Banza!

We are loving the new "Banza" pasta made from garbanzo beans!  The texture and taste are lovely and it fits well into my recent attempt to live a gluten-free life.  Here, I prepared it with olive oil, lots of fresh herbs from my garden, some sea salt and nutritional yeast.  Cannot say enough good things about this stuff.

In the background is a bean of a sweeter variety:  Ellie Belly Jelly Bean the Queen.

Can I Eat the Leaves of a Sweet Potato?

Yes!

Most of us are familiar with lost veggies in the crisper that have either rotted or started growing.  If you discover the latter, you're in luck!  Past its prime, a potato with "eyes" begins to lose flavor and texture, and the nutritional profile changes as the tuber's sugars are directed to the growth of the new plant that's sprouting.

A new potato plant will happily grow on your counter for quite some time, but popped in a pot with water and sunshine, the growth becomes exponential.  The little aging potato suddenly begins to produce so much more food than it would have if consumed pre-sprout.  Sweet potato vines are prolific and thrive on my kind of neglect.  Every day this potato yields a lush harvest of fresh heart-shaped greenery that is wonderful sauteed with onions and garlic.  It's best to start with organic potatoes, free of pesticides and genetic modifications.  Ornamental sweet potato plants can't boast that pedigree, so stick with potato plants rooted from the produce aisle.

After the potato leaf harvest, at the end of the growing season, don't forget to check the roots to see if bonus potatoes have formed.

Japanese Sweet Potatoes

There seem to be so many varieties of sweet potatoes out there, and maybe there are several names for each one.  I don't believe "Japanese Sweet Potatoes" is the actual name for these delicious tubers, but that's what they were called at Whole Foods.  Strangely, they look on the outside exactly like a less exotic, orange-fleshed potato.  Both types had a pretty purple skin and the same general size and shape.  I'd inadvertently gotten a few of each.  Sometimes you don't know for sure until you cut into them.

I mixed the cut, raw potatoes with coconut oil and 1/2 tsp of sea salt, and roasted them on parchment on a pan preheated to 400 degrees for 30 minutes, flipping halfway.  They were amazing tossed into a Swiss chard saute at the last minute.  I'd forgotten how much I love chard.  Mom used to grow a lot of it in her big backyard garden when I was young.  This bowlful made a delicious breakfast.

It Might Be Time to Plant This Potato

I've never been one to shy away from eating a tuber with a few eyes sprouting.  I've just rubbed them off in the wash and prepared the potato as usual.  In this case, when I neglected the root bin and found these lovely sprouts, the process had gone too far.  Not only has this plant now likely sapped much of the flavor and nutrition of its benefactor, I just don't have the heart to kill this willful, spunky little thing.  I'm debating now whether to keep it inside and give it some water for a while while it warms up outside (it's had no water thus far) or put it right into the ground. Hmm.  I'll keep you posted. 

Garden Inspiration

Our weather has been so mild this winter, but not warm enough to garden.  Still, finding this pretty photo of a 2011 harvest is inspiring.  I'm looking forward to planning.

Seasons Must Change

This year was not a big one for the garden.  The heat came early and I'm not cut out for it so I didn't plant very much.  I did have two tomato plants, one of them in a pot in the sunshine, and the other in my cultivated garden patch.  My potted cherry tomato did not disappoint, but my garden plot is now in the shade.  Our growing season spans most of the year and so our trees span most of the yard.  All my garden tomatoes are gorgeous and large, but green.  For weeks now I've been waiting for a hint of blush, but there's still no sign of it.

The same thing happened last year and I continued to wait for a ripe tomato until a few were spoiled by freezing.  Surprisingly, the ones which weren't cracked and soggy on the vine actually turned red in a bowl on my counter!  I thought that was interesting.  They were certainly getting less sunshine inside my kitchen than they were on their shady vine.  Maybe the difference is that our indoor climate is steady, albeit cool.  Taking no chances this year, I've brought most of what's out there inside.  I'll share if something fun happens.

Inspired by a Harvest

We've just returned from a week-long trip so my garden was full of surprises. There were gobs of Chinese longbeans, the sugar snap peas had died, there were a couple of cucumbers and, for the first time ever, there were okra. There were two of them.

Since I'm unfamiliar with the okra plant, I decided to start small with only one organic plant. Wondering about the best use of two little okra pods, I opened Veganomicon to the gumbo page! The gumbo I made was only very loosely based upon Isa and Chandra's recipe, as I utilized what was on hand, but it was DELICIOUS served over wild rice -- rich, slippery, smoky and warm.

My daughter has been vegetarian for a couple of months now so I'm sharing my experience with veggies, including vegan dishes like this. This meal was a HUGE hit with the kid. My husband liked it too, but there wasn't much left for him by the time he came down to eat. I'm hoping for a bumper crop of okra and looking forward to the next batch of vegan gumbo!

The Garden -- Time to Plan

Look at this lovely straggler from last season. I so love a veggie like this who thrives on neglect. During our chilly, wet winter I hardly checked my garden and most of it is in shambles. There were a few stalwart lacinato kales still producing, however. When I harvested this lot the weather was still pretty cold, so the flavor was a delicious sweet/bitter/fresh. Kale loves the cold. I've not cleared out the garden yet but we've had some warm days so I can expect the next straggler harvest to be less mild.

Life is full and fulfilling right now so I'll take a minute to research plants who love neglect as much as this little guy before planting!

End of Season Harvest

The kids have been in school for three weeks already in the deep south, so the gardening season should be just about over, but I still have mostly green tomatoes, and plenty of other things sprouting anew all the time. Our weather has been hellish and soggy, like a jungle, and we all know plants love that.

So here's a recent harvest. Represented are dino kale, rainbow chard, basil, tarragon, Chinese longbeans, tomatoes and my surprise guest: purple cabbage -- that's it toward the bottom: silvery green leaves with purple veins.

The cabbage was a surprise because, well, sometimes my crisper is overly full to the point I lose track of things. About half a purple cabbage was in full-rot (thankfully in a plastic bag) by the time I found it. The rot was nasty, but a brand new plant had sprouted from the slime -- sort of like a cruciferous phoenix! I had a blank spot in the garden so I quickly buried the cabbage-Fawkes to see what would happen. I couldn't be more pleased -- the fresh young cabbage leaves are tender and flavorful.

I utilized my bounty with a delicious, gluten-free Quinoa-pasta salad:

I roasted the sturdier veggies before adding them to the mix. This salad fit the bill for the first college football party of the season. My son's school, University of Georgia, is off to a fantastic start!

My Summer 2014 Cocktail

This delicious variation on a greyhound (vodka and grapefruit juice) was created as I was culling the overgrown herbs from my pots outside. This is purple basil. It's amazing how adding a sprig really rounds out the flavor of this crisp summer cocktail -- sweet, fresh and smooth. Bonus: it's pretty!

As my other herbs finish out the summer, I'll be experimenting with more flavor combinations. I'll keep you posted.

The Bully

When we returned from St. John, I found that my cucumbers had gotten an attitude. They aren't supposed to be outside of their enclosure. Even the normally prolific Chinese longbeans are cowering on their edge of the trellis, tentatively reaching their tendrils away from the cuke. I found one climbing on the sprinkler nozzle. This photo was taken after I had chopped some cuke limbs from the mint and basil, who were trapped in their pots with no escape. One leg seems to be inching its way toward my neighbor's yard.

Here's the tomato plant striving to evade the grasp of the monster cuke, with nowhere to go but up. It's about as tall as I am now. I've used no fertilizer this year. Notice no tomatoes are on this plant. I think it needs all its strength to fight off the bully.

I reaped a harvest of one tiny tomato, three Chinese longbeans and seven very large cucumbers. Many more blossoms portend pickling, Greek salads and juice in my future.

Thank goodness I'm a juicer. This one bully-cuke, along with a tiny orange and an even tinier knob of ginger, yielded nearly 30 ounces this morning.

(That's not my pancake in the background)

I feel bad for the bullied veggies, but enjoy juicing organic cukes I don't have to peel first!

Rainbow Chard Harvest

This lovely chard is the first veggie I've harvested this season. Yesterday it was 89 degrees in the deep South, so these greens will be getting bitter any day now. I'm not opposed to that, but I'd like to try them tender and sweet first. Being a slow learner with gardening (i.e. I can't be bothered with an almanac -- for now) this is the first time I've cut the greens instead of pulling out the whole plant. It'll be fun to see what happens next. I love the way these fresh stems look -- they remind me of candy. I chopped the stems and sauteed them in coconut oil and olive oil with a couple of cloves of garlic, then added the tender greens very briefly before taking them off the heat. It was delicious. I regret there is no photo of the cooked greens. In this summer season, dinnertime seems to have devolved into a feeding frenzy/circus, with various and sundry friends, schedules and agendas. I'm at the stage in life now when "letting it be" seems much more appealing than attempting to reign in this happy chaos. Long story short, by the time I pulled out my camera, the food was mostly gone.

I've seen a massaged kale salad recipe incorporating chard. Only the shredded kale is massaged with the lemon, salt and oil, and the raw chard leaves, being more tender, are shredded and added last. If my chard plants proliferate, I'm going to give it a try. A bumper crop of dino kale is next on my chopping list.

Set to Pop (Garden Shots)

Set . . . to . . .

POP!

Here's my peony bush, lush and lovely, finally benefiting from my benign neglect [see Peony Update for backstory on this]. Peonies are on my short list of favorite flowers (the others being gardenia and iris) and I feel this little bush has forgiven my past transgressions and is ready to send me Mother's Day love this weekend!

The color juxtaposition of this little lantana plant in our front border is lovely.

Here's my first sunny yellow iris in a large bank of them I planted a couple of years ago in our dry river bed. I received a couple of large bags of these from my friend, Ann, who was splitting her tubers a couple of years ago. These things go bananas and multiply in a marshy or wet area of the yard. I don't mind. I have the perfect spot for them.

Here's a kousa dogwood that was in bloom in my "jungle" a couple of weeks ago. It's a different variety from the ones I grew up with in Virginia, but it brings sentimental thoughts whenever it's in bloom. I also have three of the Virginia-type dogwoods in the backyard, but they bloomed even earlier, during the worst of the pollen when you don't really want to go outside without a gas mask around here, so I missed taking photos of them. The indigenous ones in the back are lovely trees though -- large and tall for dogwoods, so I bet they are a century old or so. Our lot was one of the last cut into a virgin forest.

Repeated shots of the same vegetable garden can be tiresome, so I'll try to avoid too much of that, but the rainbow chard is so photogenic, isn't it? If you look closely, you might see tiny little leaves that give the initial appearance of moss. I believe it is the "wild ground cover" that took up residence in the garden last year due to the shadier conditions from the maturing trees nearby. I thought I had eradicated it by pulling last year, but you may recall that the roots of this mystery plant are deep but fragile (so there is always some left behind), and have amazing powers of underground regeneration. I wasn't going to use weed killer in my garden, obviously, so I covered the whole thing all winter with a blanket of newspaper. This mystery plant seems to be saying thank you for the warm blankie. I salute your fortitude, little weed. Welcome back, I guess.

There are a few additional unidentified weeds here and there. Last year I pulled whatever seemed to be out of place, and then I missed a few days and realized that the pulled "weeds" were actually veggies from the year before that had self-propagated. My recent MS issues include memory loss, so I don't really remember much more about the regretful over-regulation of last year's garden. As such, I have decided to give these apparent interlopers a chance to identify themselves a bit more fully before I decide if they should stay or go. Not all surprises in life are welcome, but surprise garden veggies will be!

Has Spring sprung where you are?

Garden 2014

It was so good to get my hands in the dirt again! Learning every year from experience, this year I'm being conservative with the tomatoes -- two plants should be plenty. The garden no longer has much sun because of the growth of trees, so I've got the tomatoes at the sunny end, along with a few cucumbers planted along a trellis. The other trellis is for the Chinese long beans -- free to me every year since I save a few beans from the ones that get lost in the mature bean bramble at the end of the season. Also "free" to me this year are the French breakfast radish seeds left over from last year. The rest of the plants were not very expensive though -- 99 cents for about 100 Georgia sweet onions, and $3.00 each for 8 packs of lacinato kale and rainbow chard ($3 per 8-pack, not per plant!). The herbs, which I've planted in pots, cost no more than if I had bought small packages for cooking in the produce section, and will produce all summer long, and just may come back again on their own next season. Sometimes a mild winter will afford a rebound crop.

Every year, mild or not, my peppermint pot has prolifically bounced back, but this spring I found the pot to be infested with thousands of [fast moving] ants or termites. I picked up the pot and ran it away from the house, away from the garden, but had to put it down quickly before extremely well-organized and speedy regimental lines of soldiers made their way into each armpit.  Ughhhh (shudder)! I was quick and calm enough to effectively swipe the vanguard from my limbs before I was chowed-upon, which supports my theory of termites versus ants. I wonder how well Pinocchio would have fared in the same circumstance. So I repurposed a different pot for the new mint. The termite pot may need to be a loss, unless I can come up with some non-toxic way to eradicate the critters without sending them somewhere else I don't want them.

Last season provided two particularly good gardening wisdom nuggets:
1. Onions are the best deterrent to darling woodland creatures who would eat my food! I planted them all around the perimeter of the garden and also more thickly around tender greens, which happen to be Peter Rabbit's favorite.
2. Don't use soil containing fertilizer. Duh. I was a lazy gardener last year. I wound up with long, lanky tomato vines with nary a fruit.

This year I used my compost for the first time, which finally looked like soil and not garbage:

Some newspaper is still visible there, but that was part of my "brown matter" and will break down pretty easily. I stirred in a bag of peat moss to lighten the mix. I have a dual-chamber composter. It is interesting to compare the different stages of decomposition of each. The compost really doesn't stink! You just have to be careful what you put in it -- only veggie matter.

Here's the sad garden before I cleaned it up a bit and gave it new life. I had covered it with newspaper for the winter in an attempt to eradicate weeds. I don't know if it'll work.

"Ahh," I can almost hear the garden saying as it gets its first drink of the season, "that's better,"

Winding Down

At what point does one decide the summer crop is over? I get a little crop like this every day now. You can see in the Chinese longbeans a certain madness now. Somersaulting, pinching and twisting, they are in a frenetic scramble as they sense the "last call" of the season.  I'm sort of loving the show, but it may be time to pull it all out, dry the pods that remain for a new crop in the spring, clean up the garden and condition the soil for the winter.

Indoors, here's a recent project (I LOVE the warm, soothing light of the very early morning):

Sprouts! My friend, Liat, loaned me this awesome hemp sprouting bag which works so, so much better for me than the tall jar with the rubber gasketed/screened lid. I am ordering one of these bags right away! I showed my daughter my sprouts and she asked, "But what do you eat them with?"

"My fingers!" I answered, demonstrating.

Another bonus is that Liat is the Mom of my daughter's best friend, so the sprouting bonanza provides fodder for hours of eye-rolling, teenage fun at our expense! It is such a joy to make those kids laugh.

Here's another way I eat my sprouts --

This was my breakfast this morning: sprouts (Ezekiel Bread), sprouts and hummus! Delish!

Why sprouts? Bioavailability! Simply put -- the sprouts are alive, with 100% of their nutrition intact, and have converted the starches/gluten of the seed/bean to the phytonutrients we all need for regeneration and fuel for our cells. I'm a newbie in this learning process, so I will share more when I know more.  I'm going to go throw a handful into the juicer now with some kale and maybe a pear. What do you do with your sprouts?

P.S. upon re-reading, I'm happily noticing the sprouts echo the acrobatics of the longbeans, all indeed "winding"!

Hello, My Love

Look at her sitting there in all her verdant glory! My favorite way to start the day. This is like Yoga in a recycled glass -- then I proceeded logically to actual yoga, courtesy of my friend, Liat. Ahhhh!

Wynne is working on noticing the way different foods make her feel, and is choosing accordingly. She's a pasta girl, but she is broadening her outlook and including more whole foods, and enjoying the noticeable holistic changes.

Here's a recent compromise which provided us all plenty of delicious wholeness:

Clockwise from top left, we have amaranth with sauteed onion, pasta with vegan artichoke alfredo sauce (from a jar, made mostly from cashews) topped with fresh tomato, Chinese longbeans sauteed in olive oil. This food was a hit -- what's not to love?

Homegrown

Here's a recent harvest from my garden, for which I am grateful, neglected as it's been this year. Look at those furry, knobby little carrots! There are also onions and yards of Chinese longbeans. Together these made a lovely veggie dish.

Ordinarily I'd have been all over these carrot greens, which dwarf the carrots themselves, but they were too strong in flavor, probably because it has been so hot here lately. I passed on the greens this time, but  they are making a nice contribution to the compost.

Here is the finished product. It was a little tricky as I started cooking before driving Wynne to band practice, came back while she was there, worked on it some more and then left it on the warm burner as I went to pick her up. I didn't throw the smallest, tenderest beans in until the end. The veggies were simply sauteed in olive oil and seasoned with a tiny pinch of salt and curry powder. Wynne LOVED these veggies. Score!

She said, "These are really good, what are the orange things?"
When I told her, she said, I've never tasted carrots like these before, this is really, really good!"  :)

I had a hankering for a pot-o-lentils, so I made some to go with the harvest. Here's the recipe:

French Lentils

1 C dry lentils

2 medium yellow onions, diced

2 Tbsp. Olive oil

2 C water

1 Tbsp Shoyu or Tamari

2 Tbsp Dry Sherry

1 Tsp. dry thyme or 5-6 stems of fresh thyme

salt and pepper to taste 

Saute the onions on medium heat until they become fragrant and almost transluscent. Stir periodically to  prevent burning. After rinsing lentils, add them to the pot along with the water and Shoyu or Tamari and thyme. If you have fresh thyme, you can put the whole woody stems in, then remove them later. The dry herbs are stronger in flavor than the fresh thyme. It would be fine to add more fresh thyme than I have here if you like the flavor, but be careful with the dry herbs. Bring the pot to a boil, then reduce heat to simmer 25 minutes, covered. 3-4 minutes before the end of cooking, add the sherry, stir and simmer until lentils are tender but still hold their shape. Season to taste. Don't forget to remove the thyme stems before serving.


These lentils aren't really French. They were born in the USA. I just call them that since I was inspired by some wonderful flavors I tasted while driving across the French countryside in the winter, so very many moons ago. Good stuff!

A Rustic Harvest

My garden provided enough for last night's dinner. Six golf-ball-sized garden onions, one tiny grape tomato, a small carrot with a generous feathering of greens and two fistfuls of Chinese long beans were the homegrown sauteed base for this delicious meal, planned on the fly. A couple of leftover boiled potatoes from an earlier meal, a handful of kale from the crisper, a can of navy beans and several Kalamata olives rounded out the luscious flavors. I used olive oil, salt, pepper and a scant shake of Tamari to season. This was easy, delicious, filling and teeming with phytonutrients. I always feel great when I work with what's on hand.

Heirloom

The best of the season! Delicious sliced warm from the sun and eaten simply on bread with veganaise, salt and pepper. No, I didn't grow it -- I bought it and ate it. It was great.

This year my garden is atrocious. I didn't even take a new photo of it for you because it is even worse now than it was before. Why is it so bad this year, you ask?  Well, I was a bit lazy in my prep, and I was gone for much of the summer so the garden was largely overtaken by nature. Amongst those items I planted on purpose, "survival of the fittest" was well illustrated. Each gardening season is a gift of wisdom, and this year is a learning experience extraordinaire!

My best 2013 gardening lessons:

• Do not use soil with embedded fertilizer ("leggy" doesn't begin to describe my tomato plants this year -- yards-long in every direction, forming a crazy web that prevents me from entering the space at all, with nary a blossom -- my first ever sterile tomato year).
• Start planning now for weed eradication for next year -- I'm thinking thick sheets of cardboard covering the surface through early spring.
• Plant more radishes -- I loved them and used every one.
• Repeat spring onion gauntlet -- It was the most effective tactic yet for deterring furry critters, I had plenty to eat and there is still enough of a gauntlet to protect the long beans.
• Always plant plenty of Chinese long beans. These are remarkably persistent, despite the kind of neglect I can dish out.
• Wait much, much longer to pull carrots.
• Finally make plans to use homespun compost -- it's getting too heavy to spin.
• Provide more drainage next year for the herb pot. Herbs don't like soggy toes.
• Buy fresh nasturtium seeds. My 5 year old seeds did remarkably well considering their advanced age, but their oomph was lacking. They normally thrive on my brand of neglect as well as the long beans.

As in all things, we live and we learn!

The Prodigal Gardener

My son has recently spent some time camping and hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina so we took a trip up to meet him, see some of the places he explored (albeit from the remote vantage point of the Parkway overlooks) and hear about his adventures. This photo is lovely, but doesn't adequately reflect the scope of the altitude, steepness and vastness of these mountains. Of course there are steeper mountains, but the Blue Ridge is way up there for this Georgia girl. My son told me geologists have determined that the Blue Ridge has been taller than the Alps three times in the known history of the earth. It is on a fault line and geologic events have thrust the mountains upward, only to be weathered and eroded to this relatively modest height over ages -- three separate times. Isn't that interesting? Standing atop this ridge, in the cool fresh air, closer to the sun and clouds, one would assume these rocks have always been here, from the beginning of time. Well, maybe they have been, but they are alive and changing like everything else, just in a slower time frame.

The next part of our North Carolina odyssey was to the Outer Banks to see my husband's parents. I was so busy visiting, I didn't even get a shot of the ocean this time, but as we were setting the table for dinner on the deck last Thursday this view of heaven got my attention. This is a cell phone photo. Less than 5 minutes later we were all scrambling to rush everything inside and turn the chairs and tables upside down so they wouldn't blow away. At that moment a front came in which brought powerful winds, driving rain and thunder and lightening. We actually saw a waterspout about 100 yards off the beach. This heavenly view quickly transformed into an eerie, deep pink-purple as the clouds roiled. Nature's fury is always so much more dramatic at the shore. It was quite a show. The deluge lasted all night, and my mother-in-law and I noticed the condo swayed with the winds.

Back home the weather that night was also violent, spawning a tornado, though there were no injuries that I know of. By the time we got back, ten days after we left, evidence of the storm we missed here was a downed tree in the woods, and the return of the water damage we just had fixed a couple of weeks prior. The wallboard under the fresh paint is bubbled anew, and the water stain on the ceiling is back. Ah, home ownership!

Yowza -- look at the garden! After ten days of neglect in this humid, moist, hot environment, the plot is a mess. Some type of opportunistic, ground-covering weed has had its way with the soil around all the plants I put in. I don't know what it is, but it kind of looks like a creeping thyme. At first I attempted to eradicate it, but quickly found that it would adapt any part of itself to form a new root and dig in -- in other words, if I left a piece I'd pulled, it would re-root itself instead of shrivelling. Also, the roots are deep and delicate, so when I thought I'd pulled the whole plant out, I'd left a tiny bit underground which would quickly make its way to the surface and be reborn. The weed doesn't really seem to bother the veggies, it just makes the whole garden confusing to me.

The onion arsenal is more unkempt than ever, long and tangled, but appears to be doing its job deterring pests. I've seen no nibbles, not even from this guy, who is just happy to live safely under the wooden frame, apparently in an allium-induced haze.

A recent harvest revealed the bush beans had matured before the Chinese long beans, and the radishes are all grown, very large and flavorful. I sliced this one thinly to savor with a nice glass of Pinot Gris as I prepared dinner. Then I ate it's spiny leaves, undressed so I could assess the flavor -- peppery! The beans were added whole to a veggie melange including yellow squash, zucchini, vidalia onion, mushrooms, tomatoes and several whole twigs of thyme. All the veggies were store bought except for the beans and thyme -- my nightshades aren't ready yet. Olive oil, salt and pepper and the whole bowlful was cooked in a grill pan by my husband. Delish!

I plan on surrendering to the garden's will at this point, and savoring it's un-nibbled bounty. Can't wait for the tomatoes!