Weird Veg BANNER ART CONTEST!

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

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

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...

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...

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

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!

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."