The Fruits of Today's Labor...

...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?)

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

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?

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

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

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

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.