost separate from garbage and recycling, so that when I moved here, it caused a great pain in my heart to throw out so many beautiful vegetable and fruit parts. I met a woman at the organic farmers' market who gave me this old French fryer she cleaned out, plus some advice on how to put all the layers together.

I poked drainage holes in a plastic planter base for the bottom, found a metal wire sieve to block the top from critters while letting in air and sun, and now have become totally obsessed with feeding my compost, turning it, chopping up my organic scraps into tiny, digestible pieces for the sweet creature that lives in the back near the laundry machine. My yin and yang have now been transmuted into brown and green layers (brown=old leaves, sawdust, shredded newspapers, the "cold" stuff; green=organic materials from your kitchen and garden, the "hot" stuff that steams and brews as the bacteria transforms it into cold, black matter)

It is still a work in progress and I already need a bigger compost receptacle, so I'm on the lookout for an old laundry drum, which will already have all the breathing holes drilled in the sides, plus drainage in the bottom. The Alameda County Stop Waste site also helped me imagine how all these technicolor scraps would eventually decay and shrivel up into beautiful black compost. Meanwhile, I continue to chop up my scraps into bite-size pieces and store them in a drawer in the fridge. It's an exciting life here in the southern hemisphere.

Pinhão: Giant Pinenut

2011-05-03T10:37:00.000-03:00

Running through my life in Rio like Manichaean undercurrents, yin and yang, light and dark, good and evil, joy and despair are the mico and the barata. Micos are the tiny marmosets that scamper past my open window in the mornings, pit-pattering over my neighbor's corrugated tin roof to leap into the mango tree nearby, all four limbs outstretched in a moment of pure exhilaration. They look like evil Jim Henson mini-demons with their downturned mouths and shocks of white hair shooting out on the sides of their furry heads, but they bring innumerable moments of pleasure into my life and release me from darker thoughts with their sudden chattering appearance. (The ones that hang around here are playful and shy to approach humans, unlike the scary micos that leap onto tables and bully tourists into giving up their snacks at Sugar Loaf Mountain, a popular vista point.) Their dark counterpoint, my great, trembling vulnerability here, are baratas, cockroaches, big brown tropical cockroaches with wings that I have neither learned to kill nor to react to in a calm, accepting manner. They terrorize me. There are moments when I begin to imagine cockroaches in every corner, imagine them flying in my window at night (it happened last night and I knew it wasn't just a fever-induced delirium), see them scuttling into my ear while I sleep, see them in the food I eat.

Blur your vision and it is a cockroach

Indeed, while preparing these pinhões (plural of pinhão), I began to see them as a big collection of cockroaches, hard-shells glistening ominously under the kitchen lights. But reason took hold and I kept on with the work of piercing, boiling, then peeling back their hard outer layers, imagining the nutty treasure inside, more than triple the size of the European and North American pine nuts I am used to. Peeling these nuts open is hard work, and at one point I considered banging them open with my flip-flop, the way people smash cockroaches here in one blow (whap!).

But my monkey patience persevered, and I ended up with a nice collection of waxy, yellow-brown nuts, slightly chewy like chestnuts can sometimes be. I snacked on several whole and coarsely chopped up the rest to layer on top of a squash puree I made.

Calling these mysterious beings "pine nut" may be misleading for those used to those teardrop nuts coming from arrow-shaped dark green conifers and their brown pine cones. The man at the market said they were "a type of Portuguese nut" in response to my curiosity, but these actually come from the Brazilian pine, pinheiro-do-paraná or pinheiro brasileiro, known by the scientists as Araucaria angustifolia. The tree is also an evergreen, but its leaves begin much farther up the trunk and its branches extend outwards in more of a radial pattern, like a big halo or green fireworks.

Image source

And look at the pine cones! They are grrreeeeen:

Image source

They remind me of durian, the infamous stinky fruit (like natto, a taste not to be savored by the masses, but adored by those strong of palate).

What else can I say about pinhão? The tree grows mostly in the more temperate and higher altitude regions in Brazil's southwest and is endangered due in part to the replacement of the Paraná pine on private lots with Canadian pines--think Christmas trees--whose wood has a higher market value (boo to decisions based solely on market value!!). It is a traditional food of indigenous tribes, much as pine nuts have been for North American tribes, and was also adopted with enthusiasm by Italian and German immigrants to southwest Brazil. People in the town of Lage in Santa Catarina state, are nuts (ahhh! couldn't help it, not sorry about it) about pinhão and eat it all sorts of ways: roasted, boiled, ground up with manioc flour, in a mayonnaise, pureed, gnocchi'd, eaten as a dessert or with dessert, on pizza, in a pancake, in a dish called entrevero mixing pinhão with meat and greens, etc.

Here is my attempt to give you some sense of scale:

More on pinhão (in Portuguese) from Slow Food Brasil, which is trying to raise awareness about this endangered nut, and from an informative blog called Brasil Sabor.

But just as I thought I was coming out of my delirium and ridding myself of disturbing associations (brown nut conjuring the terror of the flying cockroach), I open up my Portuguese-English dictionary from 1945 and read under the entry for pinhões do Brasil: "black vomiting-nuts." What?? Another rabbit hole I've fallen down. Turns out black vomiting-nuts, also known as the psychic nut, come from the Jatropha plant, sometimes a tree, sometimes a shrub, and that has recently been known as the great biodiesel hope. I could try to follow this new thread to its end, but as we know in the world of vegetable identification and Internet burrowing, there is never a finite end and so we must stop when our eyes begin to buzz and our heads begin to swivel around in search of micos to distract us from our mental labyrinths. Weeeeee, weeeeee, I hear their high-pitched calling now.... Let us end here for today.

Natto For Me

2011-04-28T01:51:00.000-03:00

Lots of my friends back in San Francisco have been getting excited about the International Film Festival that just opened there, and so I keep hearing about what's playing. Many of the films are being shown at the Kabuki theater in Japantown, and I am reminded of my pre-movie tradition of picking up food to smuggle into the theater from that carnival of delightful Japanese snacks known as Nijiya Market. [All their stores have donation boxes set up for tsunami disaster relief and I pass along the link to donate to the Red Cross here].

Natto, like stinky tofu, is a fermented soy, um, thing that causes extreme excitement in people, most often in the form of "Oh yeah! Nattoooo! They have natto?! Yum, I love natto," or "Gross, get it out of my face. I'm gonna puke. That stuff is so nasty. Boogerz." I must admit that while I am dedicated to the cause of keeping one's palate open to strange foods and learning to like strong and idiosyncratic tastes, I cannot eat natto with much gusto.

But I decided to take one for the proverbial Weird Vegetables team a few months ago and try this natto handroll from Nijiya Market. They have a whole variety of handrolls that are neatly packaged with precise 1-2-3 instructions for assembling the separate parts of your handroll as you pull open the plastic at the indicated arrows. I particularly like the ume (fermented plum) rolls--this dollop of wrinkled fuchsia is my Japanese pickle of choice.

After engaging my expert origami skills to follow the assembly instructions properly, I deconstructed the roll so you can see the natto better. Eagle-eyed readers will note the green leaf is identified in the ingredient list as ooba, more commonly known as shiso, a delicate herb whose texture is like mint but a few degrees finer and whose distinct and pleasing taste (to me, at least) I am finding hard to describe--almost bitter and more reminiscent of trees or shrubs than its cousin herbs (mint, basil, sage).

I thought maybe I would like natto better in a sushi roll with one of my favorite Japanese leaves, but it still made my eyes scrunch up and my mouth turn down. I don't mind the gooeyness--I'm very much friends with okra, which is equally viscous--but encountering the intense fermentation reminds me of taking too big a whiff of rubbing alcohol so that the scent punches up your nose. Still, you cannot call yourself an intrepid lover of all things vegetable without at least trying some tawny mouthfuls of this soy specialty. Here is an incredibly cute and adoring introduction to natto. And another write up on the zine-to-Internet culture clearing house Boing Boing. My other favorite market, Rainbow Grocery, also harbors a vat of natto in its bulk section, the sight of which has been known to inspire visitors from Tokyo to clap their hands together ever so gently and emit a low-yet-fervent murmur of delight.

Taioba: Better than Kale?

2011-04-25T00:33:00.000-03:00

I think I may have found a dark leafy green better than kale. My world has been turned upside down, as half of my identity is bound up in kale being my #1 vegetable. But I took home these gigantic yet delicate leaves from the organic market in my neighborhood (Glória, Rio de Janeiro), rolled them up cigar style, chopped them into a thin chiffonade (ribbons) like I do kale, sauteed them with garlic, and WOW! The taste was deep like kale but more tender, lighter. There is something elegant about these greens; they lack kale's bluntness yet maintain a certain iron insistence in their slightly bitter taste that recalls kale. They are called taioba here (tie-yoh-bah) and are known as tannia in English. The plant is similar to taro; the former is Xanthasoma sagittifolium and the latter is Colocasia esculenta, though both are from the same family, Araceae. While the taro's root (technically a corm, though I'll never get used to that word) is the most eaten part, it is the taioba's leaves that are the most used here in Brazil. The crop is grown in more temperate mountainous regions, like Minas Gerais state in Brazil (these came from the Japanese Brazilian Sítio Ohara in Seropédica, west of Rio on the way to Minas Gerais.)

While running a background check on taioba, I stumbled upon the Slow Food Brasil site ("There's a Slow Food Brazil? Yes, of course, though I never thought of it." That's me talking to myself, not me making assumptions about your reaction) and an article about how this wonderful green, so rich in vitamin A, is disappearing from Brazilian dinner tables because people here don't really know it anymore. I'm not in any position to confirm or deny this claim, but I will say I've only noticed it at the organic market. Some informative sites in English are the World Crops site documenting the successful cultivation of these crops at the University of Massachusetts and this Flavors of Brazil blog that I'm probably going to start overlapping with as I continue to post about Brazilian vegetables. More in-depth botanical enthusiast information on taioba/tannia is here.

It's funny, before I looked up taioba and learned it was related to taro, I set up a little photo shoot with taioba and inhame (in-yah-mee), which is translated as "yam" though I swear it looks and pretty much tastes like taro. Those red splashes are a few pygmy bell peppers I tossed in for good cheer ("pygmy bell peppers" is not an actual kind of bell pepper, just a colorful manner of speaking; teachers please tell your students never to use this site as a reliable source of information for their vegetable reports. We're like Wikipedia but worse.)

But I'm going to throw out an S.O.S. to the weird vegetable community here and say that I am very confused as to the exact nature of inhame. It's hairy, striated, and lavender on the inside like tarot, yet identified as a yam. The word "taro" exists in Portuguese, though I haven't seen any "taro" side by side with inhame at the market. However, taro is also referred to as "inhame de Açores," a kind of inhame from the Azores, so there is some overlap. All very confusing. I wish inhame was just taro, so I wouldn't have to painfully reshape my brain in adjusting my original ideas about it. Any clarification on this would help.

But, look! I suddenly veered the conversation away from the lovely taioba, the supposed topic of this post. Perhaps I'm still a little uneasy acknowledging that I may have found something closer to my heart's palate than kale but that I won't be able to find so easily back in San Francisco...

UPDATE: Crap! Another unreliable wikipedia moment on Weird Vegetables. I accidentally inserted a photo of couve or Brazilian kale that I tried to pass off as taioba--the very last photo. So I guess my unconscious still loves kale the best. Thanks to reader Debdeb of the WV uh-oh patrol for pointing out my mistake. (Note how couve is heavier and more crinkly than taioba)

Lévi-Strauss's Vegetable Flotsam

2011-04-21T20:42:00.000-03:00

I've been amusing myself lately by reading Claude Lévi-Strauss's 1955 memoir of his time in Brazil, Tristes Tropiques, with a mental Werner Herzog accent (I'm reading the English translation). The famous French anthropologist and father of structuralism makes some pretty strong declarations and denunciations that could easily be attributed to the equally opinionated German director. Listen:

I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions.... I have often planned to undertake the present work, but on each occasion a sort of shame and repugnance prevented me making a start.

And on the anthropologist's profession as decidedly unadventurous, unglamorous:

...periods of hunger, exhaustion, sickness perhaps; and always the thousand and one dreary tasks which eat away the days to no purpose and reduce dangerous living in the heart of the virgin forest to an imitation of military service...

Lévi-Strauss finds himself disgusted with the public's taste for sensationalistic travel accounts of Amazonia, Tibet, and Africa whose dominant tone is a desire to impress. He blames lazy writers but also their undemanding readers: "Instead of having his critical faculties stimulated, he [the reader] asks for more such pabulum and swallows prodigious quantities of it."

Already enjoying this rather spicy pabulum my French elder had been spooning into my brain, my vegetable radar went haywire when I hit this amazing passage comparing his old advisor, psycologist Georges Dumas, to some eerie kind of vegetable while giving a lecture at a mental hospital :

In that room, one already had the sensation of being exposed to a peculiar kind of exotic experience; there was a platform on which Dumas ensconced his sturdy, angular frame, crowned by a knobbly head resembling a large root that has been bleached and stripped through a long stay on the sea bed. His waxy complexion created a unity between his face, his short, white bristling hair and his goatee beard, which was also white and sprouted in all directions. This curious piece of vegetable flotsam, still bushy with little roots, was suddenly humanized by the flashing of coal-black eyes, which emphasized the whiteness of the head.

Immediately, I knew Dumas to be un semblable, a kinsman, of my parsnip creature!

I particularly relish the thought that a vegetable could last and last on the bottom of the sea, like a whale bone, and suddenly be washed up on shore for tribes of people to encounter and incorporate into elaborate rituals. You may also be interested to note the difference between flotsam and jetsam. The former is the wreckage of a ship and its cargo that have been washed ashore, while the latter are materials or goods that have been tossed overboard, perhaps to lighten the vessel in times of duress, and subsequently, also, wash ashore. The same endpoint, but different ways of getting there. There must be another soul out there that gets pleasure from this sort of semantic precision.

I'll keep my carrot eye out for any vivid accounts of Brazilian vegetables our noble adventurer has to offer as I progress through the reading. And look how very cute his professor Dumas looks even when he's not doing a vegetable impression:

photo found here

Brazilian Daikon

2011-04-18T00:58:00.000-03:00

Okay, I found a Brazilian daikon at the organic farmers' market. You can tell it's Brazilian Japanese because of the black-and-white wave mosaic pattern on the ground and the Havaiana flip-flops. This is not a yacon (Cf. my Glória farmers' market gaffe). I picked it up at the veggie stand and, playing it safe, asked, "What's this?" The farmstand woman was like, "Duh, it's a daikon" (pronounced the same way in Portuguese) and I felt properly shamed for not recognizing my own kind.

Eggplant Penguins

2011-04-15T00:21:00.000-03:00

Meanwhile . . . back in northern California, WV correspondent and specialist in critical vegetable studies Morel Tea reported on the sighting of two emperor eggplant penguins at the veggie mecca known as Berkeley Bowl. Tea writes:

While I was at the bowl today, curiosity led me to investigate a most peculiar sound--something like a low muttering--which seemed to be coming from the southernmost corner of the produce section. Much to my surprise, I happened upon this happy pair of emperor penguins, dressed up as Indian eggplants, who were passing the afternoon by exchanging bawdy jokes . . .

The penguins had surely been on the run from pesky naturalists and German documentarians driving them to the brink of insanity in their native South Pole, swimming north and taking shelter in markets along the way with this crafty disguise. No doubt they were hoping to land in the homey yet elegant North Berkeley home of a pair of professors, living it up on the patio while drinking in endless sunset views of the Bay.

Life Improvements

2011-04-06T22:49:00.000-03:00

When I was packing for Brazil, my veggie mate Erin asked me if I was going to bring my cherished Global Chef's knife along to visit South America. "What?! Nooooo," I answered. "I'm not that attached to my things. I'm going to be traveling around and can't really be bringing a knife in my luggage. I'll make due with whatever's there." After several weeks, I finally broke down and decided I couldn't deal with the flimsy carving tools in my Rio kitchen.

Walking on my way to get a cavaquinho, the Brazilian cousin to the ukulele (another thing I left behind in San Francisco; they have the same Portuguese grandparents), I passed by a shop called Rei das Facas, [King of Knives]. After some discussion with my new friend Oliveira ("Não sou vendedor, sou seu amigo!" ["I'm not a salesman, I'm your friend!"], I picked up this sturdy Tramontina 8" knife. "You just improved your life," Oliveira informed me with a twinkle in his eye, as he wrapped my knife in paper. Eager to welcome this new member into my home, I found it a cozy little basket with tea towel blankie. Oliveira was right, and a life lesson was learned: always have a good knife. Your life will be better for it. I also recommend the Frenchie folding, wood-handled Opinel for bike trips and picnics. I use mine primarily for slicing apples and cheese.

This knife has made the most significant practical improvement in my day-to-day life here (I can't quite play the cavaquinho well enough yet for it to compete), but I've gotten more than my money's worth of cheap thrills from this R$8 purchase made at the Glória farmers' market, a combination mandolin and grater:

I've always wanted a mandolin for slicing vegetables but somehow never got around to buying one (the starting price of $30 always seemed to remind me of the need to abstain from the frivolities of late capitalism) . But I must admit, my life has received a bit of a new thrill and I find myself cooking potatoes just so I can put their little hat on and watch them slide slide sliiiiiide away into coin-shaped slivers. Or sometimes I just put the tiny hat on the potato and smile at it.

Glória Farmers' Market (G-L-O-R-I-A!)

2011-04-03T19:03:00.000-03:00

It's me taken about a month to settle into a new rhythm and new surroundings in Rio de Janeiro. Figuring out what and how to eat is turning out to be something of a challenge now that I've become much more conscious about what's in my food and how it's produced. Back when I lived here in 2003 through 2004, I ate almost anything, meat on a stick barbecued on a street grill, snacks involving various combinations of meat + cheese enveloped in breaded, fried dough, or feijoada, the signature Brazilian black bean stew with assorted pig parts (tail to ear to feet). Now that I've transitioned from Anthony Bourdain to Alice Waters-style eating, I've become more attuned to the currents of "comida natural," or "natural foods" in Rio but am adapting and making up my guidelines as I go along, knowing I can't exactly reproduce my San Francisco alimentary habits and wanting to stay open to trying different kinds of foods here.

This is my Sunday neighborhood farmers' market, in Rio's Glória neighborhood, walking distance from the downtown Centro area. There is a separate organic farmers' market nearby on Saturdays that I'll talk about in a future post, but I've decided to give up on organic puritanism for the time being, partly from limited availability of products, information, and variety but also largely due to cost. (Rio has become significantly more expensive in recent years, and some blame the anticipatory effects of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics on rents. Americans in particular feel the pain of the dollar's drop and the real's rise, from US$1:R$3 in 2004 to now US$1:R$1.6.)

This market's a bit crazier than the one I used to go to in chic Ipanema (more shouting, more elbowing up in these parts), but I like its controlled chaos. And vendors in Glória still insist on a similar level of OCD rigor in their fruit and vegetable displays. Look at these charming kale doilies, used to decorate the bagged manioc (it was the end of the market, so most of the manioc was gone already).

Constant vigilance is necessary on the part of the consumer in selecting and purchasing produce. One must know the fair price (vendors can smell uncertainty in your approach, though some have their set prices written in chalk), be able to bargain quickly ("R$2 each? Okay, I'll take 3 mangoes for R$5, okay? Okay! Ta bom!"), and watch out for vendors pushing extra produce on you with practiced swiftness, i.e. you ask for a bunch of kale for R$2, and the vendor sneaks in two bunches and charges you R$4, or you merely glance in the direction of a box of custard apples and, vroosh!, it's bagged up and being handed to you and you couldn't possibly have the bad manners to turn it down.

Vendors here are generally more gregarious, more playful, than their American counterparts:

"Fala princesa! Diga-me freguesa!" "Speak, princess! Tell me, customer!" 

"Look at these guavas, so rosy, they're blushing with shame!" 

"Hey, bananas, papayas, on super sale, buy one bunch, get three! I'm getting out of here! I'm going home already!" 

"Okay, miss, here's your dozen oranges, plus one extra for your parakeet! Or your cat, whichever."

When I picked up some hot peppers to try my hand at homemade hot sauce, I asked the man how to do it. He helped me choose a combination of long red, small green, and round orange peppers, told me the steps, and said gleefully, "The recipe is frrrree! Ha! FREE!" and slapped me on the back, grinning with pleasure at his own joke. He repeated it a few more times, then told me to "volte sempre," return always. I'll let him know how it turns out.

I got some interesting vegetables, pretty purple cabbage, a moon-pale green one, and a Portuguese nut called pinhão that I'm to boil in its shell. My online translator is telling me they are pinenuts (!) but they seem so huge compared to what I'm used to. I haven't boiled them yet, but will in the next couple days and report back.

~~It was also nice to spot daikon (yakon) in these parts.~~ [April 4 correction:] Oops! WV uh-oh patrol, headed by Leafy Heirloom, spotted this egregious error. The tuber below is in fact yacón, a Peruvian tuber, a lighter, crisper root veg, and a relative of Jerusalem artichoke. I just thought that daikons in this hemisphere were a little darker.

It must come from São Paulo, where most of Brazil's ethnically Japanese population lives (you may or may not know that Brazil has the largest population of Japanese descent living outside Japan, estimated at around 1.5 million). Still not sure how to say daikon in Portuguese, though radish is rabanete [ha-bah-netchy]

The man who sold me my most interesting vegetables was a man of few words, more self-contained than the usual farmers' market vendor, and wished me "Paz e saúde" ("Peace and health") with my veggies. Here he is, rewriting the chalk sign for "pinhão," after the "o" got smudged:

Another thing I like at this market are the tapioca snack tents. They make tapioca "crepes" with fillings like banana and cinammon, a kind of beef jerky (carne seca), cheese and banana, cheese and coconut, or ham and cheese.

The tapioca flour gets dumped loose into a pan, where the heat and a little butter makes it stick together into a kind of grainy, kind of tasteless, but somehow pleasing, shell for your filling of choice.

Here, I'll peel it open so you can see the banana and cinnamon filling, yum!

After the market, I trudge with my heavy loads swinging off my arms back up the hill, taking the shortcut stairway to our Santa Teresa hideaway, where I think more about Glória and listen to Patti Smith.

Kale for Nerds, or: Return of the NEEP!

2011-03-31T00:32:00.000-03:00

Opa! It is my deepest pleasure to announce that kale [kail], n. was the Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Day last Tuesday, March 22, in the Year of Our Lord 2011. This delightfully stunning news comes through the wires to South America from our WV correspondent in New York, Mr. Cardoon O'Chickory, who you may recall provided us with our last big break from the OED, that venerable treasure trove of etymological lore, back in January, 2009 when the pale, mild neep climbed to its finest moment as Word of the Day.

Mr. O'Chickory (really just Chickory, but I like to add the O' as a little shamrock in his cap) writes:

Hi katrina, look at this! the OED comes up trumps again. I am going to start using the phrase "*to give one his kale through the reek"* from now on.

Note also that we come full circle with: *kale-turnip n. = kohlrabi*

*THE NEEP'S RETURN!!!*

I don't even know what that means. But it seems deeply pregnant, no? 

Too excited for words, I had to wait an entire week to process this, yes, deeply pregnant entry.

As mentioned above, it turns out that kale derives from cole, which is related to the German kohl for cabbage (all are from the Brassica family), and kohlrabi being a kind of German turnip, also known as kale-turnip, this, as our perspicacious correspondent points out, brings us full circle to NEEP, our most cherished word for the common turnip.

I want to know all about sea kale, keel to be found wild on Maritime rocks, all that gigantic colewort growing in kitchen gardens, and Scottish kale soup served with moldy bread and sour ale. The Scots seem to have been crazy about kale. You could give someone "his kale through the reek," really let 'em have it in olde timey Scotland (undoubtedly the best kale phrase of them all). But if I'm all about getting my kale in the good ol' U.S. of A., then that green's gonna go cha-ching like cheddar, like scrilla, and "You will get 111% on your kale in this fun-fest" called America, the promise goes.

For those of you vegetable nerds without proper access to the OED, I am pasting in the highlights. All ye who can gaine entrye to the OED, click here.

kale | kail, n.

Pronunciation: /keɪl/ Sc./kel/

Forms: α. ME cal, ME–18 cale, (ME–15 Sc. cail (OE, 15 call, 16 cayle), ME, 17– kale, (15–16 Sc. kaill), 16– Sc. kail. β. ME kelle, 15 kel, 15–16 kele, keel(e, 16 (Sc.) keil, 16–18 keal(e, 17 kell.

Etymology: Northern form of cole n.¹, q.v. The normal northern English spelling was cale (now rare), the Scots kaill, kail; the latter still common in Scots writers or with reference to Scotland, though kale is more frequent in general use. The β-forms are mainly southern spellings indicating the narrow Northern vowel.

a. A generic name for various edible plants of the genus Brassica; cole, colewort, cabbage; spec. the variety with wrinkled leaves not forming a compact head ( B. oleracea acephala), borecole.

1699             M. Lister Journey to Paris    (new ed.)   150       The Keel is to be found wild upon the Maritime Rocks. 

1814             Scott Waverley I. viii. 104       Gardens, or yards...stored with gigantic plants of kale or colewort. 

1861             G. H. Kingsley in  F. Galton Vac. Tourists & Trav. 1860 148       When times were tolerably quiet, they...cultivated their oats and kail in peace.

b.  With qualifying word:  curled kale,  curly kale,  †frizzled kale,  German kale, or  green kale, the ordinary borecole, with green leaves, very much curled;  †great kale,  lang kale,  Scotch kale, a variety of borecole with less wrinkled leaves, of a purplish colour;  wild kale, Colewort. Also  corn-kale,  wild kale, Field-Mustard ( Sinapis arvensis);  Indian kale (see quot. 1890). See also bow-kail n., , sea-kale n.field kale: see the first element.  1673             D. Wedderburn Vocab. 18 (Jam.)       Brassica, great kail, unlocked. Brassica capitata alba, white locked kail. Brassica crispa, frizzled or curled kail. Brassica minor, smaller kail. 
1731–59             P. Miller Gardeners Dict.    (ed. 7)  ,       Brassica Siberica, Siberian Borecole, called by some Scotch Kale.

 2.
 a.  Broth in which Scotch kale or cabbage forms a principal ingredient; hence Sc.water-kale, broth made without meat or fat. Broth or soup made with various kinds of vegetables. 
a1480             Burlesque in  Rel. Ant. I. 85       Ther whas rostyd bakon, moullyde brede, nw soure alle, Whettestons and fyre~brondys choppyde in kelle.

1642             Milton Apol. Smectymnuus in  Wks.    (1851)   III. 277       When he brings in the messe with Keale, Beef, and Brewesse, what  stomach in England could forbeare to call for flanks and briskets?

1816             Scott Black Dwarf i, in  Tales of my Landlord 1st Ser. I. 31,       I will be back here to my kail against ane o'clock.
1858             E. B. Ramsay Reminisc. Sc. Life    (1860)   1st Ser. v. 108       The old-fashioned easy way of asking a friend to dinner was to ask him if he would take his kail with the family.

b.  Sc. Phrases:  cauld kale het again, something stale served up again; e.g. an old sermon doing duty a second time.  to give one his kale through the reek, to treat one in some unpleasant fashion, to let one ‘have it’.
1660             in  J. Ramsay Scotl. & Scotsmen 18th Cent.    (1888)   II. 80       We will take cold kail het again tomorrow.

1816             Scott Old Mortality i, in  Tales of my Landlord 1st Ser. III. 12       When my mother and him forgathered, they set till the sodgers, and I think they gae them their kale through the reek!

1823             J. Galt Entail III. xxx. 282       Theirs was a third marriage, a cauld-kail-het-again affair.

1840             C. Brontë Let. in  E. C. Gaskell Life C. Brontë    (1857)   I. ix. 214       He would have given the Dissenters their kale through the reek—a Scotch proverb.
  3.  N. Amer. slang. Money. 1922             S. Lewis Babbitt xiii. 172       You will get 111% on your kale in this fun-fest.

1926             Flynn's 16 Jan. 638/1       The kale is cut up an th' biggest corner goes to th' brains.

1927             Daily Express 23 Sept. 1       Enough ‘kale’ (prize-fighters’ name for money) has been received‥to assure the promoters a profit of approximately £100,000.
 And, for dessert, some choice compounds for you: kale-bell n. the dinner-bell.kale-brose n. oatmeal-brose made with the fat skimmings of meat-broth.kale-gully n. a knife for cutting kale.kale-runt n. [no further explanation given!]kale-time n. dinner-time.kale-turnip n. = kohlrabi n. ( Chambers's Encycl. 1890).kale-wife n. a woman who sells kale or greens. All right my lovelies, that's quite enough kale for one evening. This kale-wife bids you adieu on a balmy evening in Rio, where her hair is becoming a baroque piece of frizzled kale, or couve [koh-vee], as our lovely dark green is called in these parts.

Amigo-Legume

2011-03-17T16:18:00.000-03:00

Like Robinson Crusoe before Friday,

I make friends from materials

found in my New World.

Unlike them,

I have chosen

the terms of my exile.

Legumes Estranhos: Brazil Continued

2011-03-14T21:28:00.000-03:00

Oh my Godgee (a friend's "Brazilian" way of saying "Oh my God."). It's been almost a month since the last WV post. A lot has happened. Incredibly rapid people's revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, disturbing conflicts in Libya, protests against the shameless Republican assault on workers' rights and non-corporate governance in Wisconsin and Michigan. A natural disaster in Japan spilling over the global consciousness in a chaotic flotsam of photographs that I'm finding nearly impossible to process adequately. How does one maintain a sense of what has happened, is happening, with so much information hitting at once?

And I moved to Brazil for the rest of the year.

I am still eating mostly vegetables. Weird ones. Meat slips in from time to time if it's in tiny bits tucked into the black bean soup that I was craving at the neighborhood bar one night. Or if it sneaks into the juice bar breaded pastry I thought had only manioc and cheese.

There's no Trader Joe's here but one can still get lazyman pre-cut veggies very easily. I picked up the above sacks of squash and shredded carrot with beet from one of the little stands that materializes on street corners most evenings. I am currently in Rio de Janeiro, far from Ipanema and the beach where I lived in 2003 to 2004, this time closer to the decayed nineteenth-century glories of the old city, in the Santa Teresa neighborhood, which Lonely Planet likes to claim is a Brazilian Montmartre. Sure, there are puppeteers and painters out in the street sipping tiny cups of cold beer on Sunday nights, and it's up in the hills with breathtaking views over the city (panorama of Guanabara Bay, piled brick shacks of the hillside favelas in the near distance), but it's its own thing... I try not to stub my sandal feet on the cobblestones on my way home, up up up past ivy-covered walls topped with broken glass in lieu of barbed wire and neighbors peeping down on me from fluorescent-lit rooms.

I visited the Glória neighborhood farmers' market just down the hill this past Sunday and have heard tell of an organic farmers' market close by. There are also versions of CSA (community-supported agriculture) produce boxes to be had in my neighborhood. I am still orienting myself to the lay of the land, but the organic & permaculture bug seems to have bitten here too, in a land saturated with soy and corn monoculture.

I have nothing too alien to present you with today, but I was quite pleased with this watercress bunch (agrião) I found--watercress being a much more proletarian, sturdier vegetable here than it is in the U.S., where we tend to associate it with lace gloves, doilies, and tea sandwiches (by "we" I mean me). I was also equally, if not more, pleased by my clever tactic of poking a hole in the midpoint of the carrot-beet-shred bag in order to dig my greedy monkey fingers into a balanced mix of Tang and picked-scab colors:

Here is the rainbow coalition salad I made, "the best greens I've seen in Brazil so far," exclaimed a visiting New York poet and fellow misteriosa ethnic question mark, whose Transcendent Brow says:

                                                    "my crush is on
                                                    your rosemary potato
offerings of candlelit
                                                    vigils for my grandparents . . . "

and whose "conscience is a cherry plum tomato / Amish radishes . . . "

Meep mop! That's a shout out to my cat Osiris, whom me olde veggie companion Erin is sweetly tending back in San Francisco. Old timer readers of WV may recall my brief 2008 foray into Legumes Estranhos, when I was in Rio for a research trip. More investigations to come...

Coming Up Bitter

2011-02-16T06:46:00.000-02:00

My New Yorker (by way of Milan) friend Valeria recently asked me what I thought were some trends in the world of vegetables, which of course has less to do with the state of being of vegetables themselves and everything to do with their human eaters. After considering it for a moment, I decided that bitterness was becoming more acceptable to the mainstream palate, and I thought of how chicories, like radicchio, seemed to be taking a bigger role on the plate. I stake this claim on some kind of intuition, not really eating out very much since my income shrank to graduate student size several years ago, but I think a general growing interest in weird vegetables has got people experimenting with bolder tastes. (The New Yorker food issue in the fall had several pieces dedicated to the vegetable, including a riveting article on root vegetables and nostalgic paeans to sauerkraut and borscht, while New York magazine recently documented a new breed of vegivore eaters in "Why Vegetables Are the New Meat.")

But I hadn't thought about how a rising interest in bitterness might propel bitter melon, the old Asian favorite, into the position of would-be successor to tofu as the darling of American alternative health food obsessives. Awhile back, I profiled this most intriguing of vegetables along with its most fervent promoters, the National Bitter Melon Council.

Well, tonight, from 7-9 p.m. at SOMArts Cultural Center in San Francisco, NBMC founders Jeremy Liu and Hiroko Kikuchi are bringing the gospel of Bitter is Better to the public at a conversation and workshop organized as part of the exhibition A Sensory Feast. The Council promises the creation of a new fragrance, Bitter, as well as the design of a bitter melon tattoo for the most dedicated and auspicious participant (I wonder if it'll grant the bearer a lifetime supply of free bitter melon, kind of like Jimmy Corn does for Casa Sanchez burritos. The deal was just revived this January, by the way. Get in there!). Adding its own trend-spotting quip, SFoodie dubs bitter "the new umami" in its post about the event. More info is also at the SOMArts website.

Vegetable Pedophilia

2011-01-29T20:51:00.000-02:00

This is a public service announcement to inform you that someone in your neighborhood may be a vegetable pedophile. It is quite possible that this person lives in San Francisco's Mission district and goes to the Ferry Building on Saturdays and looks for the tiniest, cutest, babiest vegetables she or he can find--at whatever cost. I know two such people. One lives with me, sometimes blogs with me, and the other is her cartoon Pixar manguy. I came home from my own Noe Valley farmers' market excursion this morning with a bag full of mature, hearty dark leafy greens and large Tokyo turnips to find these teeny-tiny baby baby radishes wedged together in a ziplock bag sitting on our kitchen island. Note the binder clip for relative scale.

I went, "EEP!" and immediately grilled Erin on where she got these infants and how much they cost. Marin Roots Farm stand at 20 cents per tiny radish, for a bag of 50 (who counted them?!). Marin Roots does have amazing produce but I'm always too cheap to get it and afraid of my own tendencies toward fetishizing cute things, especially food. Unable to resist their miniature charm, I swooped this ten-sack of tiny radishes away to my room for playtime with my set of Russian bubushka dolls. I also ran back to the kitchen to scoop up these cute baby baby shallots that Erin got from Diry Girl Produce to complete my obsessive compulsive laying out of cute things in little rows on top of my dainty handkerchief collection (see the tiniest tiniest babushka? that's smaller than the very tip of my fingernail).

I finally ate one of the little radishes and it was very crisp and deliciously earthy, but I devoured it so quickly and my belly was still hungry afterward. I felt like a violent ogre. After this frenzy passed, and I packed the tiny baby radishes back into their ziplock veggie outfacing babybjorn, I was left wondering whether the veggie pedophiles of this world get more pleasure from the overwhelming cuteness of these tiny, tender things or whether they thrive off the vertiginous feeling of being a powerful giant themselves in comparison to these wee helpless forms. I look into my own soul and continue to seek an answer in the abyss.

A Crafty, Home-Foraged Meal: Brussel sprouts, pomegranates, and parsely-pecan-date pesto

2011-01-15T07:32:00.000-02:00

There are moments in a life when all a person wants is to be alone, when the sonic and emotional weight of all those intrusions into the dreamworld of solitude crush upon the weeping soul, and the mere thought of leaving the house threatens to burst the delicate membrane of sanity. But then there is the body, with all of its demands. I am hungry. The call must be answered. And, tragically, there is nothing in the house to eat for dinner.

That is when the immigrant-raised, hoarder mind (and longtime fan of MacGyver) springs into action, digging through the forgotten annals of the crisper and cupboard to work its alchemy upon the sundry wilted, yellowed, dehydrated and jarred bodies of potential that had heretofore given up all hope, resigned to their appointment with the compost bin of time.

Here is how I managed to stay inside on this cold, winter night and feed myself with the sorry remnants scattered around my kitchen. (A snowless, California night, albeit, but one spent in a drafty shelter poorly equipped to keep out out the elements.)

What I unearthed around my kitchen:

- Wilted, fading brussels sprouts

- Yellowed parsley belonging to my roommate (and sometime blogmate) Erin. I justified requisitioning it on the grounds that she had already used it for the purpose she bought it for and who ever knows what to do with all that extra parsley and besides she had just gone through all my farmers' market honey last week when she had a cold, so owed me some provisions.

- Half a pomegranate languishing in the bottom of a tupperware

Seemed a little sketchy but the pomegranate smelled okay. I sliced off the end just to be safe.

- Assorted bits & bobs, odds 'n' ends (Piave cheese, garlic cloves, dried shitake mushrooms)

- Penne pasta cooked who knows how long ago

It turned out to smell a little rancid, so I bit my lip and threw it out. Luckily there was still some dry pasta left in the pantry, so I set some water to boil with salt and olive oil.

I stood thinking for awhile about how I was going to make this all taste good and not be depressing. Then the parsley gave me an idea. Tacked to our kitchen corkboard was a page from the Wall Street Journal I had come across at Stable Cafe back in October featuring fall pestos that, well, kind of blew my mind. An unlikely source, yes, but enterprising captains of industry hold dear to their weekend hobbies. The article "Goodbye Basil, Hello Pumpkin Seeds," gives ideas for 11 different pestos that go beyond the basic basil + pine nuts + olive oil equation.

I had never gotten into pesto before but this article was full of creative possibilities. Among them were:

pistachios + breadcrumbs + mint

lardo + rosemary

rapini + parmesan + porcini

walnuts + grapeseed oil

pumpkin seeds + spinach

Basically, just throw a complementary combination of some herb, plus nuts, and oil into a food processor (or grind it with a mortar and pestle if you're into Old World suffering) and the result is alchemical. With very few ingredients and relatively little effort, you could impress many many mouths and add a tasty topper to many many things (pasta, toasts, dead animal, other vegetables).

One of the parsley medleys reminded me that I had pecans and dates in the cupboard from a recent trip to the country store in Sebastopol, north of San Francisco, and I proceeded to make the most magic magic magic pesto ever:

Pecans, Parsley, and Date Pesto
Recipe adapted from Alon Shaya, of Domenica restaurant in New Orleans

In a food processor pulse together a 1/2 cup pecans, 1/2 cup parsley leaves (just chop the stems short but you barely have to chop the leaves), 1/4 cup Parmesan (or a salty, hard Italian cheese), 1/2 cup pecan oil (I used hazelnut oil), and a teaspoon of kosher salt until combined but not totally pureed. Transfer to a bowl. Fold in four chopped dates and two teaspoons balsamic vinegar.

The recipe recommends spooning the pesto over duck, pork, or ricotta spread on grilled bread, and I could see how the sweet bits of the dates would go well with one of these meats, but it was pretty exciting over penne pasta.

Before mixing the pasta and pesto, I cut the ends off the brussels sprouts and picked off the sadder yellow petals and sliced them in half lengthwise. Then I sauteed the three cloves of minced garlic until just brown, added the brussels sprouts, sprinkled them with salt, and sauteed for about 8 minutes, covering the pan for part of the time so they would steam through. About halfway through, I also threw in these shitake bits that I had rehydrated in the boiling pasta water and fished out with a mesh strainer spoon. As a last minute inspiration, I also spooned in a big dollop of some crazy delicious duck fat concoction my friend Jesse had left over here when he made us cassoulet the other day (a life-changing meal).

While I waited for the brussels edges to get crispy, I rescued the still-good seeds from that old pomegranate.

After everything was cooked, I tossed together the penne, the pesto, and the brussels-garlic-mushroom mix, then sprinkled the whole thing with my precious pomegranate seeds and grated Piave cheese.

Like the article's simple yet brilliant ideas for pesto, the meal felt like it was conjured out of next to nothing. Each bite was a miracle, the pomegranates bursting tartly over the nutty pesto, an occasional creamy sweet bit of date, and the salty garlic crunch of the brussels sprouts. I kept whispering, "I am a magician. I am a magician. I am a magician." A lack of humility that Angus MacGyver would surely disapprove of, but we should all be entitled to our private moments of megalomania, as long as they dissipate once another witness enters the room.

Delicata Ring in the New Year

2011-01-03T01:21:00.000-02:00

It is the year 2011. The champagne has been drained, the confetti cast, and the eek-y half of this blog has sprung back to life like one of those dormant fern balls soaked in water. It's been a long, solo march to the far poles of the vegetable kingdom this year, but I look forward to moving this blog beyond the kale towards an adventurous eggplant kohlrabi camaraderie (see here if you are confused).

Speaking of going beyond the kale, here is my new obsession--delicata squash rings. Aren't they divine? I should have worn these with some basil earrings and a cranberry bead necklace to my friend's New Year's party. (Instead, I wore striped overalls with a paper tiara and someone told me I looked like I'd just come from jail. Oh well.)

I got the idea of baking whole delicata rings from undergound food network celebrity chef Leif Hedendal while feasting on leftovers from a spectacular dinner he helped cater with sometime co-conspirator and intrepid culinary mover & shaker Nicole LoBue.

Despite being a winter squash, the delicata has a rind that's soft enough to eat and makes for a crisp prelude to its soft, sweetish inside. With some advice from Leif, here is how I made them.

ROASTED DELICATA RINGS

ingredients: delicata squash, olive oil, salt

Preheat the oven to 450°F. Yes, that's very hot.

Wash the squash very well since you and yours will be eating the rind. Slice off the ends and throw them in the compost (yes, it is necessary to have a compost bin to complete this recipe properly). Then slice the squash into 1/2-inch thick rings. I took a paring knife and sliced out the seedy centers from all the rings, but perhaps a more clever way to get the seeds out would be to slice the squash in half crosswise first and dig the entrails out with a long spoon (or chopstick?). This part I did not ask for advice about...

Toss the rings in a bowl with enough olive oil to coat generously and salt to taste. Spread the rings out on a baking pan/cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.

Roast in the oven for about 20-25 minutes, or however long it takes to get the rings to desired crispy-softness without blackening them beyond edibility (salty-crispy outside, soft inside, so good). About halfway through (say 10-12 minutes, you should flip the rings over, if you can be bothered. It's not necessary, but they'll roast more evenly that way.

Your guests will be delighted with this tasty new food for their fingers. I served them alongside a lentil and vegetable soup, a leek tart from the Chez Panisse Vegetables recipe, and raw radish slices with butter for a cozy wintry meal with old friends. The next day, I had some fun stacking the leftovers, as you can see:

Waking up.

2010-12-31T16:08:00.000-02:00

At the start of this year, I was in snowy Berlin. Feuerwerk blasts had echoed across Kreuzberg for days -- sinister at first, then enlivening -- but after the holiday, the whitened streets around our corner of Görlitzer Park fell quiet. Nearly everything was closed. We spent the earliest part of January wandering for too long between meals, pooling change for a single cup of glühwein, making a dinner of Turkish Delight and beer, pretending to be satisfied with cold blood sausage after walking 30 or so icy blocks to a coffee bar recommended by a friend.

I think it was the morning of the 3rd when the neighborhood began to stir. Around the corner from our apartment, in front of a previously dormant café, we found a man sculpting a pig out of snow. Spray bottle in hand, scarf neatly tucked, he explained that he needed to make a new one every few days because people (presumably) carried them off in the night. We asked if he knew if the café was open. "We are the café. So if you want something, come in." Sitting at a table over two croissants and heisse schokolade, N remarked, "Can you think of anywhere in San Francisco half as pleasant?"

Later that day, looking for dinner after dark, I was sulky because the raclette restaurant where I'd hoped to eat was booked -- filled with robust Germans, laughing, quicker than we were with reservations. I stomped down the sidewalk along the darkened, seething park, imagining bad spaghetti, certain that coziness had eluded us.

But then, a few blocks from our apartment, I let Nick steer me into Nest. A beacon, winningly disheveled, cavernous and white-walled with massive dark wood tables. We sat on a church-pew banquette. I relaxed. Our waitress, running around in fluourescent patchwork Nikes, charmed us with her description of pellkartoffeln: boiled potatoes. These came with pickled fish, red onions and dill, yogurt sauce, and bread.
"It's very poor food, very German. Good for winter."
I don't think she thought we'd want it. We did.
"It's going to take about ten mintues, because I have to boil the potatoes, yeah?"
We waited with beers, entranced by a trio of friends across the room, smiling quietly in sweaters, sharing pasta and salad from giant glass bowls.

Our kartoffeln came warm and towel-wrapped, in an oblong basket. Earthy, waxy, golden, next to pale, sweet-bright pickled herring and a bowl of quark. Our hands began to move, forks clinking: take a bite of fish, butter the bread, spear a potato, swipe it in cream, break for beer, keep going. Eat everything.

Sometime during that dinner blur, kartoffel became my favorite German word. Yes, there are other nice ones -- spiegelei, Kottbusser Tor, flohmarkt, tschüss! -- but kartoffel doesn't merely sound funny or pleasant. It turns something regular into something unexpectedly wonderful.

Next year, I will eat unexpectedly wonderful things, and I will write about them. Happy 2011!

Holiday Medley

2010-12-29T18:44:00.000-02:00

Hello dear friends. Here are some festive weird vegetables to feast your eyes on while you nibble away at leftovers and warm your fingers by the fire (or with your own steamy breath). These all come from the Heirloom Organics stand at the Ferry Building market. Above are purple orach and bordeaux spinach. The first is also called mountain spinach or goosefoot, and the second is a French variety that our very own colonial hillbilly francophile Thomas Jefferson liked to grow (the Heirloom man announced this fact). Look out for an upcoming post on Mr. Jefferson and his famous vegetable obsession.

And here are the cutest pair of carrot cherub peg-legs I've seen in awhile. A romanesco flourish to whoever can identify its two companions...

The one on the left may look and feel like a daikon or even a parsnip, but it is in fact a very robust white carrot. They are sweeter than the orange ones. That chubby fellow lasted me for days in various soups and salads. And the splash of hot pink on the right belongs to the watermelon radish, an old favorite around here at Weird Vegetables.

Okay, I'm off in search of hot springs and evergreens, maybe a mushroom or two. Much vegetable cheer to you.

Magic Mushroom Seasoning

2010-12-21T19:52:00.000-02:00

This post to be filed under: Asian Foods I Grew Up With and Never Questioned the Provenance or Chemical Composition Of Until Very Recently. (Should come right after Haw Flakes).

Somewhere in the mid-to-late-80s, my Vietnamese mother caught on to the evils of Monosodium Glutamate. It was clear that MSG had to go, but there seemed to be no adequate substitute. Regular salt didn't have that extra little je ne sais quoi, the quoi now rapturously popularized as umami or the Fifth Taste. Soy sauce had that added depth but could sometimes be overpowering in both color and taste. Nuoc mam, or fish sauce, had a pungency that required it to be used only sparingly.

Infinitely resourceful and a woman of great cunning, Mrs. Thao, as she is known in certain milieus, investigated the back alleys of Chinatown and penetrated the fluorescent obscurantism of Japantown's mini-malls.

Her golden discovery was this: Natural Mushroom Seasoning, Alternative Substitute for MSG and Chicken Essence.

For years I watched her sprinkle the tiny, tawny pellets into soups and stir-fries. After I moved out, she would always give me a jar of what I came to call the "magic mushroom seasoning." I never saw the original packaging. The mysterious substance would appear in old containers that once housed western spices and condiments with "mushroom seasoning" scrawled in my mother's singularly illegible handwriting on paper scraps scotch-taped around their middles or to their lids.

Then in my mom's spice cupboard I found this McCormick Family Size parsley container, with a printed label version of MUSHROOM SEASONING affixed cunningly, ransom-letter style, below the now-misleading brand name and just above "flakes," so as to suggest an entirely new product: McCormick Mushroom Seasoning Flakes (Perejil Picado). The unsuspecting eye would think this was just another regular seasoning, to be found innocuously in the Safeway spice aisle between Marjoram and Paprika.

One day recently, I finally cornered her. "Mom," I said. "I'm over thirty years old. A grown woman. Kind of. I think it's time I knew what this so-called mushroom seasoning really is and how to procure it myself."

She looked at me for a few seconds. "I don't remember where I got it. Somewhere on Clement St. probably."

I stared back at her, mind working. "It's MSG isn't it? I knew it. If it is, I can handle it. I promise. I won't tell the others."

Wordlessly, Mrs. Thao turned her back on me and walked into the pantry. She squatted to the floor and moved aside a 10 lb sack of rice. A flurry of plastic grocery bags, pocket packs of Kleenex, a box of expired Advil Cold & Sinus, and bags of green tea leaves and dehydrated black mushrooms flew past her head and landed at my feet. Finally, I heard the heavy rustle of thick foil packaging.

Hair tousled around her head like a floating bird's nest, my mother handed me that which I coveted: the original packaging of the now infamous magic mushroom seasoning:

A fascinating glut of information confronted me. My eye knew not which path to follow first. Buddhist swastikas, the regally pale daikon, the triple-decker Chinese-English-Vietnamese product name. From whence did it originate? What did the slightly ominous "SETSCO Test No (Chinese characters): W2136001" mean? Was this an experimental product, not yet legal on the U.S. market? Or did "GENERATION II" mean second generation, so more advanced and more healthful and tastier than the original incarnation? "No M.S.G.," "Cholesterol FREE," 0% of something in Chinese probably bad like MSG or cholesterol, the yellow triangle in the upper left corner assured me. I was informed that there were both calcium & Vitamin B lingering in this salty dust. And plus or minus 400 g of it in one package. But what kind of mushrooms were in this "mushroom" seasoning? Were those shitakes? What were all those other vegetables doing in the photo? Had they been involved in the flavoring too?

More of the mystery unraveled across the back of the package.

Here I learned of the technological prowess that had gone into developing this super seasoning:

"Using modern technology and special technique of extracting the relevant ingredients from mushroom, we are able now to enjoy the natural seasoning tasting as a substitute to MSG."

And finally, what I most burned to know--the ingredients:

Mushroom powder, Salt, Mushroom extract, Vitamin B, Calcium.

But far from resolving the mystery, this list only opened the door onto another, more disturbing, labyrinth, like a sparkling David Bowie beckoning me ever deeper. For not only were these just the "Main ingredients," suggesting that there were untold numbers of minor players left uncredited, but even more importantly, the kind of mushroom was not specified. And why did the mushroom have to be acted upon by "modern technology and special technique" to be divided into "powder" and "extract," leaving some other mushroom parts unaccounted for? Why had Vitamin B and calcium been deemed the most appropriate nutritional supplements?

I knew more answers would be found with the product's manufacturer, but even this avenue of inquiry led to a cipher wrapped in a riddle. . . all covered in secret sauce. My magic mushroom seasoning was a Product of Singapore, packed by Po Lo Ku Trading company, which also seemed to be in Singapore. But then there was also this other entity, HSinwell Co., Ltd, which seemed to belong to the next line of all-caps: TAIPEI TAIWAN. But then what was this "Vegetalk Food Supplies Pte Ltd (Singapore)" listed at the very bottom? I figured that "Ltd" was "limited" but what was "Pte"?

I should never have opened this Pandora's Box. My mother had tried to protect me. My head spun and I felt faint. The words swirled around my head in a terrible hallucinogenic cloud. Everything took on a deep purple tinge. To steady myself, I took a metal top out of my pocket and watched it spin madly on the table, reassuring myself of the reality of the situation. It wobbled and fell, and I knew there was yet another level of information to be mined.

The Internet took me by the hand and led me to the site of one Po Lo Ku. It turned out to be a registered trademark of the Hsin Sui Industry Co., a Taiwanese company (remember the "HSinwell Co., Ltd" on the packaging? Close enough...). The Singapore connection is through the exporter, Vegetalk Food Supplies Pte Ltd ("Pte" stands for Private, as in the very VIP exclusive sounding "Vegetalk Food Supplies Private Limited"). Incidentally, the Vegetalk website has an amazing tiled menu that features tiny vegetables that slide into view when your mouse passes over them (the radicchio and bok choy are my favorites).

Back on the Poloku website, an October 2007 press release announcing the introduction of its mushroom seasoning into India's markets offered some illuminating highlights. Company sales manager Hung-Te Sheu touts the texture of what seems to be their star product as superior to mere mushroom powders, boasting:

"The mushroom seasoning sold in the granulated form is unlike the powder form that gets soogy due to the humidity in India.  The mushroom seasoning can be exposed to air for about five days and  yet remains crisp." 

Through my various researches I was further able to ascertain that the mushrooms used are in fact shitake, though of a "special breed":

"The company is delivering a special breed shitake mushrooms into concentrated dices acting as a replacement to aginomoto." 

"Aginomoto" is a charming synonym for MSG. I also learned that the mushroom intensity can be varied according to desire:

"We make client-based mushroom seasoning. Some clients demand more mushroom content while other's want less. We are involved in B2C (Business to client) so far."

If there remains a single person who is unconvinced of the superiority of mushroom seasoning to aginomoto/MSG, here is Hung-Te's further testimony:

 "You feel thirsty after consuming MSG products but after using  the mushroom seasoning in their food, customers have given the feedback  that they do not feel thirsty." 

The press release leaves us with a final endorsement of the magical allure of their seasoning:

"Poloku mushroom seasoning has thus been  able to retain the original sweetness and freshness of the mushroom and  gives the most alluring taste if blended with the richness of one's  food."

I hadn't ever considered the sweetness of mushrooms, but perhaps that was the secret to the seasoning's textured flavor, an almost supersensory sweetness underpinning the savory. After returning from down the rabbit hole, I realize it looks the same, tastes the same, may still have the same amount of unknown harmful chemicals. I continue to sprinkle my soups and stir-fries with my magic mushroom seasoning. Am I persisting in dangerous ignorance or have I reached the practical limits of my knowledge about the origins of my food and acting as best I can considering what I have learned? Or should we stop talking about mushroom seasoning and just enjoy it, in the spirit of Jonathan Richman when he sings:

"He gave us the wine to taste
not to talk about it
He gave us the wine to taste
and not to discuss
so let's taste it, let's taste it
don't criticize it and waste it"

Weird Veg Logo Winner!

2010-12-20T16:07:00.000-02:00

Congratulations and a giant kohlrabi kale kiss of gratitude to Steph the Paisley Fox for designing our new Weird Vegetables banner and winning all the cookware she can get for $55! My little niece of three wise years wandered into the office while I was tinkering with the sizing in Photoshop and in her little voice she said "carrot... broc-oh-lee... raaaaadish." So cute! My artichoke heart is beating greenly with pleasure.

Kim Jong-Il's Veggie Fascination

2010-12-04T04:04:00.000-02:00

Okay, I am pausing Klaus Kinski being really abrupt and crazy at the start of My Best Fiend to show you what happens when one of the world's strangest leaders gets close to vegetables: massively spooky staring contest. A quick scan of facebook while loading the DVD brought me to this new and amazing blog: Kim Jong-Il Looking at Things. (Thanks, Mr. Simon, for all that you do.)

This candid shot with the huge radish brought tears to my eyes. Tears of what? Joy? Recognition? Shock? Hilarity? Who knows? Kim Jong-Il always appears so expressionless, and generally looks like a big, schlumpy doll in photos, so it's crazy to see his delicate eyebrows suddenly raised up above his sunglasses frame and his mouth turned down in unmistakable perplexity. "What is this radish I see before me?," his inner voice whispers. "Can its wisdom feed an entire nation?"

Again, a kind of surprise mixed with humor overtakes this normally composed leader as he encounters this ear of yellow corn. His face registers a response to the uncanny--that which is at once familiar and strange. Do the spaces between its kernels remind him of the spaces between his teeth? What labyrinth of time does this maize beckon him to enter?

He seems to feel at home in this green field of wheat, however:

He strokes his chin and remembers a spot of time when he was carefree and happy. But the effect seems to fade when this wheat is processed into crackers. The pastoral magic dissipates, and Kim Jong-Il is returned to our industrial present. He becomes agitated.

He seems to remain stern yet somewhat indifferent toward fruit...

... and maintains a sincere curiosity about smorgasbords.

Eat My Luigi

2010-11-30T18:34:00.000-02:00

Or is that Mario? Am I racist for thinking all short Italians with mustaches look the same? I'm calling it Luigi with brussels on top because our crabby olde Internet dweller, Endive Haricot, forwarded this dispatch and called it Luigi. Where did he find it? Somewhere in the mind-blowing art labyrinth that lives here. They call themselves Studio Jfish. Floating, wobbly hamburgers (ham-bo-go's) await you.

Those are turnips that were his eyes.... Probably radishes, actually, but I like the way "turnips" sounds better. ("Those are pearls that were his eyes." Glory to whoever can catch that double reference without Google). Also, did you notice that Luigi's entire face is a butternut squash?? There is some hardcore Arcimboldo action happening here. For realz.

Off-the-Grid Vegetables

2010-11-18T03:32:00.000-02:00

This post comes to you courtesy of the magic redwood grove wi-fi of the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur, California. My lovely Zoe and I took off on a coastal sojourn to be among the mists, cliff sides, creeks, and cypresses, to witness "the face of creation as God intended it," as Mr. Miller once raptured. We've been tucked away at a yurt village and campsite called Treebones, a former lumber mill perched on hills overlooking the crashing waves of the Pacific south of Big Sur. Besides their yurts, which have given rise to endlessly indulgent travel writer word play ("Flirting With Yurts," "Get a Yurt!," "Yearning for Yurts?," "Yurts: what goes around comes around . . . and around"), Treebones's other sophisticated hippie attraction is its off-the-grid status--qualified by its own water supply, three septic fields, clean energy fueled by two propane-burning turbines whose exhaust heats the pool, hot tub, and floors, plus an on-site fire suppression system (don't ask me how this works but a sign in the bathroom explains this all). On top of this, much of our dinner last night came from their organic garden perched over the sea, pictured above.

The usual fall/winter suspects abound in the Treebones garden: sprawls of squash, brassica rows in various states of growth (kales, chards, broccolis), lettuces, carrots, pockets of nasturtium.

Here is some exciting purple basil that Zoe imagined making deep purple pesto from:

And a spiky, slightly bitter green that looks to me like mizuna, though maybe a more astute Weird Veg reader can properly identify this for me (the wwoofer in the garden couldn't confirm my guess):

Perhaps the most dramatic members of this garden community were the matured brussels sprout stalks, like tiny trees or giant broccoli, depending on your starting perspective. These were stripped bare of their brussels-adorned branches and mostly there to dazzle visitors with their strange, pale green glory. Their tops look like collard greens, but the garden worker said they were too tough for people to like and mainly fed to horses. I didn't have a chance to ask the horses what they thought.

As we left the garden, this bird on wire saluted us in farewell. Hummingbirds seem to be the official spirit animal of the California Wild Coast. They've been buzzing their iridescent bodies onto fence posts and succulent stems, between the branches of persimmon trees, all the while kissing flowers and each other brazenly before our delighted faces.

I began this post at the Henry Miller library but had to break off while we moved on to dinner--we had planned on the famous Nepenthe but decided instead to huddle in the candlelight under the low Norwegian ceilings at the cozier, woodsier restaurant at Deetjen's. And now I bid you goodnight as we adjourn from the fireside at the Treebones lodge and retire to our humble tent on the cliffside. Let us all dream of waterfalls and tender artichokes and awake to waffles in the morning.

Weird Veg BANNER ART CONTEST!

2010-11-06T04:21:00.000-02:00

Just when you thought all the games and parades were over--Halloween, World Series, Dia de los Muertos, S.F. Giants homecoming cable car parade--I bring you the official Weird Vegetables BANNER ART CONTEST! Oh yeah. Okay, sit down, get ready. Calm your excitement by gazing into the waxy eyes of these animal vegetable paraffin creatures that my thoughtful friend John Kim sent me (and thanks to Dave Huang too, whose company imports these from China). For I lay before you a proposition as mysterious and absurd as the imposed relationship between vegetables and briefcases. Now, to explain.

Back while I was working frantically to meet my non-vegetable-related deadlines head on, an email arrived in the Weird Vegetables virtual letterbox from Eileen of the CSNPromo Team. She dangled free gifts before our curious noses, with tales of booty from Cookware.com in exchange for a WV product tie-in post. "Vegetable love cannot be bought so easily!" the cabbage dog and onion pig declared hotly, but the cauliflower sheep nuzzled my arm gently to say that $55 in cookware could actually be quite a nice thing. Determined not to sell out so transparently, I considered reviewing only products that could be relevant to the blog's raison d'être, such as the machine that transforms all vegetables into spirals, or tools that suggested a strange fear of dirt + compulsion towards gadgetry (potato peeler with extraneous toothbrush thing), or that merely sounded bizarre: the Ronco Veg-O-Matic.

But I decided in the end to leave my cluttered kitchen universe intact and instead to let one artistically inclined reader choose something they actually wanted--like a Le Creuset mustard jar with matching silicone spatula or that Global 2.5" sheeps foot peeler you've been drooling over--while also breaking my ennui at my own photo of vegetables that currently resides at the top of this blog. In this way, we might imagine that art will trump the convoluted strategems of commerce. The contest is as follows.

CONTEST GUIDELINES:
Design a banner to run across the top of this blog. The only requirement is that it say Weird Vegetables clearly (can be all lowercase letters or all caps too). In color or black & white. I will say I'm partial to some sort of illustration or graphic to contrast the photos on the blog. I'm not sure what the measurements up there are, but the jpg I uploaded was 35 x 7 inches or 2575 x 554 pixels, if that's any help. Email the jpg or other kind of image file (or a link to where it's posted) to weirdvegetables AT gmail.com.

The winner will receive $55 of credit to use on cookware.com, plus the ultimate tribute of having their art featured atop the illustrious blog-o-space that is Weird Vegetables. Let's say we'll decide in just over a month, so you have until December 15 to send in something eerie and wonderful. So spread the word, start roaming farmers' markets and the fields for inspiration, and get your sharpies and paint pots out, your scissors and knitting needles moving.

Squash the Rangers

2010-11-01T20:26:00.000-02:00

Now is the season when veggie lovers everywhere have outed themselves as unlikely sports fans. The San Francisco Giants are now one game away from the taste of sweat-stained victory and I am pulling out all my superstitious tricks to help them along. This kabocha squash from Happy Boy Farms is dedicated to closer Brian Wilson, the pitcher with a beard of tar, which birthed the postseason mantra "Fear the Beard!" (though reliever Sergio Romo's beard has emerged as a scary contender).

For me, and probably most accidental sports fans, it all goes back to childhood, when you sat with your brother, your cousin, your dad, through countless games at Candlestick Park shouting, "Good eye, good eye!" and "Ooh-ree-bay!" at the Giants' former shortstop, whose second cousin Juan Uribe has now inherited the chant as our current shortstop/third baseman and heavy hitter.

With laughable ease, I could have carved a more elaborate pumpkin face, like this one shown on the Fear the Beard blog (yes, there's a blog but it's not only baseball and kind of overwhelming to me),

...but I didn't want my little squash to develop a disturbed psyche, as cautioned in this shoebox greeting card--

--sent for Halloween by the aunt of this lovely lantern fish:

Let's go GI-ANTS!

Pumpkin Play Time

2010-10-31T21:11:00.000-02:00

This spooky scary Halloweeny edition of Weird Vegetables is brought to you by the spookiest scariest social networking interface around: Facebook!

While I lay in bed with a monster cold, my friends fell to their pre-Halloween pumpkin productions with admirable industry, which I was able to witness from a prone position via my laptop.

High school homie Danny Murphy, so true an S.F. Giants fan he probably bleeds orange and black, carved this SF logo in honor of the current magical baseball postseason.

Meanwhile, Char Booth of black-eyed peas fame, posted this oatmeal-in-a-pumpkin breakfast special:

To make your own, scoop out that pumpkin, then toss in these ingredients:
oats, grated pears/apples, raisins, fruit compote, soymilk or water, nutmeg, cinnamon, pinch o' salt. The oatmeal to liquid should be about 1:2 (so 1/2 cup oatmeal would be a little over a cup of water or soymilk)

Then bake at 375-400 for an hour or so. Put the cover on for the first half and then let it breathe. You can then use the baked pumpkin meat for pie, bread, or other pumpkin-based treats. Char writes, "the original idea came from boingboing, who got a diff recipe from another food blog... theirs was a bit sugarcore for me." Sugarcore's a bit freaky to me too--we like to keep it straightveg over here, SxV (though preferring veggies to sugar is always a bit queer).

Happy Halloween! Go GIANTS!!

And the Beet Goes On...

2010-10-25T16:55:00.000-02:00

A tag after my own heart...

It's been awhile vegetable friends. I fell off my weathered butternut saddle, or rather was dragged off by multiple varieties of invasive species. Lover of weedy diversity that I am, I welcomed these insistent offshoots that led my energies down paths of food history, of ecology, of poetic proprieties, of Giants baseball.

A storm of deadlines blasted this neglected terrain, and I missed a few beets. But the fall sprouts have unfurled their greeny tendrils out of the freshly drenched soil, and Weird Veg is back. There will be radish balloons, clowns sad and happy, zoo trains, contests, salad sideshows and raw food rodeos.

The Giants are in the World Series and the beet goes on...


Even pedestrian bridges have been known to sprout beets in times of urban need

It Came From Santa Rosa...

2010-10-05T19:34:00.000-03:00

South down the 101 it rolled, past the Petaluma chickens, stopping only for a quick peek in at the L'eggs Hanes Bali Playtex outlet shop, then back onto the highway, careering like a ghostly runaway tire past the semis and big rigs until it got hungry in Corte Madera, stopped for an organic snack, then plunged bravely into the foggy wind gusts on the Golden Gate Bridge.

I had not expected an evening caller and put my eye curiously to the key hole at the sound of polite knocking. I saw this peeping back at me:

He introduced himself as a white winter squash and resembled a larger, thicker-skinned version of a summer patty pan squash (perhaps this Italian variety or this one). I let the fellow in and he took a seat on a red wicker stool at the kitchen table. He smoked a fennel pipe and told me about the garden in Santa Rosa where he had come from. He was raised among the prized heirloom tomatoes nestled next to a modest plot of grapevines belonging to some Vietnamese friends of my parents. He'd never quite felt at home among the more popular produce, sitting in the corner like a sad pale moon while the merry tomatoes jumped on the trampoline. Looking for a place to fit in, he decided to venture south to San Francisco, where a sprig of calendula at Hayes Valey Farm whispered to him about my penchant for weird vegetables.

I had already begun roasting some parsnips, tomatoes, and half a kabocha squash to use in a pasta sauce, and he suggested he jump in the oven as well to warm up a bit.

"Whole?" I said.
"Whole," he said.

So I put him on a baking sheet next to the kabocha and diced parsnips. After 40 minutes at 400 degrees, his edges browned and sank a bit but the rest looked the same.

But something was wrong. I could sense it. I sliced him open to check his insides.

Suddenly I noticed a sinister ring of brown goo on the bottom of the squash. Rot. He'd been on the edge of decay but had tried to pass himself off as edible. Still, the insides looked benign enough, if not quite appetizing. I spooned out the seeds and scooped out a bite of white flesh. It hadn't exactly gone bad, but it was not good. No, the swollen, bland bite left my mouth immediately and plopped wetly into the compost bin like an overripe plum. There was no hope. No one would eat this, not even me. It was a little depressing, but with less soggy pathos than this attempt.

The only thing to do was to put the poor fellow back together again and send him off to Pixar in a jaunty disguise. I had some connections there, I said, maybe we could sneak him onto a storyboard for the Ratatouille sequel.

Thinking quickly, I pulled together some scraps from the cutting board and made him a face. "Kids like you better when you have a face," I explained, "as do adults, for that matter. Having a face makes almost any object cuter and thus more endearing and worthy of love. Take Marcel the Shell, for example."

But my white squash was still unhappy, as his newly constructed face showed.

I stood back and surveyed his features carefully.

"It's the soul patch, isn't it?" I asked. He nodded. I had known it was wrong: too Ethan Hawke nineties coffeehouse pseudo-intellectual, but neither of us had to say it outright. We both knew.

I plucked off the droopy fennel frond, et voila!

Seymour the Squash was ready for his new public. If Pixar didn't bite, perhaps Dreamworks would be interested. He rolled back out into the October night, a sheen of inspiration glinting off his new face in the moonlight, the decay spreading throughout his bottomside momentarily forgotten.

Black-Eyed Peas in Pink and Green

2010-09-14T17:33:00.000-03:00

Oh, remember when we went swimming at the lake and had a picnic and gave each other silly nicknames after different cheeses? Char brought some black-eyed peas, still in the pod, to share, and we ate them raw. I didn't know they spend their salad days in merry pink and green, and that only in their dessicated undead state do they become beige with black eyes. They were more tasty to look at than to eat raw, though, I'll admit.

Beware, these peas are not really peas but beans. Somebody better tell Cook's Thesaurus. As cowpeas (a beany family), these Vigna unguiculata operate in that shadowy space of misrepresented legumes, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the butterfly pea (Clitoria ternatea), chickpea (Cicer arietinum), pigeon peas (Cajanus cajan), and the winged pea (Lotus tetragonolobus). Thank you to the Library of Congress Everyday Mysteries patrol for informing us of this important distinction and also for telling us that:

As legumes they are extremely nourishing vegetables, both to people and to the soil. They are able to fix nitrogen, meaning nitrogen from the air is taken in by the plant and bacteria living in the roots convert it to a useable plant nutrient. Because of this process, nitrogen-fixing plants improve soil quality by adding nutrients back into the soil.

The "peas" bounced around in the topsoil of my belly as I let go of the rope swing and plunged into the cold cold water. I swam alone to the far end to investigate but got scared of lake monsters as I sank my toes into the muck around the tree roots and very soon turned back to join the others in the sun.

HAW!

2010-09-09T20:02:00.000-03:00

Haw flakes were once and will always be a favorite snack of mine. I went to elementary school in San Francisco's Richmond district, which is one of the several unofficial Chinatowns we have around here, and Haw Flakes were an unquestioned part of every black-haired child's snack life.

The ingredients are simple: haw, sugar, water. The discs recall communion wafers and melt away if you place them on your tongue and wait patiently. Press them to the roof of your mouth, and they break apart softly into grainy pieces that dissolve quickly. The taste is only very slightly tart and mostly fruity, but again in a kind of oblique manner, not so exaggeratedly flavored in the camp way of mainstream American fruit snacks. Some have compared it to the taste of fruit leather or fruit roll-ups, which I think is more or less accurate, despite the difference of texture.

I lived for an impressive amount of time before ever having to doubt the normalcy of this snack or to explicate its ingredients in any meaningful way. Haw was haw and that was that. Sometimes a lighter-haired friend would venture some objection to this mysterious package, but they were usually made to feel shame for their ignorance by the Asian majority. At some point between college and graduate school, I fell out of my Asian buffer zone, with the consequence that Haw Flakes became newly cast as a strange freakshow food to be sniffed at suspiciously and the accuracy of its terse ingredient list challenged ("I don't know... they're probably not listing all the chemicals in it"). I would offer the haw with assurances of its auspicious, most delicious qualities, but couldn't really say whether "haw" was a Chinese word or a substance also known here.

It turns out that "haw" in fact refers to the crushed up berries of the hawthorn tree and used to be eaten in rural areas of the American south before the industrial food system taught people to be afraid of food that didn't come from a grocery store (though the Chinese hawthorn may vary from trees found in this hemisphere).

Here is a great description of Haw Flakes on Asiangrocery.com that was written as a serious information source after the site had to take down its earlier reference to a Haw Flake writeup by some "totally clueless American" when said "clueless American" wrote Asiangrocery.com to complain and threaten a code-yellow Homeland security alert. Read angry letter here. And click here to read the angry American's original post, which includes such choice lines as, "What's a firework doing with an ingredient list? And what the hell was a 'HAW', anyway? Haw haw haw! Well, since the whole ten-pack cost thirty-nine cents, I figured what the hey." and "There was no way I was going to eat these babies until I figured out what 'haw' meant - I didn't want to find out it was Chinese for 'pig innards' after knocking down a pack."

The Fruits of Today's Labor...

2010-09-06T18:26:00.000-03:00

...are so very sweet. San Francisco's jumping on this heat wave craze, and I'm taking Labor Day off from vegetables to spend some quality time with fruit.

Watermelon Agua Fresca

8 cups diced watermelon
1 cup water
juice of more or less 1 lemon
a couple of old wrinkled kiwis, diced
some strawberries you were meaning to make jam from but that languished in the fridge, sliced

Put them all in a big pitcher. Smush with a wooden spoon and if you still want it smoother, put a hand blender in there (also known as immersion blender). Or use a regular blender. Chill in the fridge and/or add ice.

It may be a little on the tart side, but so many things are too sugary these days, it's nice to remember the sweetness of fruit alone. Your wooden armadillo will love it.

Cranberry Beans (or Borlotti?)

2010-09-01T03:55:00.000-03:00

Okay, I'm still trying to get my groove back, waiting to exhale, trying to make some deadlines, but I wanted to squeeze in one more post before August flipped into September. Back in the Bay, the August produce is once again life-affirming, but I fear that the cold summer has made the Early Girl tomatoes not so spectacular this year. It's still early in the season, but the specimens I tasted from my favorite purveyors, Dirty Girl and Tomatero, haven't been as out of this world sweet and vivid as in past years.

But these cranberry beans have provided some excitement to distract me from tomato disappointment. Iacopi Farm, also at the Ferry Building, always has the best fava beans and English peas but I'd never tried their cranberry shelling beans before. My visiting Italian friend Valeria saw these dramatic pods and exclaimed, "Borlotti!" and paused for a golden moment to think about shelling beans with her mamma back in Milano. But the sweet boy working the stand said, no, that these were cranberry beans and pointed to a different package of dried beans labeled Borlotti. The Cook's Thesaurus reduces various aliases to the same identity linked by a simple equation:

cranberry bean = borlotti bean = saluggia = shell bean = salugia bean = crab eye bean = rosecoco bean = Roman bean = fagiolo romano

Nevertheless, I suspect that the bean people have a finer feel for the nuanced ways in which these all retain their very own character. A less-fatigued Kale Daikon would get to the bottom of this, but I'll leave that thought as a placeholder for now. Cranberry beans also remind me of Tongue of Fire beans, though I think the latter have a white (rather than greeny) undertone and come from Tierra del Fuego, at the southern point of South America, instead of Italy.

One must, of course, take extra time to shell the beans but since they are fresh, they don't require the advanced soaking that dried beans do, which works better for the haphazard way in which I embark upon meals. I love the quiet, meditative state that standing over a bowl and doing some simple, pleasant task like shelling beans lulls a person into. If I'm shelling or sorting with someone else, then our conversation takes on that kind of easy, meandering rhythm people get into when they can talk without having to stare at each other across a table, and silences seem natural rather than awkward.

The shelled beans are how I imagine little dinosaur eggs, some pale green, others mauve speckled. They don't really look like actual cranberries, but the True Red Cranberry Bean from Maine, highlighted in the Slow Food USA Ark of Taste "endangered species" list of best-quality, delicious-tasting heirloom varieties, truly does look like a bright red cranberry.

To cook these beans, I just followed the recommendation of the young farm stand man and boiled the shelled beans in lightly salted water for about 30 minutes (actually I accidentally overcooked them while having one of those high-school style hour-long phone conversations with someone who lives 10 minutes away). Then I sauteed them with minced garlic and olive oil--you can also add shallots or onions if you like--added more salt and had a lovely multi-hued lavender bean meal. The beans have a muted, nutty taste that seems somehow equivalent to their understated palette. Chez Panisse likes to smash the cooked beans into a spread to put on bread, which sounds like a delicious idea. I might also add bits of parsley next time for color.

And while sitting on the kitchen floor, talking on the phone and waiting for the beans to cook, I made a Weird Veg sign from the empty hot pink pods.

It reminds me of those stylized "Chinese" fonts on old signs for Chop Suey restaurants and other oriental mysteries.

http://sfasianarts.com/page3/page3.html

http://jjohnnydollar.blogspot.com/2007/02/chinese-resturant-matchbooks-so-cool.html

Cirque de Légume

2010-08-19T03:42:00.000-03:00

Just more proof that humans are waaaaay weirder than vegetables.

I've been slammed with deadlines since getting back to S.F. and have left everything else in the dust, including my poor beautiful, strange vegetables. But luckily, my friends have been forwarding me material to keep afloat, like this clip from an Edinburgh show put on by a pair of iceberg-lettuce-and-leek-loving clowns. Honk your nose if you love carrots! (Thanks Conor!)

Artemisia, is that you?

2010-08-05T14:59:00.000-03:00

A wave of work and schlepping back from New York to San Francisco has knocked me off my once-a-week WV rhythm. I've got some wonderful things to tell about the Poughkeepsie Farm Project, probably the highlight of my trip, but while I catch my breath and pull it all together, I cast to you this scrap of mystery. You all were so spunky when chiming in to identify that cat mint that I thought I would ask about this specimen as well.

Erin and I encountered it while at a friend's hillside hideout in Santa Barbara. Its spiny leaves look similar to rosemary but they have a lighter, chalkier texture and taste almost sage-y. Our friend said, "Rue?" But I thought I recognized its bristling twin at the Cloisters garden in New York:

The sign identified this medieval herb as Southernwood or Artemisia abrotanum, named after the goddess of hunting, Artemis. Apparently they still use it as a poultice in Germany, but most people nowadays seem to use it for filling sachets with a lemony scent. Entertaining aliases include: Lad’s Love, Maiden’s Ruin, and Old Man. Another site cites its use in ye olde ladies' bouquets and "tussie mussies." Bonus points for whoever is industrious enough to Google "tussie mussies" first and report back.

So perhaps the Santa Barbara plant is also some kind of Artemisia? If not southernwood, then maybe sagebrush? Help from the vegetable geniuses out there is much appreciated. Here are more photos to work from:

Cloistered Vegetables

2010-07-19T02:40:00.000-03:00

There are times when the vast, debauched machine of the metropolis becomes too much for the mere creature of flesh and blood and even the city-bred must seek refuge from its vertiginous glass-and-steel modernity and subterranean velocities. In the northern reaches of heat-struck Manhattan, I found a garden oasis and the unexpected blooms of a well-known vegetable. Do you recognize it?

A friend's offhand suggestion led me to the Cloisters, a medieval outpost of the Metropolitan Museum of Art built in 1938 as a composite of French monasteries from the twelfth through fifteenth centuries to house their collection from that time period. After picking up another friend's Schwinn cruiser in Harlem, I cycled carefully in the bike lane up Frederick Douglass through Washington Heights to Fort Tryon Park, where I visited the museum and then napped on a park bench overlooking a flower garden and the Hudson River, undisturbed except for the occasional falling leaf or passing jogger (the greenway bike path along the Hudson was a good downhill route for the way back).

Wandering in the mercifully air-conditioned galleries among busts of saints and sculpted ramblers was a balm to my sweltering spirits

and I was soon ready to venture outdoors again for the Cloisters garden tour.

The tour was delightfully laden with vegetable lore, but before that I learned that cloisters are "quadrangles enclosed by a roofed or vaulted passageway, or arcade," common to monasteries, and that a garth (Garth? yes!) is the square or rectangular courtyard that these passageways surround. The tour takes you through the three museum gardens, with a brief visit to the woven plants in the famous unicorn tapestries, which I know from a long-ago furtive and absorbing interlude with Tracy Chevalier's historical romance The Lady and the Unicorn.

The three gardens are the Cuxa Cloister Garden, which is modeled on the medieval pleasure garden (full of flowers and sweet-smelling plants), the Trie Cloister Garden, which is meant to resemble a wilder mix of meadow life and evoke the millefleur pattern (thousand flowers) of medieval tapestries, and finally the Bonnefont Cloister Herb Garden, which is planted according to "a ninth-century edict of emperor Charlemagne, naming 89 species to be grown on his estates," as the brochure tells us. This last garden was where my weird veg antennae starting twangling in all directions, as we admired the white pompoms of the leek blooms pictured at the top (did you guess correctly?) and all sorts of MAGIC PLANTS.

I've always preferred magic to the disenchantments of modern science, except of course for when my health is on the line and the medieval medicine man suggests a dose of herbs followed by bloodletting. This magical patch included mandrake, sweet basil, Italian arum, vervain, the poisonous thornapple, and St. John's wort.

Apparently, witchy activity reaches its peak during the hot summer months, so St. John's wort (left), which blooms around the time of the solstice, and vervain were thought to ward off the nefarious antics of demons, witches, and fairies.

It wasn't surprising to learn that many monks preferred to eat raw vegetables, out of a sense of asceticism, though I hadn't ever pictured monks munching on radishes before. They also preferred their salads more on the bitter side than most present-day Americans, mixing in strong herbs, like sage and rue.

But what did astound me was that the intricate scenes of the 16th-century unicorn tapestries were dyed with colors from only three plants: weld for yellow (left), madder for red, and woad for blue. There was so much more that I learned but I'll let you take the tour for yourself. Or the botanically curious but far from New York can read the very informative blog that the gardeners write called The Medieval Garden Enclosed.

Freshening Up

2010-07-16T00:49:00.001-03:00

Eep! Close the dressing room door puh-leaze! Okay, Erin and I have been thinking about freshening up the site for awhile now--you know, painting the walls, getting rid of dingy furniture, musty books, wilted carrots--and I'm experimenting with rearranging some things. But... being a total techno RUBE, I seem to be doing it all live, with no real hidden staging area, so please be patient with us as the site kind of freaks out and throws your google reader for a loop. Then we'll all adjust to the change and feel like we've got a new perspective on the world, an added zing in our daily routine. And I'm working on commissioning or doodling up a new Weird Vegetables title banner (illustrated perhaps? any volunteers?), so that too might be getting all crazy on you in the next couple of weeks. Patience is appreciated in the vegetable universe.

Here, have this nice toast with hot pink beet spread to calm your jangly nerves. I got it from the co-op in Ann Arbor back in March. Wouldn't that make a rad lipstick color? Hot Beets! I think Nars should do it.

Addendum 7/17
Inspired by this age of full disclosure and reality TV, twittering facebooks and 24-hour cable news, I thought I would share with you the real story behind this overnight redesign (though it is true that Erin and I have been talking about it for awhile now). Despite the rainbows & sunshine song and dance routine I perform for the world, my kale levels do dip dangerously from time to time, as when I'm traveling alone and poring over papers in archives for many many hours at a stretch and that's when I do things like this. My email to Erin explains:

Hey Erin!

I got obsessed with the new site design tool and did a bunch of sprucing up last night. I hope that's okay! It's like that thing where you're lying in bed staring at the wallpaper staring at the wallpaper staring at the wallpaper and all of a sudden there are terrible little naked figures crawling up and down it and you're starting to lose your mind and you feel like either it goes or you do. So I had to motivate and change it up a bit. Thoughts?

[blah blah, other things I wrote to her, etc.]

I loaf you!

-k

Miner's Lettuce

2010-07-15T00:50:00.000-03:00

In a cavern, in a canyon,
Excavating for a mine
Dwelt a miner forty niner,
And his daughter Clementine.

One day, Clementine looked at her pa, who was lookin' rather run down and pale, and said, "Pa."

"Yes, darlin'?" he replied.

"I been thinkin'..."

"'Bout what hon?"

"'Bout how you been lookin' mighty pale lately, kinda worn out and your teeth've been fallin' out. Kinda scurvy like."

"Well, you might be right about that. I been feelin' right low lately. Thought it was all that fool's gold I been turnin' up near the mill. Nothin's been pannin' out."

"Pa, what I think is, I think you been eatin' too much baked beans and sourdough bread. And not enough greens."

The miner cocked his head and scratched at his dark beard, frowning. Clementine hurried out the back door of the shack and stooped down in the grass to gather what looked like tiny, bright green lily pads hanging off long stems, each one with a sprig of dainty white flowers at its center. Back in the kitchen, she took the bunch from her apron and laid it down on the table in front of her pa.

The miner leaned over to inspect the offering. His scalp was sunburned under his thinning hair and the back of his neck was creased in dirt. "Aw hell, woman," he spat between chapped lips. "This condition o' mine ain't nothin' some whiskey and sardines won't cure. Them greens're for rabbits 'n' little girls." But upon seeing her stricken face, he relented. "All right, darlin', don't you cry, I'll try a few. Just ta please you."

And as he tasted this humble weed he'd looked at without seeing a thousand times on his way past the pines down to the river, his eyes lit up. "Well, I'll be damned, missy. That stuff's like a little burst o' lemon rain. That's real nice, yes indeed."

Clementine beamed and handed him a tin cup of water to wash it down. She knew if he kept eating that funny lettuce, he'd perk up and their salad days as a family might last just a few years longer. She wasn't ready to be married yet to one of the rough young men who came whistling round after dinner to catch a glimpse of her pretty face and tried to make her smile with their crude jokes.

It wasn't too long before the other miners took a liking to this surprise salad that contained the kind of vitamins their bacon didn't (namely "C"), and once again, scurvy belonged solely to the pirates.

Dreadful sorry to Clementine, but the native Americans were onto this green trail munchee long before the miners got credit for it.

Once upon a time it was called Indian lettuce, though also favored in English cookery, as Mary Elizabeth Parsons recounts in her 1897 book The Wild Flowers of California:

The succulent leaves and stems are greedily eaten by the Indians, from which it is called 'Indian Lettuce.' Mr. Powers, of Sheridan, writes that the Placer County Indians have a novel way of preparing their salad. Gathering the stems and leaves, they lay them about the entrances of the nests of certain large red ants. These, swarming out, run all over it. After a time the Indians shake them off, satisfied that the lettuce has a pleasant sour taste equaling that imparted by vinegar. These little plants are said to be excellent when boiled and well seasoned, and they have long been grown in England, where they are highly esteemed for salads.

Some might call it a weed, but this relative of purslane that grows in abundance almost everywhere you look in Northwestern park land is taking gold from fools at the Ferry Plaza Market for $6/lb. The Presidio and Golden Gate Park have great, secluded patches for the discerning eye to find. But if you don't have the inclination to wander among the trees instead of among tourists and/or you have a phobia of dog pee (or ants), then you should try the impeccable "wild-crafted" specimens at the Marin Roots farm stand.

Erin and I found this miner's lettuce growing in a small cemetery in Forestville, near the Russian River. Their souls are lost and gone forever, but the grasses and flowers grow so sweetly over the gravestones and the spiders weave webs between the trees that glisten in the fairy light, so that the mournful mind is made quiet by the scene.

Fort Greene Veggies

2010-07-10T15:13:00.000-03:00

This morning I woke up with ambitions of heading down to Prospect Park and the big Brooklyn farmers' market at Grand Army Plaza then hopping over to the Brooklyn Museum of Art to catch my hero Kiki Smith's show but was feeling a bit groggy from yesterday's daytime dissertation-writing bender (overpriced cheap white wine and other low-level toxins were helping me face down my demons--we all need drastic measures sometimes) and a night of hopping around New York that ended in watching the most incredible SPAZZ performance I've ever seen: Khaela Maricich of The Blow and formerly of the Microphones singing solo at Joe's Pub. It was like watching a speed-freak do karaoke while breaking into occasional trip-hop dance moves. And then she sang the sweetest song to her girlfriend who was sitting up in the balcony. And talked about writing a song for Britney Spears to sing before taking off her t-shirt and twirling it around her head while jumping around in a black unitard. She is so amazing.

But back to vegetables--after being dragged out of bed by the potty needs and beseeching eyes of two naughty-cute dachshunds that I'm dog-sitting in Clinton Hill, my weary self decided to stay close and visit the Fort Greene greenmarket, which happens at Fort Greene park and near a big Saturday flea market. After picking up iced coffee at Choice, which is connected to the Choice Greene bougie grocery a block away (think Bi-Rite) where I've already splurged on Point Reyes blue cheese, and then running into a San Francisco acquaintance who has an inspiring design blog that is much prettier and more read than this one, 2 or 3 things i know [insert comment about it being a small world and how Brooklyn=the Mission and you're a fool for thinking you could hide out here and be anonymous], we waddled our way down to the park.

One thing I'm finding about New York is that it just wears me down too much to try to stick to my usual produce principles, as well as those of cooking over eating out. So here I often just buy vegetables and fruit that look good without taking the time to ask as many questions as I normally do. (And it's hard to dawdle when you've got two hotdogs on a leash that anyone could step on or stroller-smash at any moment.) But I'm also finding that information at farmers' markets isn't as accessible as at the markets I usually go to back in San Francisco, so there's less information about certification or growing practices, while the people working the stands seem unused to customers asking these kinds of questions, often responding with vague answers and question-mark faces, though not always. I guess it's more like shopping at the Alemany and Heart of the City Civic Center markets than at the Ferry Plaza or Noe Valley markets. One stand at the Fort Greene market had a sign that said "certified naturally grown" but I wasn't quite sure what that meant--I promise to investigate next time.

The most interesting things I picked up were lemon cucumbers, pea shoots, and garlic scapes, which are a bit tougher with more bulbous tips than the dainty green wands that appear earlier in the season (see top photo; peashoots are above left). Fruitwise, I was quite taken with the gooseberries and with the clever little red hairnet covers the farm had to cap off the pint box. I don't think I've ever seen gooseberries on the west coast. They're like sour grapes with a sweet tinge, and have the most wonderful tiny watermelon stripes running down their translucent spheres. The farmstand man said people often make jam out of them and then wrinkled his nose at me (but in a friendly way) when I suggested popping them had a similar shock-effect as taking shots of kombucha. Today, I write with the power of kombucha--only a low level of alcohol, though still too much for the finger-wagging Puritans at Whole Foods, it seems.

I get the feeling that the tone of this post is veering toward the spastic, with even more run-ons than usual. The heat and intense bouts of writing about poetry and trying to do too much in general is melting my brain I think. Oops!

Eastern Veggie Kin

2010-07-08T14:59:00.000-03:00

More on this greeeeen soup to come, but first: I'm out in New York for a July soujourn and trying to stay cool in this record sweltering heat (it broke 100 degrees yesterday and no Italian ice could console me). Of course the thing I always miss most from the West is the produce, though I've been able to find some nice greens and peaches at the Union Square farmers' market and will investigate the Grand Army Plaza market just north of Prospect Park in Brooklyn on the weekend.

Touching down in New York always seems to generate a certain amount of bumpkin confusion on my part, mainly in the areas of housing, transportation, and feeding myself. On this last area, I realize I've become a special-needs eater almost by accident, just from becoming so used to having ready access to perfectly ripened, organic, mostly locally grown produce year-round and also being able to glean lots of information about where most things I eat come from or how they were raised and produced. At this point my eating restrictions (tending toward fresh and unprocessed, mostly vegetables, grains, and fruit) are less a matter of weight or ideas of healthful eating as the even more urgent fact that my body begins to rebel (getting into bouts of cranky sluggishness) after ingesting too much airport food and last-minute greasy goodies because I got too tired and hungry to wait for the local co-op or natural foods store to present itself.

After some initial question marks about subletting, I felt very lucky to have landed in a Harlem house-sit (sweet friends of friends) for my first thrilling week in the sticky gray capital of pigeons and highrises, where there was not only homemade purple cabbage sauerkraut and home-brewed kombucha (two mothers, bless their souls!) but also food composting. The intrepid couple who so graciously opened their home to me had taken it upon themselves to start a compost bin in their backyard, cleverly stowing the kitchen scraps in the freezer until ready for transfer. My hosts-in-absentia also tipped me off to Strictly Roots, a West Indian vegan soul food eatery a couple blocks away, where the motto painted on the wall mural declares, "We serve nothing that crawls, walks, swims or flies." They had run out of food by the time I got there, just before 9pm, but were jolly enough to flirt like mad and dish me up a to-go box of random, delicious scraps (sauteed veggies with curry sauce and yuba strips), plus a slice of strawberry cake, on the house.

Adding to the wholesome glow of kindred vegetable spirits was another encounter I had at the Westside Market over by Columbia University to the west of where I was staying. Lingering in the prepared soups section, I fell into conversation with a white-haired, bespectacled man about the merits of the cucumber-spinach versus the cucumber-avocado chilled soups. In a leisurely manner, we discussed the potential heaviness of the spinach, wishing that it was dill instead, and wondered about the yellow-tinged color of the pricier avocado blend. I settled on the darker green, shown above with dollops of the tangy homemade sauerkraut and some thick plain yogurt. Surprisingly, the spinach taste seemed to have vanished under the more dominant cucumber tone, adding mainly its thick texture. The coolness of the soup was a balmy noontime break in the throbbing heat.

Of course, by the time I finished shopping, another older man had shouted at me to "Move!" out of his way, which shook me up a bit, though perhaps it wasn't so different from a similar soul at Berkeley Bowl who might grumble even worse things at me into his or her groceries in lieu of shouting into my face.

Dropping Veggie Knowledge

2010-07-06T00:40:00.000-03:00

So, the other day, during a routine procrastination check of the site meter, I had to do a double take when I noticed our daily hit count for June 21 was listed at an eye-popping 588 (it's usually around 70-80 per day). Conducting some basic cyber sleuthing, I tracked the sudden spike back to the online intellectual gymnasium known as Mental Floss (also in print!). Turns out that the topic of Monday's fun fact quiz was Obscure Veggies, and the final question borrows a mysterious veg photo from our very own WV Quiz the Third. I freely admit that I only answered 7 of 9 questions correctly, but that I did at least get that last one right. If I had known it all, I might have been forced to question the need for further weird vegetable research via this self-educational vehicle (aka blog).

Take a shot at flossing your mind and check out how many green bits you can get from between your folds of gray matter.

And here are our own WV quizzes I and II.

Rose's Poison Potato Heart

2010-06-29T18:21:00.000-03:00

A heart-shaped nightshade, chloro-filling itself green, spying us with its seedy eyes as it imagines disrupting our nervous systems under the surge of its alkaloid toxins; they ripen the longer it sits on display in the kitchen.

The fierce and fabulous bike educator Rose Johnson showed me her heart when I visited her Panhandle apartment two weeks ago to interview her for a series on LGBT bike leaders that the S.F. Bicycle Coalition commissioned for Pride Month. (Wanting to volunteer more for the SFBC but never having a regular schedule, I decided to contribute by writing for them.) As she made me a lunch of salad with chickpeas, summer squash, and red sea salt sprinkled over boiled eggs--I brought cranberry juice and Tartine bread--I discovered that we also shared a veggie passion.

That crafty Rose has parlayed her vegetable knowledge and cooking skills into a way to make ends meet and supplement her work teaching bicycle safety classes and leading public school children on rides. While working at an organic grocery store, which would send her home with their "ugly" vegetables, deemed too weird for rational consumers, she got creative with her veggie bounty and eventually dreamed up the idea for Apothocurious, a "CSCA," or Community Supported Culinary Adventure, in which she delivers weekly spreads, sauces, and salads to customers on her rusty trusty bestie, a Fuji Finest road bike. Rose is about to embark on a summer adventure, and so Apothocurious is on what she terms a "hummus hiatus," but check out her blog for updates on when the spreads will be back on the table.

After we discussed this sinister-cute potato heart, I happened to watch Agnes Varda's amazing amazing 2000 documentary about those who make use of the otherwise wasted scraps of industrialization The Gleaners and I (which is really The Gleaners and the Lady Gleaner if you're attuned to the French title Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse). In a scene at a potato farm where the mechanized harvesting process leaves behind tons of potatoes, the elderly elf Varda bends over to pick up all the heart-shaped potatoes she can.

Later, the camera lingers on a pile of potato hearts that the filmmaker has amassed as she runs her hands over them and considers her own decaying body. The blog Eat Me Daily has a nice write up of the scene and further considerations on potato hearts here.

I'm always interested in ways that foods "gone bad" or somehow left behind can be saved and turned into something edible or at least consumable in other ways (sour milk into yogurt, hard bread into bread pudding, old wine into my mouth when no one's looking), so I especially appreciate how Varda's film consideration of the old green potatoes (and all sorts of other things, you'll find, if you watch the movie) gives a chance to compensate for the energy that went into cultivating them, changing our perception or veering our thoughts and actions in a new direction, even if the tubers aren't directly converted back into food energy.

Last of the Tree Collards

2010-06-19T03:45:00.000-03:00

While enjoying the nice weather up in Sonoma County last weekend, I ran into the Sunday Sebastopol farmers' market and picked up these beautiful tree collards from First Light Farm, though my geriatric memory is croaking out something about these being from farmers under another name who use First Light's land. It's hard to take notes when your arms are full of strawberries and greens...

I think most of us imagine collard greens as a deep, dark green color, so these surprised me with their delicate purple veins and shading, almost like Red Russian kale.

They're called tree collards because, unlike regular collards and other brassicas like kale, these grow high up from the ground, reaching five to six feet. As the season gets hotter, brassicas, which prefer colder weather, start getting thicker and harder to chew, so these were the last they would be offering this season I was told. An interesting thing about tree collards that I learned here is that they are difficult to propagate because they have to come from cuttings rather than seeds, which they either don't produce or if they do, then don't "breed true," which means you're not guaranteed to get the same kind of parent tree collard from the seedy offspring.

I prepared these as I do kale: chopped into ribbons and sauteed with garlic. This time I also added diced spring onions and carrots. The taste and texture were more robust than similarly colored kale (Red Russian), a kind of hearty quality suggestive of German hikers marching through the Alps in jaunty lederhosen.

I served the tree collards for lunch alongside black quinoa with yellow raisins and beet salad with sheep feta. The little creature that was laundering its whites and grays at my house couldn't wait to get its hungry hands on them.

rad & rad

2010-06-10T20:09:00.000-03:00

Radical! Treviso radicchio and amethyst radishes. The former from Dirty Girl and the latter from the stand to their left at the Ferry Building whose name I forget. This is like the WV equivalent of one of those S.F. Chronicle front page photos of fog over the Golden Gate Bridge or some guy rollerblading with sport sunglasses on. Nothing really important's happening and the space could really be devoted to something more urgent and illuminating, but hey, we had the nice photo and decided to run it, just for the hell of it.

Speaking of radical, though, have you ever wondered about the origins of the word now most commonly associated either with a wild departure from the status quo or with southern California dude sports and the thumbs-up sign?

The OED tells us that radical, as an adjective, means, in the first sense of the word:

Of, belonging to, or from a root or roots; fundamental to or inherent in the natural processes of life, vital; spec. designating the humour or moisture once thought to be present in all living organisms as a necessary condition of their vitality; usually in radical heat, radical humidity, radical humour, radical moisture, radical sap. Now hist.

Perhaps none of these meanings are altogether unrelated, though. The further we depart from the origins of things, the less radical, less vibrant they--and we--become. Wildness dissipates and softens, the radish withers, and the radicchio wilts the farther they get from their soiled root beds.