Lettuce Dressing For Carnaval!

Look at this delectable lettuce! She's so perky and fresh you wouldn't even know it was 87 degrees out and humid enough to make you bathe entirely in your own sweat at a rate of two slick layers per minute.

Carnaval has just come to a close in Brazil, and it feels like I got hit with an enormous glitter bomb hurled to the soundtrack of a 1000 beating drums and 500 blaring horns. Drunken street parties are just about my worst nightmare, but I braved the crowds in Rio de Janeiro to put on a costume and hear some amazing music a couple times over the course of the four-day festa.

I came across this cheerful human vegetable after escaping the confetti crush of a bloco in the hilly, cobblestoned Santa Teresa neighborhood, where I used to live. A bloco is a street party in which a big band marches through the streets playing popular Carnaval songs, while people in costume follow along singing, dancing and tossing confetti and water and maybe beer on each other. This bloco had started at 8am (yes 8am), so I was feeling a little zombie-faced by the time I decided, a couple hours later, to make my salmon exit, moving determinedly hand-in-hand with my little owl friend (see above photo, left) contra the human tide.

We paused for breath after winding our way out of the thick of things, and that's when she appeared in our path, Alfaçinha, as her friends call her, or Little Lettuce, a nickname earned by her vegetarian ways. Below are more views of this most green of fashions. Extra props go to the coordinated lettuce scrunchy.

She was a welcome salad interlude after a morning full of sweaty meat hunks:

More photos from the bloco Céu Na Terra, which means Heaven on Earth, but for me was more like Sweaty Beer-Soaked Inferno Made Bearable and Even Pleasurable By Brilliant Costumes & Bursts of Joyous Music and Dancing.

UPDATE: And finally, in response to a very woolly, very crafty reader's request, here is my last-minute costume. The inspiration is a 3-in-1 rendition of Princess-Clown-Super Hero. (I hope I get extra props for the biker shortz.)

Weird Vegetables: Nevada City Edition

Composed on the train from San Francisco to Chicago, then to New York but posted in New York a couple days later...

As I chug eastward on the Amtrak rails, in search of New England weird vegetables, fireflies, and culture shock, my mind skips back toward the western frontier to linger for a moment over the July fourth weekend I spent in Nevada City for my friends' wedding (but it's in California! what?). My always-companion Erin came along and shared what was most likely a haunted room at the National Hotel, which toots its horn as the oldest continuously running hotel in California, open since the Gold Rush days of 1852. The whole town feels a bit like a Universal Studios Wild West set, with its Mine Shaft saloon, quiet, almost too-pristine streets, and brick building fronts dating from California's first glittering burst of urban concentration.
On Saturday morning, while I snoozed away in the saggy old iron-framed bed surrounded by flowered wallpaper and ancestral portraits, Erin was up and exploring the town. From our balcony she had spotted the tell-tale tents of a farmers' market and came back to rouse me for a vegetable adventure.

Our hopes were not high for a one-block market in a wilting-hot small town of 2,800, but as we strolled past a guitar strummer and various farm stands, I was struck by how meticulously arranged the produce displays were, with their carefully drawn up chalkboard signs and beautiful, well-selected produce.






It was all so... so... good-looking, so functional, so normal but in that TV normal way that makes you think everyone and everything is always supposed to look so fresh and clean and healthy. Even the farm people fit the ideal of my imagination: hippie-happy, earthy in a rosy-cheeked, sun-kissed way, not a farmster in sight (what I call the vaguely artsy urban farm stand worker whose aloof manner emphasizes your inferiority for having a less direct connection to the land's natural treasures).

The Four Frog Farm crew



Heaven and Earth Farm

The lovely ladies of Living Lands Agrarian Network

Not only did the Living Lands Agrarian Network have the most good-natured workers and very tempting produce, they also ran a stand across the way where we picked up some sourdough buckwheat pancakes topped with peaches and different kinds of mint. I was beginning to think we would have to make a special guest post for Cute 'n' Perfect Vegetables, when we happened upon this elongated creature lounging with the wee gherkins:


It touched a chord in my memory, and when I asked the farm stand worker for an i.d. check on this pale, ribbed growth, she confirmed that it was an Armenian cucumber, which I had formerly associated with a curved shape. Our excitement and my camera frenzy over the cucumber, as well as the nearby sunflower sprouts or sun sprouts, caused the young woman at the Heaven and Earth stand to ask, "So you guys just like weird vegetables?"



And BLAM!--our cover was blown. We introduced ourselves and our blog to Jess, and it later turned out that everyone else whose name we learned at the market was also Jess, or Jessie, or had a J name. I haven't pieced together the meaning of it yet, but it may yet come to me in a dream one day.







Offering further proof that strange and beautiful are not mutually exclusive qualities was a pile of gigantic Jabba the Hut romaine lettuce heads at Olala Farms (though originally grown at You Bet Farms). This Willie Nelson of a man, below, whose polo shirt's embroidered message read, "Older than dirt," was swaddling these heads in brown paper like flower bouquets for awe-struck customers and eagerly invited me to lift a plump specimen so I could experience its heft firsthand.

At Mountain Bounty Farm we talked a little berry shop (red berries ripen earlier in the season, April-May, whereas darker berries get sweet in the late summer months, we learned). They were so friendly and cheerful that I decided they would be receptive to a farewell pun, and said, "Have a berry nice day!" Turns out Jess of Mountain Bounty not only shares my love of weird, twisty carrots but is also a produce pun connoisseur and shared with us a joke she had learned that morning from an elderly man.




The customer shambles up to the stand and announces:
"I need the ingredients for a Honeymoon Salad."

"What's in that?" Jess asks.

Pregnant pause.

"Lettuce alone!" he shouts, then falls into hearty laughter, I imagine.


It seemed an appropriate prelude to the wedding we would attend later that day in a shady grove but not before taking a quick dip in a secluded swimming hole on the South Yuba River.

The Vegetable Museum

If art is a way of defamiliarizing the world, of bringing our attention to dwell on the strangeness of certain objects, thoughts, or actions, then vegetables, in their innate weirdness, are a natural medium for this kind of aesthetic reflection. (The ghosts of Russian Formalism and Viktor Shklovsky are nodding their spectral heads in approval as I type.)

When our Veg-on-the-Street correspondent, Endive Haricot, forwarded me a link to The Vegetable Museum, the vegetable art project of Beijing artist Ju Duoqui, I immediately recognized in her a kindred spirit, though one far more skilled than I in the art of wielding the vegetable. Parents teach their children not to play with their food, but Duoqui's work recovers the secret bounty that is lost when vegetables are reduced to mere vehicles of nutrition.

After shelling several kilograms of peas to make herself an entire pea-lady outfit two summers ago, Ju Duoqui decided to get even wackier and reconstruct classics of Western art via the wide world of vegetables (the tofu Mona Lisa, a leeky Van Gogh, Klimt's naughty kiss between radishes, begging the question: where's the beet?!). Of the tableau above, Liberty Leading the Vegetables (the inspiration is Eugène Delacroix's La Liberté guidant le peuple) the artist writes:

Against that fiery fried-egg backdrop, this woman who emanates onion smells from her breast and carries a spring onion spear in her left hand and a wood ear flag in her right, draped in a tofu skin robe, leads the vegetable people forward. The yam soldiers, with their bewildering little round eyes raise a cabbage banner. Having figured out what moving forward means, have they lost their momentum? Each of the potato-head soldiers has a different expression, not sure of their bearing, perhaps surprised, but that is definitely a completely unadorned potato. You wouldn’t know them any better if they were chopped into French fries and covered in ketchup, but when placed in the picture, they all appear unfamiliar and rich in facial expression.

How well do we really know our vegetables, regardless of the form they take? I am particularly taken with the line: "this woman who emanates onion smells from her breast." Think of it, the onion body from which flow the tangible traces of courage and hope. Maybe that Obama onion wasn't so random after all...

Another vegetable piece of Ju Duoqui's that I am fond of is The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Pickled Cabbage, which is a lumpy revision of Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolas Tulp:

And here's a saucy little Tim Burton-style potato 'n' lettuce Napoleon:

Dig the little eggplant shoe and the cilantro cravat. All photos and the artist's statement are taken from the Paris-Beijing Photo Gallery, where even more vegetable masterpieces await your perusal.

Arugula or Iceberg Lettuce?

I voted arugula. This poster comes from a very scary righty blog that I don't have the heart to link to here, but Weird Vegetables wants to take back the arugula and detach it from this taint of xenophobia that demonizes strange, foreign-sounding words and exotic-seeming vegetables. Why should the desire to know about the world beyond the borders of iceberg lettuce be discouraged as "elite"? Why should we shy away from greater flavor and nutrition? Call it by its original English name, Joe rocket, if that feels less threatening. Either way, lettuce hope that by the end of tonight, this country will welcome a new kind of greenery into the White House.

watermelon radish

If I may channel Alice for a moment: it's beautiful, right? I purchased this one from Heirloom Organics at last Saturday's Ferry Plaza market. HO is also my preferred purveyor of lettuces, although they've directly contributed to my food-snobbishness. Ever since my first taste of their arugula, spinach, and mustard, I've been unable to consume any organic salad-in-a-bag (yes, especially Earthbound) because it tastes like limp tissue paper in comparison.

Anyway, back to the radish: this
variety is slightly sweeter than the average puny bulbous root, but still pleasantly crunchy and spicy. I tossed mine into a salad with greens, sliced pears, and feta for lunch yesterday.

Note the imperfect julienne-ing. My knife could use a good sharpening, but even then I'm no Thomas Keller–evident in the fact that my knife is dull. These photographs of his minced onions, brunoise, and tomato diamonds in The French Laundry Cookbook almost make me cry.