Fort Greene Veggies

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Morel of the Story

Ever since I met the mushroom man Phil Ross at last month's Dinner Discussion, I've had mushrooms on the brain. I've been lurking around the Far West Fungi stand at farmers' markets, wanting so badly to get my grubby hands on some meaty morels, but not quite ready to pay the $24/lb price. And so for the past few weeks I've contented myself with the more affordable oyster and shitake mushrooms.

Never in my wildest foraging dreams did I imagine what lay in wait when I agreed to a last minute adventure up to Ashland, Oregon with my feral friend Neep Dandelion. The days were meandering and improvised--setting out in the late morning from friends' magical tree-house cabin, wandering in and out of the Ashland Food Co-op on a regular basis, stopping for a midday espresso or to contemplate a ginkgo tree, finding an unexpected treasure at one of the town's several used bookstores, placing a rock gingerly atop a river-dwelling cairn.


On one such day, which turned out to be a fateful one, we decided after bicycling around town more or less aimlessly to take a "real" bike ride. "Real" turned out to mean the hardest ride of my life. Part of it may have been that I hadn't been expecting to embark on a 28-mile (roundtrip) journey, twelve of them constituting a steady uphill climb, and so set out with a half-swilled gingerade kombucha, a half-filled water bottle, a stomach fueled by three sad sticks of marinated tofu and bean sprout salad, and a canvas bag of random sundries swinging clumsily from my shoulders.

The two miles out of Ashland led into increasingly rural country, with silky cows, deer, and sheep grazing on waving grasses shaded by oak trees and a creek babbling sleepily alongside us. My heart sighed in pastoral contentment. But then we entered the winding incline of Dead Indian Highway, and by the Mile 6 marker the sun's mad beating against my brow had caused me to fling my sweaty helmet off my head and fasten it onto my bag's thick straps, the bag itself clinging clammily to my hot back like a wailing papoose. The kombucha was long gone and the plastic-flavored water was dwindling dangerously.

Still, we kept on, turning off the main highway up an even steeper road ("Oh!" my legs and lungs groaned, while my pride kept them mute) in search of our destination: an alpine forest once inhabited by grizzlies. My stamina began to wane, and Neep would wait while I walked my bike awhile and stretched. At one point, he disappeared around a bend and then altogether. He had hopped off his bike to take a dip in a creek, leaving it in plain sight where I would surely see it and then join him. But it was on the left side of the road, while I pedaled painfully and slowly up the right side, my eyes fixed determinedly on the dirt directly before me.

Upwards and onwards I forced my body, trying to catch up to him (I thought) and wondering why I wasn't crying from fatigue and frustrated muscles, then deciding it was because there was no one there to see and pity my private ordeal. I would lay the bike down when I hit my limit and half collapse onto my back in the loose roadside gravel, looking up into the trees and sky for tranquility, stretching a bit until I got another small burst of energy to keep on. The view grew more breathtaking even as my own breaths became harder to take.


I knew that as feral and errant as my friend was, he wouldn't leave me alone for such a long time, so I imagined he had reached the trailhead to the mountain summit and had fallen asleep while waiting for me. The road became narrower and muddy, and the old-growth fir trees loomed more darkly around me, lit up here and there by gray-green moss and mustard-yellow lichen. The air grew colder, and there were occasional patches of snow stretched upon matted piles of dead pine needles. I thought of other times I had kept going through hunger, exhaustion, and raw pain and reminded myself to be tough.


I had downshifted into bare survival mode, eyes glazed, mind numb, body hunched over the handlebars, when I heard a commotion behind me. Neep Dandelion! Eyes wild, whiskers waggling, hands waving: "There you are!" We spilled out our stories in disbelief and relief, agreeing that there was no way we would have kept going so high up the mountain had we been together to talk ourselves out of it, that it was much farther than we had anticipated, that we had run out of water and now what should we---but wait!

Look!

What?

Morel!

What?

That's a morel!

A morel? Really?

And he ran over to crouch by the burnt-brown beauty that was poking itself out so frankly among blades of grass and soggy fallen pine cones. A deep euphoria gathered and swelled in me as my eye traveled over its sturdy, almost rubbery form, in and out of its exquisite nooks and crannies.

Where there is one morel, there most surely are others, and as our eyes became attuned to the tell-tale craggy cone shapes, we spotted more and more along the roadside. Like the proverbial woman in the wheelchair whose ailment gets miraculously blessed away by the evangelical preacher, I jumped up and down in instantaneous rapture, all thoughts of dehydration and total-body meltdown dissolved under the whitewater force of my morel mania. Whooooohoooo!

Using a stick and a plastic fork saved from our co-op snack, we poked the prized mushrooms from their root-like mycelia (to let new ones spring back up for other lucky pilgrims to find), working our way steadily uphill, tossing what began to pile up as pounds, yes pounds, of morels into my canvas bag (and now was I finally glad that I had schlepped it all the way up there). We celebrated the boon by splitting our last remaining bit of sustenance, a juicy navel orange that had been lying at the bottom of my now-magical bag. After reaching the summit trailhead, we considered hiking another mile to the peak, elevation 5,922 feet, but decided that this monster lode of morels had been the real summit after all and turned back for home.

The downhill ride was windy-cold but easy on the legs, and it wasn't long before we rushed into the tree-house cabin to share our amazing discovery with our hosts and their resident flaxen-haired forest sprite, a mischievous fellow whose preferred garb is a compact pair of tan Carhartt overalls with pale green patches on the knees.

They were as excited as we were, and over the next few days, we proceeded to have morels at every meal:

- morels fried in bacon fat
- morels sauteed in butter with asparagus and scalloped potatoes
- morels scrambled with eggs and bacon
- morels dry fried with salt
- morels scrambled with eggs and potatoes

[then back to S.F. with the last batch]

- morels on focaccia-bread toaster-oven pizza
- morels dry fried with salt (again)
- morels minced into bucatini pasta with basil, capers, and parmesan


There were ants, and who knows what else, hiding out in the labyrinthine gnome hats and hollow stems of the mushrooms, and though we tapped each morel against the cutting board several times to oust its feisty inhabitants, a few gritty bites at each meal told me I was getting a little extra protein with my fungi.

I had hoped this excessive bounty would so saturate me in the taste and texture of the forest floor as to purge what might be a hard-to-satisfy craving, expensive in terms of money or time, not to mention the limits of geography and season. And I know that there is no repeating that providential moment when nature extended its hand with a gift that revived me at the end of one of my most grueling physical experiences in recent memory. But oh, the morels have unleashed the forager's hunger for more. I must have more morels, more morels a must, morels more more, more more more!

As though to taunt me when I changed my wild foods calendar from May to June, the page went from ramps to (gasp!) morels.



There was a time when I thought that kale gave the highest of highs. Then I went on a morel bender and shall never be the same again. But this is a blog about vegetables. The third kingdom, that range of edibles wedged mysteriously between the animal and plant worlds, must remain an occasional guest in our civilized society of carotenes and chlorophyll, where seeds and roots propagate life in predictable byways revealed in the daylight of rational science. Let us leave the spores and mycelia, the hyphae and hallucinogens, where they lie in the shadowy realms beyond even that of the weird vegetable. Let The Great Morel Home Page take up the burden that we lay down here.