Canton noodles with greens and cusk

There comes a time in every gardener/salad growers life when they get tired of eating salad.  Diversity is decidedly necessary in the diet.  Once we feel as though we can't shovel in another mouth full of salad (even if tangy cheeses or dried cranberries are involved) we start cooking the greens.  

This was dinner a few nights ago: stir fried noodles topped with sautéed brassicas, ginger, onions and cusk.  Cusk is a native white fish.  Supposedly it's related to cod, but the texture is quite different and it seems to work best in dishes that require broken up pieces of fish (like chowder or fish tacos).

What I'm eating today: birthday cupcakes

The cupcakes I made for my birthday this weekend needed some decoration.  

Tiny spinach and mizuna leaves looked pretty cute, if only for a few hours.

What I'm eating today - the first harvest of the year

Yesterday I harvested the first greens of the year.  I planted the mizuna a month ago and the handful I harvested was just enough to cover a pizza.  

What I'm eating today ~ 1/28

Winter is all about eating lots of soup.  Especially when you constantly feel like you might be getting sick.  Most soups benefit from a few leafy greens.  I add a chopped handful (or two) in just a few minutes before serving so they have time to cook, but are still vibrant green.  Above is chicken soup with spinach, but nearly anything would work.  Tat soi, pak choi, vitamin green, swiss chard, or kale would be especially good.

What I'm eating today ~ 1/7

Last week I commented on not knowing what to do without any salad greens in the house.  In truth, we have bags of frozen spinach that were harvested before downy mildew took over and are not totally bereft of green things to eat.  I've also watered the nearly-dried-out greens that were left to fend for themselves in the greenhouses during Christmas break.  So, soon I'll be back in business.

In the meantime, I'm wrestling with the quadratic equation.  If you haven't thought about this since high school (like me!) it looks like this:  Ax² + Bx + C = Y  or this:   X = (-B +/- √(-B – 4AC)) /(2A).  I'm using it to look at all the growth rate data from the fall.  So far it's a bit headache-inducing, but makes me glad I've hung onto my TI-83.  (For anyone older than me I think you used slide rules to do algebra?  Wikipedia describes slide rules as 'mechanical analog computers,' which sounds like a term that would get you shoved into a locker). 

First harvest of the season

Planted September 4th, just 17 days ago! 

Planted September 11th, 10 days ago. 

It feels like I just began planting for the fall season and already there are harvestable greens!  This week we had our first mizuna salad from the first planting of greens, and by next week I will be harvesting lettuce as well.  Next week is also a big week because I will be planting over 20 varieties of greens as part of the variety trial.  I am super excited to start this project!  Finally I will have some answers for all the people looking up vitamin green.

Dinner on a muggy night

If you are anywhere in the New England area this week, or just in the United States at all this summer, chances are you don't want to do much cooking.  After traveling for a week, and breaking out in a sweat just standing up I was not about to actually cook anything for dinner tonight.  Since I just got back last night from the OFA short course (more on that in the future once I've had a bit more sleep) the vegetable part of my diet has been lacking.

I have not been eating many of these.  Although I dissected a restaurant salad
and found both mizuna and tatsoi in it!

Not to worry!  Remember the class I went to on super nourishing greens back in the spring?  When everyone else said their favorite dish was the arugula pesto, my favorite was the greens soup.  The pesto was great, but it involved pasta, cheese and basil, which happen to be three of my Favorite Foods of All Time.  Not like this soup, which has not one, but three amazing things about it:

1. There is no cooking involved.
2. You get tricked into slurping up four vegetables without realizing it.  Five if you count avocado as a vegetable.
3. Zucchini is one of those vegetables.  We are just beginning zucchini season here, which means it is a treat and not something you feed to the dog because you have more summer squash than you know what to do with.

If you are my mom you might be thinking "what! avocado?!"  Yes, today I bought my first two avocados ever.  Perhaps this will be the year I discover how wonderful guacamole is because I have an extra one sitting in the fridge now.

Recipe 

(adapted from the Food and Health Forum- 

if you join their mailing list you get a whole digital cookbook!)

Blend together a cucumber, a whole bunch of kale and a cup of water.  Spinach would be fine too.  I did this with my immersion blender.  Dump in an avocado, juice from a lemon, a capful of soy sauce, a teaspoon of ginger and a pinch of cayenne.  Blend it some more. Then taste it.  Grate in one moderate sized (8 inch) zucchini and fold in a cup of corn.  Chill until served.  People may be put off by how it looks.  They are fools.

* Edit 7/19:  For dinner we had chips and cheese dip which balanced out the cool vegetable-ness.  Bruschetta would also be good on a not-so-muggy day.

What I learned this week

Last week's facts came from reading published articles.  This weeks facts come from other people who've read published articles.  They seem to be all about eating, which is definitely because it is after seven and I haven't had dinner yet.

lots of broccoli planted too close together

No Baloney compared three crucifers (broccoli, kale and brussel sprouts) to see which give the most bang for your buck.  As you know I'm a big fan of all brassicas even if I only get to grow the leafy kind for my research.  Which was the winner? Broccoli!  They do stress that you shouldn't really choose between the three.  All of them should be part of your diet, but not necessarily during the same meal.

I eat salads naked because I don't like salad dressing.  Apparently I'm missing out because the correct monounsaturated fat-rich salad dressings help release nutrients from the vegetables.  According to Mario Ferruzzi, a Purdueassociate professor of food science, "If you want to utilize more from your fruits and vegetables, you have to pair them correctly with fat-based dressings."  One study isn't enough to make me eat salad dressing all the time but maybe sometimes.

Lastly, broccoli leaves are edible.  It shouldn't be a surprise because they are in the brassica family and related to cabbage and kale.  When planting our garden a few months ago we had more plants than space.  Since I can't bear throwing away plants I stuck them all in anyways.  Now, we are eating the leaves from select plants to thin out the patch.  I treat them like kale, and they taste like - broccoli of course.

A really cool thing: Basil rooting

A few weeks ago in my post about basil I mentioned basil could be 

propagated by cutting (aka if you put basil in water like cut flowers 

magically roots will appear).   I stuck a few of the harvested basil stalks  

in a cup of water and left it on my windowsill.

Two days ago I said "Nothing is happening!  We should just eat this basil."  

I stuck the cup in the kitchen so I would remember to use it. 

As I groggily put the kettle on this morning I saw that magic had happened - 

little roots had burst out!  (At 6:30 this morning I was the only one actually excited about this.)

Look at them all!  What a relief that we had fish for dinner last night and not pasta.  

All the basil we planted in our tiny garden is not very happy because 

it has been so cold and rainy.  Hopefully, these will be their replacements in a few weeks.

tat soi florets for dinner

Since the winter (when I started saving mizuna seeds) I learned that you can eat all brassica florets.  After I read that I felt a bit stupid.  What did I think brocoli was?  Not a very tasty flower in the brassica family that is a staple in my refrigerator? 

  When I threw out all the flats of over-the-hill greens a few weeks ago I save a few of tat soi because they were just starting to flower.  Oh boy, do they taste good!  Like sweet broccoli, and with no sharpness that broccoli sometimes has.  I quickly learned that you have to pick the florets when they are small, otherwise they get tough and fibrous.

I ate most of the tat soi as snacks when working in the greenhouse, but some made it home for dinner one night.  I sautéed them with garlic and asparagus (from the store) and spring onions (from another research project at the farm).  I mixed the sauté with a piece of chopped bacon and middle eastern couscous (which I just discovered this year and are my favorite).  Then we ate it all up.