Weird Veg in Paper Magazine!

I've long harbored a simultaneous pleasure and discontent in the fact that Weird Vegetables has always been a little haphazardly thrown together, never quite ready for prime-time, much less polished than other  food  blogs, intermittently updated, falling fallow for long spells.

On one hand, I'm such a perfectionist that if I sat around crafting my ideal web presence, I'd be just as far behind as I am in my dissertation (ba-dum! of the sad drum, no laughter). In this way, the rough-draft feel of the blog is a productive necessity--and a quality of most blogs, I suppose. But at other times, when I'm daydreaming on the BART train to Berkeley or procrastinating from grading undergraduate papers, I imagine a banner with weirder vegetables, more frequent posts, more interviews and profiles, a more magazine quality to the site. Maybe I don't need to wait to make these changes until after filing that dissertation on competing ideas of propriety and proportion in North American, Brazilian, and, er, some British and French literature, which encompasses Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil, Clarice Lispector, and the Brazilian modernists known as the cannibalists.... sigh. Back to lighter subject matter...

So it brought me great surprise and delight to find a short appreciation of the blog in Paper magazine's May Tech & Food issue. (Andy Samberg and his cronies from The Lonely Island are on the cover listening to a hamburger, and I thought they looked like they could use some major veggie B-sides). It seems that having a site that is technologically and aesthetically one step beyond a Geocities homepage doesn't entirely discredit the worth of one's online contribution, and that the print world, that old dying king the youthful web armies are doing their best to overpower and supplant, is peopled by, well, people who will spend the time to click through one's forgotten posts and synthesize their wanderings into a thoughtful appraisal:

 "Part scrapbook of images, part diary of encounters with preposterous plants, this blog adds rich chapters to our awareness of the vegetable world. Scroll through to find vintage seed packet artwork or a review of artichoke tea."

 
[Blushing with pleasure!] The shout out appears in a roundup of "weird, smart, funny, yummy" food sites like scanwiches, artist Dan Cretu's high-concept weird food + art tumblr, and everylastmorsel.com, which sounds like grindr for gardeners, except more about hooking each other up with veggie advice. Or something.

Anyways... the longer feature that this page punctuates is devoted to "foodieodicals" (a new breed of magazines about food), in a beautiful spread that features some local San Francisco publications, Meatpaper and Remedy Quarterly, plus the brand new Modern Farmer, which is technically based in Hudson but seems to have lured a communal barn-load of S.F. media people with promises of lower rent and the simple life. They also mention a super rad zine you should know called Put A Egg on It. In the print mag but also online here.

You should also check out a crisply-written piece on the new "foodivists" (magazines love catchy neologisms) who are moving and shaking up the West Coast food + art world, by WV contributing vegetable Leafy Heirloom, aka Leif Hedendal. (On a side note, we at WV would like to thank Leif heartily for calling the attentive eyes of Paper Mag to our humble virtual vegetable stand.) Little City Gardens gets a lovely profile, as do up-and-coming SF baker dood Josey Baker (not redundant; that's really his name, yo), a chef from Washington named Blaine Wetzel whose ecto-green broths and foraged edible sculptures I've fallen in love with, plus two groups dedicated to exploring experiments in dining, Thought for Food and Thank You For Coming. You can read the feature in print but also online here.

They Draw & Cook Vegetables

The art of cooking intermingles with the cooking of art over at They Draw & Cook, a website of recipes illustrated by countless artists from around the world. The illustrations all take the form of a long, rectangular banner, but vary in style from hand-drawn cartoons to saturated watercolor splashes to the clean lines and flat shapes of graphic design. I particularly like the experiments in typography and narration of  recipes that move between the textual and the visual. In the same way that I usually find out more about TV shows through reading newspaper reviews than actually watching TV, I discovered the site through a review buried at the back of the print magazine Gastronomica of a cookbook the founders have published with 107 of their favorite illustrations from the site. Read the review here. Below, a few choice vegetable recipes. Green jello salad wins the prize for freakiest vegetable dish.

 

  

Somebody Take This Obese Pumpkin, Please!

It's the time of year when gourds start to take over, spilling from the oven and dinner plate onto people's front porches and various home display nooks. And the grocery stores start getting inspired with their gigantic pumpkin and yellow-and-green warty gourd displays. Around Berkeley and Oakland, I've seen a number of obese pumpkins basking in their orange Jabba the Hutt folds at the Berkeley Bowl, out in front of Sweet Adeline's cafe, and some random restaurants along Telegraph that I zoomed past too quickly to remember.

People grow these enormous pumpkins, win prizes at county fairs, proudly display their overgrown vegetable progeny in a blaze of harvest glory. And then the excitement fades and reality sets in. You have an enormous, unwieldy pumpkin that no one is going to eat, that will grow moldy and disgusting, and that you will have to hack at with a chainsaw before it'll fit into your green bin.

The photo above comes from a Craigslist post from a San Francisco family that won this 160-lb. pumpkin for correctly guessing its weight and, now that the euphoria of that victory has shriveled to a wizened tendril, are trying to pawn off this nuisance on someone else. Here's the ad:

160 lb pumpkin -- who can resist?

Date: 2012-11-13, 8:45PM
We won this pumpkin in a contest for correctly guessing its weight.
We've enjoyed having it for the past month, but now it's time to let go.
Wouldn't necessarily suggest eating it, but great for use for decorative, artistic, or composting purposes.
Yours for free if you'd like to come pick it up. I'll help you carry it to your car.
We're near Japantown.


The ad is still live as of this posting (it's here!), so I hope I am doing a public service by spreading the news to someone who might want this bloated orange monster.  "Who can resist?" I imagine the family members smiling weakly, trying to convince you of the irresistible allure of the 160-lb pumpkin that's been decaying in their house for a month already and that they are begging you to take off their hands. "I'll help you carry it to your car." Please help. SOS.

While I'm on the topic of ornamental squash, I'd like to remind you that it's the time of the year when we gather round and reread my all-time favorite McSweeney's Internet Tendency column, "It's Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers." by Colin Nissan. It begins:

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. 

It continues in pretty much the same vein, until the cumulative effect of the macho-dude swearing and swagger to describe such Martha Stewart passions for seasonal decor makes me laugh so hard I cry, every time. I especially love the gourd necklace.

When it rains it pours, and the veggie posts keep coming tonight after two months of silence. (It's been a busy few months.) It must be the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday and an early T-day feast last Sunday that got me thinking about vegetables again. Enjoy your feasts and don't forget to include some weird vegetables.

And thanks to Amaranth Gadberry for foraging this amazing pumpkin plea from the brambles of Craigslist. Lastly, I leave you with some choice obese pumpkin photos culled from the Internet. While 160 lbs might seem heavy to you, some of these award winners weigh in the area of 1,300 pounds or MORE. Yikes. And yes, that is a man riding in a pumpkin boat.

Cute Vegetables and Familiar Faces at the South Berkeley Farmers' Market

 

Moving from San Francisco to the Oakland-Berkeley borderlands (with an interlude in Rio de Janeiro) has brought a few challenges of acclimation, like getting lost in Oakland every other time I try to find the Grand Lake movie theater or a frozen yogurt place close to the Oakland Museum. But my food procurement routine has presented some reassuring continuities. I continue to find a wide selection of produce and bulk foods at Berkeley Bowl, my Rainbow Grocery substitute, while the South Berkeley Farmers' Market presents some old favorites (Dirty Girl, Blossom Bluff, Blue Bottle coffee) alongside some new friends. Full Belly and Riverdog are two farms I've known about for a long time but that don't make their way into San Francisco, so I'm excited to start sampling their produce on a regular basis. Riverdog seemed to have an especially broad selection of cute vegetables last Tuesday, including some of those pictured above. 

L-R, they are Armenian cucumber, an albino eggplant, a summer squash that looks as though it were hand-dipped in grassy hues, tiny radicchio, Chinese (or Japanese) eggplant, a fist-sized cauliflower, stripey eggplant (not sure what variety), French breakfast radishes right out of a children's picture book or the Chez Panisse Vegetables book, and pale lemon cucumbers, which turned out to be surprisingly sweet for cucumbers. They are mainly from Riverdog Farm, with a couple cuties from Dirty Girl.

I got a reminder + $2 coupon in the mail letting me know that the farmers' market had relocated 10 blocks closer to Oakland from its old location (for my personal convenience, of course), and though a few people have grumbled about the move, most of the vendors seem happy with the larger space.

I've been going to the Tuesday afternoon market, which starts at 2pm. This is exciting because I usually can't wake up in time to get the best of the market on Saturday and Sunday mornings, plus getting there at the start of the market also offers sightings of local foodie movers and shakers. As I strolled along with a Weird Veg special agent chef, he pointed out Charlie Hallowell, chef/owner of the most delicious Pizzaiolo and Boot & Shoe Service (where I just ate a delicious nettle pizza on Saturday night), as well as Russell Moore, chef/owner of the much-lauded Camino going about their food shopping. Both are part of the ex-Chez Panisse, local-vegetable-loving mafia, which has been spreading its influence over Berkeley and Oakland for years (Oliveto is another restaurant with Chez Panisse ties that comes to mind, as well as the San Francisco restaurants Quince and its spin-off Cotogna. I wish someone would compile a list of this mafia and their restaurants, or send me a link to where one already exists).

As I hovered over some Riverdog lemon cucumbers, a broad-shouldered, salt-and-pepper mustachioed man passed by me and I had a feeling of déjà-vu that threatened to linger as an unbearably unscratchable itch. Where had I seen him before? "Pal's Take Away," my agent said in a low voice at my side. Ahhhh, yes, one of the masterminds behind my favorite secret sandwich shop in the Mission, where I used to live in San Francisco. Suddenly, it didn't seem that I had moved so far away.

Weird Vegetable Iron Chefs at the NY Food Book Fair

Wild tamarack, basswood leaves, garlic mustard, fiddlehead ferns,
and knotweed over Spanish mackerel. Source: NPR

While some of us gaze dreamily out at the rainy rainforest in Rio de Janeiro, others are busting their chops organizing book fairs and slapping together improvised gourmet dinners in the throbbing capital of, well, capital and haute cuisine: New York City. Congratulations to Elizabeth Thacker Jones for pulling off the first-ever New York Food Book Fair in high style at the Wythe Hotel in Brooklyn (and proving that grad students can actually meet deadlines and be "real people" too) and to WV friend Leafy Heirloom (aka Leif Hedendal) for whipping up what looks like a very tasty, very veggie-inspired meal to accompany the event—and for getting his leafy mug featured on the NY Times food blog.

The Garden Gather dinner was held in honor of John Cage, genius of music and mushrooms, and co-founder of the New York Mycological Society, but the wild mushrooms that were supposed to be the centerpiece of the meal suddenly got shy of all the attention, so Leif and his co-chef Mark Andrew Gravel improvised with a whole bunch of New England-foraged greens that they'd never heard of before. The NY Times blog and NPR both covered the event, making it sound like an unexpected Iron Chef competition starring weird vegetables. The featured weird vegetables included twelve pounds of dried heirloom red cowpeas that Gravel packed in his carry-on bag from South Carolina, ramps, basswood leaves, tamarack shoots, lily shoots, knotweed (eh?), ground ivy, toothwort root (what?), sweetflag (what??), and fiddlehead ferns (relatively normal in this esoteric company). The chefs used a combination of the Internet and their instincts about texture and flavor to make the knowns and the unknowns all work together. Another top-chef secret shared by Leif went beyond the forest and into the sea. He made up for the unexpected dearth of mushrooms "by getting a lot of seafood—that's my idea of improving something, is throwing a lot of seafood at it." Oysters, blue crab, and mackerel. Sounds fishy, but we trust his Leafy heart still blooms green.

Toothwort root and knotweed, though I'm not going to pretend I know
which is which,  (I'm assuming that NPR's caption puts them in l-r order...)

The NYT write-up gives a fuller view of the context of the book fair and the meal, while NPR's piece focuses more on foraged greens and the potential incongruity of a swanky $150 per person meal being concocted from what might be considered as weeds: "In a different era or a less rarefied location, such a plate might suggest poverty — someone forced to scrounge for scraps (whey) and weeds (cattails) because they couldn't afford anything else."

This redefinition of obscure and foraged vegetables as a product of specialized knowledge (both in the gathering and preparation) that carries with it a certain aura of exclusivity and gourmet cachet is a tendency that has marked the culinary Zeitgeist of the past few years. Of course exclusivity and gourmet cachet are nothing new in the world of fine dining, but the attention dining-obsessed eaters are suddenly granting to the endless variety of vegetables that chefs are seducing them into accepting (with lots of butter, high quality olive oil, and creative combinations) has been an interesting and complicated phenomenon to witness—though always pleasing to experience when I'm lucky enough to taste one of these expertly prepared meals.

But it sounds as though this Brooklyn-based weird vegetable sermon was served to the choir, since one of the guests was already rapturing to the NYT about the greens he spotted on the way to the dinner: "It's really hard not to pick the lamb's quarters and the shepherd's brush that is growing within a block of here."

We at Weird Vegetables (the royal "we" of Kale Daikon and sometimes Eggplant Kohlrabi) look forward to a Bay Area incarnation of the Food Book Fair with much watering of the mouths and minds.

Daikon Prince Charming

It's been over a month, and the Turnip Princess was starting to tap her rooty tendrils with impatience at all my delays. Luckily, the WV team is always turning up some good things in the soil of far-flung territories. It was all the way in Santa Fe that agent Celery Kabbage came across this adorable Daikon Prince Charming, perfect for our turnip lady! He speaks Japanese, she speaks Portuguese, but they communicate perfectly in the international language of spicy root vegetables, and the salad days of their green love are in full bloom!

The Turnip Princess

The Turnip Princess lies in wait for her Pumpkin Prince to appear one moonlit night and find her absolutely radishing. Her pale luminescence is crowned by her own greeny mantle and a chamommile diadem. In the midst of her reverie, she purses her spiced lips and sheds a single petal tear of unfulfilled joy.

The idea to create a Turnip Princess came to me from a German fairytale I read in The Guardian that is one of 500 forgotten stories recently unearthed from an archive in Regensburg, Germany. These folktales had been gathered in the Bavarian countryside by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth, a 19th-century contemporary of the Brothers Grimm. Here is the article about the fairytales and the translation of "The Turnip Princess."

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.)

The Vegetable Butcher of Eataly

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.