an ever-revolving page of pure serendipity, curiosity and other wonderments

worth pondering...

“half the interest of a garden is the constant exercise of the imagination. you are always living three, or indeed six, months hence. i believe that people entirely devoid of imagination never can be really good gardeners. to be content with the present, and not striving about the future, is fatal.”

--alice morse earle, 1897

hallelujah time. summer’s bounty is upon us. berries weigh down bushes. hollyhocks stick up their ruffled necks toward heaven’s gate. the black-eyed susans are winking all around. a hundred thousand blinking beauties, eyes wide for all the bumblebees and butterflies, who suck their holy nectar, rub their legs against the fertile dust that, with every fluttering of wings and landing once again, will make for gardens down the road. 

it was worth the wait. the days, now hot, and fueled by tall, sweaty pitchers of lemon waters. the nights, if you tiptoe out to where the stars are, are twinkling. up where sleeping clouds are, yes. but right around us, too, where the fireflies do their blinking thing.

any minute now, it’ll be tomato time. our mouths will break out in sores from sucking down so much acid-tinged  juice. i will slice and slice and, sometimes, simply  bite and chew, straight from the vine. i’ll stop, perhaps, just long enough to shake the salt, and grind the peppermill, then it’s back to what i wait all year for: the bounty of the holy sacred earth, round and red and wholly satisfying.

don’t know ‘bout you, but i can’t keep myself inside. if i could, i’ll roll up underneath the black-eyed chorus and spend the night sleeping like a bumblebee in sweetest dreams, surrounded on all sides by growing things that bloom in living color. blessed sacred summer, thank you...... 

terra’s corner: here is the little patch of pull up a chair where our dear friend terra is rooted. terra is terra brockman, who, fittingly, writes of the earth, while her brother henry farms the earth. both harvest their own crop of magnificence down in congerville, in the heart of the illinois heartland. terra is a writer with a high calling, she is a writer of sacred earth. or, you might say, she is a sacred writer of earth. either way, she brings us, through her blessed words, each week during harvest season, to the earth, to the farm. to the rhythms of the growing world. every thursday, sometimes after midnight, her weekly missive, “farm and food notes,“ lands in computers all around the globe. we are blessed to have her here, and share her wholeheartedly. as you read along, you’ll soon know just why i call her a national treasure and holy sacred friend.

here is the latest taste of terra....

Farm Notes

After the couple inches of rain we got two days ago (along with strong winds that brought down a dead tree or two, including the old hickory in front of our parents’ house), the soil is perfect for pulling roots – not too muddy, not too dry.

The beets we pull by hand, but steel and horse-power help us loosen the deep-rooted carrots. Henry drives the tractor very slowly through the beds of carrots, pulling behind him an implement that has arrow-shaped sweeps mounted on it. Henry positions the sweeps so they dig down about a foot, and loosen the earth alongside each row of carrots. This allows the workers to easily pull them up, without breaking the tops off and leaving the root anchored. After I stumbled my way down the carrot row a way, I ditched my sandals in the nearby bed of chard, and walked back over the soft, yielding earth to pull more carrots. As I stepped where Henry had loosened the soil, I sank down calf-deep in the earth’s welcome embrace.

There is something about soil -- deep, rich, soft, buoyant, fragrant, joyful soil -- that is hard to convey in words. But my eyes and nose and skin sense the truth -- the absolute beauty and rightness of this soil your vegetables come from. And so will your taste buds.

Because of other obligations, I didn’t make it down to the field until about 6 p.m. today, which was the beginning of the night shift, but still felt like hot mid-afternoon. The night shift usually consists of Henry and his three kids, and farm-hand Matt. I stepped in alongside them, pulling and bunching the beets and carrots, talking and sweating, relating news of the day. The kids talk amongst themselves in Japanese and their words and laughter bubble up like a refreshing spring of pure water. Even though they’ve been working most of the day, they don’t seem tired or bored. I wonder where they will go when they leave the farm, and how far their work ethic, sense of camaraderie, sense of humor, and sense of belonging – to each other and to the earth -- will take with them.

It wasn’t until the sun finally fell behind the trees, that the air cooled and the light softened. The evening lasted one brief hour, and then night fell, sending most of us into our houses and soon to bed, while Henry continued working – washing all those root vegetables, and loading them into the truck, while I headed home to cook up some corn and write. The corn was amazing . . . your teeth barely touch the kernels, and they are so crisp and full of juice that they leap into your mouth.

Henry warns that, with the way the heat has kicked in, there won’t be any lettuce coming to the market this week. He also says there’s more than one way to make a salad. This week Henry suggests cool cucumber salads and juicy tomato salads. Both of them made with a sprinkling of the beautiful peeled shallots he’s bringing up.

The cucumbers and squash are coming on strong now, as are the tomatoes. But it will be a short tomato season this year because of the wet weather, which has caused various blights to take hold of the tomato plants and will reduce their lifespan considerably. So buy them up now, heirlooms and hybrids alike. And consider making sauce to freeze for winter, or just chunk the tomatoes into ziplock freezer bags now and make sauce with them later. It’s easy, and it’s the only way you’ll get to taste summer tomatoes in the dead of winter.

The rain this week came at just the right time for the big batch of fall greens and roots that Henry planted over the past week . . . if all goes well you’ll be seeing the arugula, chois, Japanese turnips, and many other fall crops earlier than usual this year.

Food Notes: Henry of Shallott

With Apologies to Alfred, Lord Tennyson

On either side of Walnut Creek it lies,
Henry’s Farm with veggies low and high
That perfume the air clear up to the sky;
And from the field the goodness flies
To many-tower'd Evanston;
Where up and down the people go,
In search of tastes long forgot
from that fertile field down below,
tended by Henry of Shallott.

The shallot is the most prized member of the onion family among many serious cooks. Even if you’re not all that serious, try some of the peeled “Red Sun” shallots that Henry is bringing up this week. (He is also, for the first time, bringing up braids of onions. This is a beautiful and useful way to store onions in your kitchen. Just hang them up with a nail, and use as needed.) But back to our shallots . . .

Sometimes it seems like the names of vegetables came about though a game of “telephone.” Before 300 B.C. the Greek writer Theophrastus called shallots askolonion. Some 400 years later Pliny concluded that is was so named because it came from the ancient seaport of Ascalon in Palestine. The Romans called it caepa Ascalonia, or Ascalonian onion. Although this theory has been repeated often and stated as fact on many a website, Alan Davidson, in The Oxford Companion to Food, says that the shallot actually originated in central Asia and reached India long before it came to the Mediteranean, and then to France around 800 A.D. It brought its vulgar Latin name iscalonia with it, which in Old French became eschalotte, and English took it as eschalot, or shallot.

Tennyson’s “Lady of Shallot” is not an allium addict; she came from a place called Scalot (which conveniently rhymes with Camelot).Tennyson’s poem is loosely based on the Arthurian legend of Elaine of Astolat, as recounted in a thirteenth-century Italian novella, Donna di Scalotta—neither of which have anything to do with onions, although there is some weeping nevertheless.

In European cooking, shallots are best known for their role in sauces and in vinaigrettes. You can also simply substitute shallots for onions or garlic in your favorite recipes. For up-scale green beans, for example, blanch the haricots verts a minute or two in boiling salted water, then sauté up some shallots in olive oil. Add the blanched beans, tossing to coat with the shallots and oil. Add salt and pepper to taste. Here are a couple of other simple recipes.

Shallot Bruschetta

3 tablespoons olive oil
5 large shallots, thinly sliced

4 – 6 slices French bread
Pepper
Freshly grated Romano cheese

Preheat broiler. Heat oil in heavy small skillet over medium heat. Add shallots and sauté until tender, stirring frequently, about 5 minutes.

Broil 1 side of bread until toasted. Spread shallot mixture on second side of bread. Sprinkle generously with pepper and cheese. Broil until beginning to brown. Serve immediately.

Shallot Vinaigrette

2 tablespoons French red vinegar
2 tablespoons finely chopped fresh shallots
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
2 teaspoons Dijon style mustard
6 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon heavy cream
(may substitute yogurt or omit entirely)

Using a blender, add first 5 ingredients and, with blender running, add oil. Continue blending. Add in lemon juice and then the optional cream or yogurt.

--terra brockman, “food & farm notes,”august, 2008

everyday poetry dept.

one of the joys of all life, i do believe, is the wonder of catching bits of poetry in everyday talk. it is like stumbling upon a climbing rose in a thicket of plain old weeds. i collect these bits. and just the other day, i heard a line so heavenly, i decided we must all begin to keep them in a special drawer, here on the lazy susan. if you hear a line, a bit of poetry, a way of cobbling words together that sends you to the moon, well, let me know. i’ll tuck them here. where the poetry in our lives will grow. because we’re on the prowl.

here’s the first...

in telling a story about standing in her corn field, a thunderstorm in the offing, the wise and wonderful terry starks, wrote this....”The sky began to rumble, as if it had eaten a bad star the night before-and I furiously

chopped at dirt clods, breaking them up and over my corn.”

she did it again...

on her wonderful blog, true calling, terry told this tale of the cantankerous winter that would not go to bed...”I find winter can be, at this time of year especially- like a child who is too sleepy, disgruntled, dragging its feet before it retires...whining in winds, crying in precipitation like tears from rain storms, and even still-an ice and snow covering as its security blanket. Perhaps that is why the little birds sing...to help put winter to bed, to sing to it sweetly- a lullaby of Spring.

and here’s yet another...

this from a bed-and-breakfast keeper in sedona, arizona, after a gentle rain fell...”it was a female rain,” she told my friend susan. “a nurturing rain,” she explained.  may female rains fall all around you. when you need one, and even when you don’t. 

cooking class: in celebration of a sun that shines straight-up, basking all the earth in what it takes to make the fruits ripen on the bough and vine....

   in my book of summery swoons, there is little so fine as a cobbler bubbling in the oven, its soft sweet insides plucked just hours before at the farmers’ market (or, of course, in the orchard, should you be so blessed). berries, peaches, you name the summer fruit; i’ll take it. two or three, while you’re at it.

    august, though, is high tide for peaches, rolling in in juicy waves, those fuzz-skinned orbs with wrinkled pit. and while my no. 1 choice in peach parlance would be straight-up, dripping down my chin, most of all the world would take ‘em cobblerized, so i’ll oblige.

    here then, the cobbler and the dough, from our fine kitchen friends at williams-sonoma. 

peach cobbler

serves 10 to 12.

ingredients:

3 lb. peaches, peeled, pitted and each cut into 8
  slices

1/4 cup plus 2 Tbs. plus 1 tsp. granulated sugar

1/4 cup plus 2 Tbs. firmly packed light brown
  sugar

2 1/2 Tbs. cornstarch

2 tsp. fresh lemon juice

1/4 tsp. freshly grated nutmeg

1 Tbs. unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

1 batch cobbler dough (see recipe next door)

1 egg, lightly beaten

Vanilla ice cream for serving

directions:

--Preheat oven to 425ºF. In a large bowl, stir together the peaches, 1/4 cup plus 2 Tbs. granulated sugar, the brown sugar, cornstarch, lemon juice and nutmeg. Transfer to a 2-quart rectangular baker and scatter the butter pieces on top.
--On a lightly floured work surface, roll out the cobbler dough 1/4 inch thick. Tear the dough into 3-inch pieces and place on top of the peach filling. Brush the dough with the beaten egg and sprinkle with the 1 tsp. granulated sugar.
--Bake the cobbler for 10 minutes. Reduce the oven temperature to 350ºF and bake until the topping is browned, 50 to 60 minutes more.
--Transfer the pan to a wire rack and let cool for about 20 minutes. Serve the cobbler with vanilla ice cream.

a moment’s silence....   

it’s been months now, but i still can’t take this down. just before last christmas, a gentle saint among us died. he was best-known as the pigeon man of lincoln square. a few weeks later, at a sidewalk gathering of friends and strangers--even pigeons--who came to say goodbye, to honor the spirit of the man who held out his arms and was cloaked in flocks and flocks of feathered friends, 200 compassion cards (pictured to the right) were passed out, each along with a slice of squishy white bread to feed the birds. the words are worth slowly consuming...

compassion: deep awareness of others’ suffering, accompanied by the desire to alleviate it. joe zeman 1930-2007. be the change.

cobbler dough

ingredients:

1 1/4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour

1/3 cup sugar

1/4 tsp. salt

7 Tbs. cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/4-inch
  cubes

1 egg yolk

1 tsp. vanilla extract

2 Tbs. very cold water

cobbler dough directions:

In a food processor, combine the flour, sugar and salt and pulse just to combine. Add the butter and pulse until the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal, with the butter pieces no larger than small peas.

In a small bowl, mix together the egg yolk, vanilla and cold water. Add the egg mixture to the flour mixture and pulse just until the dough pulls together; do not overmix.

Transfer the dough to a work surface, pat into a ball and flatten into a disk. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes. Roll out the dough as directed in your recipe.