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."

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.