Straight from the Farm

I’m learning a very valuable life lesson these days.  Change, for the better or for the worse, is strangely easier to deal with in larger quantities. I’ve already mentioned the big change I made recently in careers. If I’d had my druthers, that change would have been more than enough for me for a year or so.  But following close behind it, much to my initial dread, was another big change.  D and I bought a house and moved into it this past weekend.  So now, in about a month’s time, both my job and my home are completely different. 

Moving to the new house was looming in my head for the past month.  Don’t get me wrong, I helped pick it out so I was happy with the new house.  I just didn’t want to leave the old one, what with the four years of junk stored up in the basement and the kitchen I’d come to love so much.  I don’t think I posted many pictures on here of my old kitchen, but it was adorably retro with red walls and a decidedly Asian flair that I had carefully cultivated.  I’d moved in there while I was still single so everything was arranged just the way I liked it.  The one downside though was its size: 8 feet by 10 feet.  Ouch.  When we picked out the new house, the kitchen was top priority for me. 

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Sometimes it’s the little things that tickle a person.  Things that make the corners of your mouth turn up just a notch and put a gleam in your eyes.  That’s what happened when Farmer Dave asked me to play around with a new crop on Weavers Way Farm.  I was tickled because it was, whether he realized it to be or not, a little pat on the back that said “Hey, you’re pretty much an expert at figuring out how to use farm produce so naturally I’d ask you to create a recipe for me.”  

This mystery ingredient, however, was completely new to me too.  Edible Chrysanthemum is known by many names (Garland Chrysanthemum, Crown Daisy, Shingiku, Choy Suy Green, Tong Ho, Ssukgat, etc.) around the world and is used mostly in Asian dishes, from what I could gather.  It is different from the ornamental mums you put out in your flower beds or deck containers each fall.  Its leaves do look similar though.  Farmer Dave was asking me to play around with the stuff since he didn’t know what to tell customers at market who asked how to use it.  Well, those customers weren’t the only ones without a clue.

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The other day something so utterly bizarre happened that I literally stopped in my tracks and stared, mouth agape. There, among a box of seeds sitting on a neighbors porch, was a packet of purslane seeds!   Any gardener worth his or her salt knows that purslane is a nasty invasive weed that can take over a garden plot in a week if left to its own devices.  Who the heck would sell its seeds?  And why the heck would anyone buy them?  Sadly, I know the answer to both those questions.  Purslane has recently become a highly favored gourmet addition to salads and such in upscale restaurants.  I’m guessing some marketing guru got the notion to sell its seeds, not knowing enough about its cultivation to realize it was a weed!  I could only shake my head in disbelief.

Eating weeds is not a new concept though.  In fact, I think it’s one that should be highly encouraged, with a little weed identification education of course.  Don’t go out and eat just any weed. Only some are edible.  But once you know what is edible – and some are quite delicious – go get ‘em! 

It certainly is a unique way to clean out the invasive species from your garden or local park.  One caveat though when foraging for edible weeds: be sure you know if they’ve been sprayed.  It’s best to get them out of your own garden or overgrown backyard if you can. And let’s face it, we all have a weed or two somewhere.  

I’ve been doing a lot of weed pulling in my new line of work/study and one that repeatedly rears its unusually pretty head is garlic mustard.  It’s a member of the Brassicaceae family (the one with broccoli and cabbage in it), and it gets the same small white flowers when it bolts into seed.  It spends its first year low to the ground though as a mounded rosette of deep green kidney-shaped leaves.  It’s a little harder to identify if you don’t know what you’re looking for, but I think these younger clumps make for better eating. 

While pulling a few hundred garlic mustard plants, I meditated on the name and decided it surely must be edible with a name that included two delicious flavor agents.  After a little research, I learned it was once a very regular part of the colonial diet as an herb and salad green, particularly in winter when not much other green leafy stuff was available (garlic mustard pops its head up before anything else in the Northeast which is one of the reasons why it’s such a “successful” weed).  Since it’s a prolific seeder, at some point it no doubt got out in the woods where it grew like crazy in the shade and has ever since been the scourge of all those horticulturalist intent upon preserving native undergrowth in our woodlands. 

I’m always intrigued by older food traditions and the idea of putting a weed to good use, much like my beloved sorrel (weed-turned-delicacy), set my cook senses tingling.  Since I was thinking of sorrel as a good cultural comparison and maybe even somewhat similar in flavor, I decided to revisit the recipe I created for sorrel almond pesto to see if I could make a spring version of that more summery dish.  I still have some frozen basil on hand and instead of fresh tomatoes accompanying the pesto, I put the last of my oven-dried tomatoes to use.  Presto, some fresh *spring* pesto!   And a few less weeds in my yard to boot!

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You might have noticed that I haven’t been very, um, active in the kitchen lately.  I’ve already explained that in part a few posts back.  But I didn’t realize just how much having dirt under my nails every day now would divert my attention.  I gotta scrub for a good fifteen minutes before anyone would be wanting me in the kitchen! 

But I’m not complaining.  Nope.  I’m lovin’ the ride so far.  I broke ground on my garden plot this week, something I’m absolutely dying to tell to you about, but I haven’t got the photos I want just yet to put up that post.  I keep changing my plot layout, and I want to get that solidified first.  I will tell you about what I’m planting first (tomorrow, in fact).  I’ve got an antique lettuce mix, sugar snap peas, “easter egg” radishes, and sorrel.  I’ll be direct seeding all of those considering the current hot streak here in the Northeast.  These cool weather crops are going to need to get started as fast as possible if they’re going to have a productive spring before the real heat wave hits. 

But this is a recipe post, not at garden post.  So, I did get in the kitchen on an evening this past week, one of the evenings I didn’t have a class, a meeting, or a lecture to attend (there seems to be one almost every night now), but I didn’t quite have the energy to start from square one.  What to do…what to do?  I spied the leftover roasted roots in the fridge, looking a little worse for the wear (certainly lacking any “crispy” factor), and got the notion to make a quick soup with them.  

I’m a sucker for lentils in soup.  And I’m an even bigger sucker for how pretty uncooked red lentils are (if only they stayed so pretty after boiling).  I know they’re rather unassuming, but I’m still drawn in by their perfect circular shape and the feel of them running through my fingers.  I thought I was a bit of an oddball until I saw Amelie, my favorite movie of all time, and the scene at the grocers where she takes pleasure in running her hands through sacks of legumes.  

Since red lentils cook so quickly, they seemed a good match for my roasted root soup idea.  So there were lentils and there were roasted roots, but quite frankly, the rest of it is a bit fuzzy.  I’ll do my best to recap in a recipe that will let you recreate this silky smokey soup.  The pureed red lentils make this soup thick and filling.  If you don’t have the exact same mix of roasted roots, you can still make the soup with only roasted potatoes. 

So here goes with the “recipe”… if anyone notices anything terribly amiss, feel free to point it out.

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Last weekend, D surprised me by taking me to New York City to celebrate my birthday.  He’d already gotten tickets to a play (I Love You, Your Perfect, Now Change gets a big thumbs up from me) and had picked out a restaurant for dinner (aw, so sweet).  He did ask me though what I’d like to do in the afternoon before the play started. I immediately said “Union Square.” 

I’ve been to NYC dozens of times but never had the opportunity before to stop in at the granddaddy of farmers markets held in Union Square.  I’d heard so much about it, including drooling over some of the produce Deb’s bought there during the past few years I’ve been reading Smitten Kitchen.  Still, I wasn’t quite prepared for the intensity of the experience.  Hordes of people, none of which seemed to be paying any attention to anyone else around them to the point that I literally had to throw myself between people by times just to try to get a foot further among the stands of root vegetables, apples, and fresh baked goods.  Elbowing aside, it was still an awesome market, even at the brink of spring before anything green was ready for this particular greenmarket. 

Sad that there weren’t any ramps or asparagus to be had yet, I started scouting out for anything unique that I hadn’t had a chance to try before, even if it was just another “boring” root vegetable.  After about the third or fourth stall of potatoes (granted, there was a very impressive array of potato varieties and sizes), I finally found something totally new to me: burdock root. 

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