The Dill Bread of Summer

Bouquet dill is one of the most welcome sights of midsummer.  Its exuberant flowers are cheerful, whether as volunteers in a flower bed or in the vegetable garden.  And it is one of my favorite herbs.

Of course dill is famous for fish, chilled cucumber salad or soup, and in pickles.  But I especially look for it so that I can bake dill bread.

This recipe is a survivor from an era when no-knead batter breads were popular.  It contains cottage cheese, whose protein gives the bread structure without heavy kneading.  But I knead it anyway.

The bread should be made to serve hot, along with a summer meal that might include corn on the cob, a grilled meat, probably a cold salad or grilled summer vegetables and perhaps some sliced tomatoes. Its frank opulence offsets those simple elemental flavors (don't skip the butter for the hot bread). Leftover bread can be toasted the next day and served as a tea bread or snack.

Many market gardeners and supermarkets feature the variety known as dukat dill, which resists flowering and provides a long supply of the fresh dill leaves.  But in my experience these have a milder (duller) flavor than the ferny foliage of the bouquet dill.  You'll need to pick the leaves before seedheads begin to form and the leaves start to yellow.  I like the strong flavor of the bouquet dill and include lots of it in the bread.

Cottage Cheese Dill Bread

Dissolve one measure* of instant dry yeast in 1/4 cup warm water.

Mix 1 t salt, 1/4 t baking soda, 2 T sugar and 1/4 cup all-purpose flour.  Set aside.

In a saucepan (low heat), melt together 1 cup of creamed cottage cheese (not low-fat) and 1 T butter.  Let cool in pan after combined.

Combine the cooled cheese mixture with the yeast, the dry ingredients, and

1 egg

2 T (or more) chopped onion

2 T (or more) chopped fresh dill

Mix in approximately 2 cups more flour.   Turn onto floured board and knead briefly to combine flour and wet mixture, adding flour as necessary.  The objective is not to knead aggressively as for breads that depend on gluten for structure, but to combine flour and produce a dough that can be handled.  Place in a buttered bowl and let rise for 45 minutes.

Butter a casserole or loaf pan.  (An oval casserole can make an attractive loaf for the table.) Punch down the dough and place into the pan to let rise another 30 minutes or until bread has risen above the container.  (Note - it can run over the edge if left to itself, so watch.)

Bake the risen bread for 35 minutes in a preheated 350° F oven.

*Yeast note: A packet of instant dry yeast may be used.  Regular bread bakers often use a bulk dry yeast such as saf-instant (available from King Arthur's catalog or in many groceries), in which case the recommended amount is 2 1/4 t.

The center of the bread is soft, but not wet.

The Fruits of Summer: Eggplant and Tomato

The gorgeous fruits of summer's bounty are a delight to the eye but a challenge to the cook.  How to use not just one eggplant, but six or eight all at once?  And the tomatoes just keep on coming, despite numerous batches of sauce.  This sets off a search for dishes that use several of these fruits of summer at once.

Middle Eastern and "Mediterranean" dishes are a great source for such recipes.  Every summer I know that when the eggplants come in, I'll be making my favorite lamb and eggplant stew from Claudia Roden's classic A Book of Middle Eastern Food  (it has since come out in a revised version but I cling to my old one).

Note that most recipes in this book, and many other recipes using eggplant, call for sprinkling the cut eggplant with salt and then draining it after awhile.  I think this may have been intended to cut the "bitter factor" from the eggplant.  However, I do not use the large eggplants but rather a smaller variety, Neon. There are many varieties of pear-shaped eggplant that are similar but I have found this one to be sweet and mild even when fairly mature.  I never use the pre-salting technique.

Lamb and Eggplant Stew

adapted from Claudia Roden

1 large onion, chopped

1 pound or more of lamb stew meat (this can be made from leg of lamb)

3 tomatoes (quartered, peeled by immersing in boiling water)

1 tablespoon concentrated tomato paste

Juice of 1/2 lemon

1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

1/2 teaspoon ground allspice

olive oil

2-3  eggplants (medium size)

salt, black pepper

Brown the meat and onion together in scant oil.  Mash the tomatoes into the mixture and add the tomato paste, lemon juice and spices.  Add water to cover and simmer for about 1 hour until the meat is tender enough to cut with a cooking spatula.

Slice the peeled eggplants thinly and sauté in batches until translucent.  This will take up a lot of olive oil.  Some of it may be poured back into the skillet for the later batches.

Mix the eggplant into the meat mixture, cover and simmer for about 1/2 hour more.  Salt and pepper to taste.

This mixture is excellent over a bulgur wheat pilaf, but any grain pilaf should work.  It is also very nice with some yogurt on the side.

The Terror of Tomatoes: So Much of a Good Thing

It's fortunate that we choose not to remember unpleasant things and that we compartmentalize memories. Otherwise, we might never order so many garden seeds. We'd look at those lovely pictures and think, "Oh, no - the harvest!!".

Now is the season of desperate processing. Even with the depredations of a late-season tomato late blight infection, the tomatoes have advanced from one kitchen counter, to a second, to a table in the basement. I've pulled out the last of the vines but I'll have tomatoes ripening and asking to be processed for another week or two.

I grew three varieties this year. My old reliable for fresh eating and casual cooking is Carmello, which I've been buying from Renée's Garden. It is a tender-skinned variety bred for flavor that grows medium-sized red round tomatoes. This gets made into tabbouleh, gazpacho, fresh salsa, broiled tomatoes, and of course eaten as luxurious big fat red tomato slices.





I've usually grown an Italian plum-type tomato too, and lately it has been Pompeii, also from Reneé's Garden. They produced very well this year and made large long fruits.










This year I added Amish Paste from Cook's Garden. These are described as "acorn-shaped" and that works pretty well. They are supposed to be meaty and good for sauces. Some of these fruits were huge.

I can't compare flavor for these last two, because I combined them. I usually think of plum-type tomatoes as "paste" tomatoes. So I just quartered them and cooked them together in a couple of slow cookers, a.k.a. crock pots. I cover the pot until the tomatoes juice up and begin to cook, then remove the cover and let them cook down all day. Then I run them through a food mill to remove skins and seeds, and the result is a moderately thick purée which I freeze in jars.

What I do with the Carmello when it exceeds fresh eating requirements? I skin them (by placing briefly in a pan of boiling water and then pulling the skins off) cut them up, and cook them down. This goes into various dishes for freezing, like cabbage rolls and a huge batch of spaghetti sauce. But I also make a simple basil-tomato sauce for freezing. It can be used as is or as the base of other sauces and it is a good way to use the basil I grow every year.

Basil Tomato Sauce

For each large pot (about 6 quarts) of cooked tomatoes, cut up 1 medium onion and 6 garlic cloves. Cook them in about 1/4 cup of olive oil until translucent (don't let the garlic brown) and add the tomatoes and a plentiful quantity of fresh torn (not chopped) basil leaves. Simmer with stirring until thickened, 1-2 hours. Add ground black pepper and salt to taste (I often omit salt since tomatoes are fairly salty in themselves).

I've often used this from the freezer to make a more complex meaty spaghetti sauce. It can also be used to make a sauce with roasted red peppers.

Roasted Red Pepper Sauce

For each quart of Basil Tomato Sauce, roast and peel 1 ripe red bell pepper (or more). Put the pepper and the sauce into a blender and purée till smooth. Season with black pepper and 1/4 t each salt and sugar (or to taste).

I serve this with Eggplant Parmigiana. Both the prepared eggplant and the sauce freeze nicely for midwinter meals.

The Basil Tomato Sauce is just fine as is for dishes like traditional lasagna.

Mon Petit Chou

Not for nothing do the French use cabbage as a term of endearment. Cabbage is an enormously solid and reassuring vegetable that has provided good nutrition for the humanity of the world. It is productive, high in nutritional value, and best of all, stores well. I've written previously about its role as a storage vegetable and of course about its evocation as sauerkraut. I'm enormously vainglorious and possessive of my cabbages and delight in their translation from little plants in late April to amazingly huge heads by August.

This year I planted three varieties. Ruby Perfection (red cabbage), just a few. It stores well, we like the German red cabbage (Rötkohl), and I'm trying to learn other ways to use it. This year, a new variety planted specifically for sauerkraut. Kaitlin, a new F1 from Johnny's Selected Seeds, is supposed to be a late-season, good storage cabbage ideal for kraut. I'm hoping it will solve my problem with early splitting. So far it is not very big (I planted it last so maybe it got a slow start) but looks very healthy. But this post is devoted to Tendersweet, my darling little cabbage (mon petit chou).

Tendersweet (again, from Johnny's) was an experiment last year. I found that it was not ideal for kraut but was wonderful for fresh eating and cooking. As the name implies, it is a delicate, thin-leafed cabbage. The head is endearingly flat and the soft leaves peel away easily, which makes it perfect for cabbage rolls. (See the recipe in last year's post.) Last year I froze a number of these in meal-sized portions and we mournfully pulled the last from the freezer around January. More this year.

Because it is so mild and delicate, it doesn't need any of the fussing around that you sometimes read about with salting or brining. I just cut thin slivers across the head with my sharp knife and it can be used for slaw or even served with a simple vinaigrette. Even the midveins are not harsh and coarse as some cabbages can be.

It began splitting last week after a lot of rain, so I harvested a number of the larger heads for a small batch of sauerkraut, and stored some others for near-term eating. Happily there are still a few smaller heads out there waiting for later use.

A Bad Year for Garlic

Last year's harvest of garlic, my first, was very successful. We ate our homegrown garlic all winter, right up to mid-June, when I reluctantly bought one head of store-bought to see us through to harvest again. I was so pleased that I have ordered more than twice as much seed garlic to plant this fall.

But this year's crop seemed ill-fated. First, when I received the seed garlic from Johnny's, there was a note that they had detected some fungal infection on the New York White and let them know if any problems developed. Yet it was the German Extra-Hardy that had penicillium mold on them. I violated the first rule of gardening, which is Never plant bad seed. It was so late and the fall weather was so capricious (we did have a very early winter, with snow the week before Thanksgiving), that I just put everything into the ground, including some of my stored garlic.

Not everything came up in the spring. Further, when I first ventured out to the garden after the thaw, quite a few cloves had heaved out of the soil. I pushed them back in, but I don't think it worked. Probably mulching would have helped. Once the plants did come up, many of them were very small. Then we had unusually cool wet weather all June and into July. I harvested the garlic earlier than I wanted to, about mid-July, because the plants were flopping over and I didn't want the bulbs to rot in the ground. The harvested bulbs sat in my garden shed to cure for a couple of weeks before I sorted and cleaned them.

The yield was just under 9 pounds. I estimate that my home-grown garlic cost about $2.50 a pound (seed garlic is expensive). But worse, I saw symptoms of disease on them. I identified the likely cause as a Fusarium immediately because of the pinkish color. Sure enough, Fusarium rot is a known problem on garlic.

I think that most of affected bulbs were the softneck type, New York White. Luckily I didn't order that again this year. I noticed that even after a couple of weeks curing in the shed, the cut stem of the garlic was still moist, a bad idea.



According to an excellent source on garlic cultivation that I just found, stiffneck garlic is most successful in Northern home gardens. Apparently the softneck type (which I have never cared to braid) is easier for market gardeners to plant, but the stiffneck type is hardier.


A difference between stiffneck and softneck is that stiffneck must be pruned of its flower scape in June. Not a problem for me. These yield a delicious bonus - they are good in stir-fries and especially good in scrambled eggs.

The three varieties I've ordered for planting this fall, German Extra-Hardy, Russian Red, and Music, are all (by chance) stiff-neck. I've also found a new source that I might explore.

Meanwhile, I've cleaned the garlic from this year and put it into the driest spot I can find. I hope to beat the fungus to eating it.

First Fruits

We've been eating lettuce for many weeks and finished off the first crop of spinach and arugula some time ago. But for some reason, it feels more real when you start to get the big substantial vegetables. It seems only yesterday that I put the kohlrabi into the ground, and suddenly it is huge. Time to start picking it before it gets too big and fibrous.

Kohlrabi is the version of the cabbage family that produces thickened stems as its major food offering. (The fresh leaves are also edible, like kale or collards.) I love to plant the purple variety Kolibri (Johnny's Select Seeds) because it is fun. It looks like an alien from outer space. It also seems to have a fine quality. In kohlrabi, that means a mild, slightly nutty taste and fibrous material limited to a little near the base.

As I reported before, seeds were started March 20, and the seedlings placed in the cold frame April 12. I was too busy to record the day they were planted into the row but I would guess it was the first week of May. Now suddenly they are huge! It is so satisfying to harvest the fruit of my efforts. Now to find good ways to use it.

Conventional recipes based on Anglo/American tradition are not very inspiring. They begin with cream sauce and end there. Here's what James Beard (American Cookery) had to say about it: "This is rather a bastard vegetable...to me it is a mystery why people really care for it...Mrs. Rorer felt that kohlrabi was more nutritious than turnips and that it was pleasant served with Hollandaise sauce." He mentions cream sauce "gauge one per person" and also serving it with melted butter. For an updated version, see this from the New York Times.

The way I have usually begun serving it is peeled, sliced, cooked until tender in minimal water, then with butter, salt and pepper. We consumed three for two people without any effort last night. It is mild but has a pleasant distinct nutty flavor. I expect that I will use it in a gratin before the season is over, probably with onions and some of my frozen roasted red pepper.

But where it really comes into its own is with pickling. I found a recipe that apparently originated with Shepherd's Garden Seeds that worked very well a couple of years ago. It makes a fresh delicious pickle that can be served as a side dish. This year I'm also going to try the Chinese version in which kohlrabi is subjected to a short-term fermentation and seasoned with ginger, garlic, and hot pepper.

Pickled Kohlrabi (Shepherd's, 1994)

Peel and slice 3 kohlrabi, 1/4 inch thick. Peel one carrot and slice into thin sticks. (I think I sliced the kohlrabi into equivalent sticks last time.) Parboil the carrot briefly (should yield to a fork but not be soft). Place raw kohlrabi, carrot, 2 crushed garlic cloves, 1 bay leaf, and a sprig of fresh dill into a quart canning jar. Heat pickling mixture to boiling and pour over the vegetable mixture in the jar, filling the jar completely. Let cool, then refrigerate for 3-4 days before use. Will keep for several weeks in the refrigerator.

Pickling Mixture

3/4 c white vinegar
1 1/4 c water
3 Tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon dill seed
1 teaspoon mustard seed
1/4 teaspoon red chili flakes

Note: the original version of this recipe called for two carrots. I found that this made it into carrot and kohlrabi pickles instead of the other way around, so reduced to one carrot. The carrot itself is very good in this treatment and provides color, but to me the point is the kohlrabi.

Memories of times past

I'm not Proust, but I had one of those experiences just now. I was cooking a recipe gleaned from a local blogger (Maan's Beans) and looking into the pot with tomato, onions, garlic and green beans and I was suddenly transported back to a Safeway in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, where I was buying my very first zucchini. Where I grew up, we didn't have zucchini. We had summer squash, mostly pattipan. We cooked this by cutting it up and boiling it with butter and salt and pepper and probably some sugar. But I was a curious child and would browse the supermarket shelves for hints of new and better things. (Frozen vegetables were still not common.) So I found the Del Monte Italian Zucchini, and took my prize home to try it. It was boiled in a tomato sauce, probably with some onion and Italian seasonings. As I recall, it was pretty bland, but I was enchanted with this wholly new foodstuff. What kinds of people might eat this every day? Where did it come from and where was it going? Romance is half the battle with food, anyway.

Later, I grew (and ate) plenty of zucchini, mostly sauteéd in butter or made into ratatouille or a sort of squash-egg-brown rice material that helped get us through graduate school (this was my Diet for A Small Planet phase). I got thoroughly tired of it and there was definitely no more romance.

Lately, I've been experimenting with all types of summer squash, planting different types with a premium on flavor. So in filling out my seed order, I naturally gravitated to Costata Romanesco, said to be the most delicious zucchini. Of course, with my disillusionment with zucchini, that wouldn't take much. Still, something about it made me put it into my cart.

Only later did I wonder what I had done. Why did I buy this weird ribbed zucchini? So to Google, of course. I have now concluded that this may be the original Italian zucchini, before the hybridizers got to it. It is reputed to have a really excellent flavor. But there's more! It is also what the English call "vegetable marrow".

VEGETABLE MARROW! I've been trying to figure out what this is for years. It seems that C. R. ages very well and when it gets to be big (submarine), it retains an excellent, non-pithy structure and is very fine for stuffing. Expatriate English are reputed to pine for this vegetable, which as I understand is served with a white sauce. According to a farm blog I found on Google, the farmer was able to sell his big submarines at market to these starved refugees, though his CSA customers scorned them. But there's more!

When Hercule Poirot tried to retire from detecting at an estimated age of 101, for a time he retreated to the English countryside and grew vegetable marrows. One of Agatha Christie's latter mysteries began with him throwing these (presumably still edible) vegetables over the fence and disturbing some spinsters. I've always wondered what those were.

So the Romance of zucchini still lives. I just hope it really does taste good.

Garlic in Winter

I don't recall much fresh garlic being used in our house when I was growing up; I think it was limited to a clove here and there and maybe almost exclusively garlic salt in a few recipes. Most of my early cooking used garlic salt, until I realized that I was adding a lot of salt to get that garlic flavor. I started to use fresh garlic and then a lot of it. I was struck with Alice's rule early on. You know, Alice from Arlo Guthrie's song "Alice's Restaurant", that started "You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant". Actually this song (1965) was mostly about the Vietnam War, but it briefly made Alice Brock a star, and she published a cookbook. Here's what she said:

"Tomatoes and oregano make it Italian; wine and tarragon make it French. Sour cream makes it Russian; lemon and cinnamon make it Greek. Soy sauce makes it Chinese; garlic makes it good."

Did you get that last part? I seem to have, because I use copious amounts of garlic in every dish where it seems reasonable.

Starting around 2007 there were a lot of reports that most of our store-bought garlic was coming from China. This was a comedown for our famous garlic capital, Gilroy, California. Part of it was a disease that devastated the crop, and partly because of cheap labor in China. As one industry source explains, Chinese garlic has been found to be contaminated with arsenic, and its quality is also not as good. But China has often been the only source of fresh garlic readily found in winter. I was dismayed to see a big case of it in the back room of a grocery I patronize especially for their local produce.

I planted my first crop of garlic in the fall of 2007 and harvested it in late July, 2008. Since then I've been storing and using it. Some home truths I have discovered are that yes, there really are substantial differences in quality among varieties; and storage really is an issue. The cloves start to sprout. After dithering about where to store them, they ended up in my pantry closet. The garlic to the left is German Extra Hardy. It doesn't seem to sprout as readily (I pulled the clove shown off precisely because it was sprouting). This is a stiff-neck variety with very large cloves, and not many per bulb or head. The cloves and bulb to the right are New York White, a soft-neck variety that can be braided - but I didn't. Now as January draws to a close, I have almost used up the New York White, skating ahead of the sprouts. I hope that the German Extra Hardy lasts into the next harvest, but I doubt it. We eat a lot of garlic.

In spite of the facts that GEH lasted better and is easier to cook with because of those huge cloves, I'm planting less of it in 2009 in comparison to other varieties. The reason is that the flavor seems to be harsher than the NYW. Yet I'm not ordering NYW at all, because the heads are so small and it sprouts so early. But I'm expanding my planting and have ordered more of two new varieties, Music and Russian Red. It's a little strange - I have now ordered garlic to be planted in October-November of this year (2009) and harvested in 2010. Meanwhile under the snow this last year's plantings are waiting for spring.

I'm looking forward to trying a recipe another blogger listed. It uses a lot of garlic and looks like a good reason to get plenty of green beans planted next year.

Cabbage for Sauerkraut

Not only do I like to eat cabbages, I like to look at them. I've always thought that there is nothing prettier in the garden than cabbages glowing against the earth. What a pleasure to find that others share this affection. On a page devoted to cabbage cultivation, the author states "There is no more regal a vegetable than a well-grown cabbage, three feet across, its giant silvery green or dusty purple leaves shining with health." Amen to that, brother.

When I began growing cabbage in my garden for the purpose of making sauerkraut, I was quite ignorant of cabbage varieties. I knew the difference between red and green cabbage, and that savoy and Chinese cabbage were different types, but otherwise green cabbage was cabbage. This was partly because green cabbage bought in the store is fairly nondescript and probably one of just a few varieties. For a while I grew "Stonehead", a nice compact cabbage that I now understand is an early cabbage. Then two years ago, a spectacularly bad decision: I planted "Gonzales". Rereading the catalog from Johnny's Selected Seeds, I have no idea why I selected that one. It is an early cabbage meant to be harvested young and small. When I held the plants into the early fall for the purpose of making sauerkraut, I lost a third of them to splitting.

I now understand that the reason cabbage splits in our climate is that it has had enough cool weather followed by hot weather to make it flower. In other words, splitting is the cabbage equivalent of bolting. The head splits and a flower stalk grows out of it. Since both Stonehead and Gonzales were early cabbages, they started to split in mid-August. Once the head splits, it is prone to bacterial rot and isn't very nice anyway.

Both of these cabbages also produced rather small heads, between 1-2.5 pounds with biggest exterior leaves removed. They were somewhat difficult to shred, since they didn't fit the large holder on the krauthobel very well. There was a lot of wastage after I cleaned off the exterior dirty and green leaves and cored them.

When I visited cabbage fields in Wisconsin where cabbage for kraut was grown, I was amazed at the large heads, the size of a beach ball. The interior was very firm and white. Finally I did some research and now understand that this was probably a variety of late cabbage especially good to use for kraut. The most popular among home kraut makers seems to be an old variety called Late Flat Dutch. It is so old-fashioned that most modern seed catalogs don't carry it, but I found it in R.H. Shumway. "Heads average 10-12 inches across, often weighing 15 to 20 pounds." Now, consider that a 3-gallon crock only holds about 15 pounds of shredded cabbage. These are clearly cabbages for the serious. Next year I'll grow these and also some other late cabbages. Early cabbages are supposed to be mature in 60 days. I was holding them past their prime. Late cabbages are about 110 days to harvest, so I'll plant early for a fall sauerkraut production run. These late dense heads are also the favored cabbages for winter storage. And I think they'll be fun to look at. (Edited for clarity)

Kaitlin cabbage (picture cropped from Johnny's catalog)

UPDATE (2013):  This post is one of my most-viewed, so I feel compelled to update it to be more useful.
In subsequent years I planted Johnny's Selected Seeds variety Kaitlin (F1).  This was a superior cabbage for sauerkraut and is bred for that purpose. (Note that the designation (F1) means that it is a hybrid and not suitable for seedsaving.) Here are some of the features that make it a good cabbage for sauerkraut:
Late.  As I explained in my original post, cabbages that are mostly grown as summer (early) cabbages for eating tend to split in late summer or early fall.  I was able to harvest Kaitlin in late September for excellent quality and yield. 
Light.  The interior is almost completely white, which makes for a very clean-looking kraut.  I also did not observe any internal tipburn, which is a flaw in some cabbages that leaves nasty little brown shreds in the kraut.
Heavy.  The heads were substantial.  I do not have a record of weights, but I recall that they were all in excess of 3 pounds and closer to 5 pounds.

 If you want to grow cabbage just for sauerkraut, this is a good one.  It is fine as a winter storage cabbage too. 

Roots

We have had several frost scares, though no hard frosts yet. The appetite turns to warm baked dishes with apples and orange-fleshed winter squash. But there are also root vegetables that come into their own now and continue to thrive during these cooling days.

The red root on the left is Scarlet Queen turnip. This can be larger than the specimen shown and it has continued to grow and thrive through the cooler weather. It has a much finer texture than the common purple-top turnip and gets large without being either woody or pithy. It is from Johnny's Select Seeds. On the right is President celery root (celeriac). Its green leaves are still perfect and the roots are just now beginning to fill out. I started the seeds, from Cook's, very early but waited to put the plants out until it became warm, on the advice that the plants might otherwise bolt in warm weather.

I was introduced to these last year by a local organic grower, Tantré, and because I had both of them in my refrigerator I made a serendipitous discovery that they make a lovely salad in combination with each other. Scarlet Queen can also be cooked any way you cook turnips and celeriac is used in cooked dishes or made into a purée. But the fine firm texture of the two roots combines into a light fresh salad that can be kept for days in the refrigerator.

Julienne of Fall Root Vegetables

Peel Scarlet Queen turnip roots and celery roots in equal numbers and cut off any discoloration. Cut each into long narrow strips and combine with a vinaigrette (3 T olive oil to 1 T good vinegar, salt and pepper), a scallion cut into disks, and a smattering of dried basil or other herb. Marinate in the dressing a few minutes and serve.

Frontiers of fermentation

I've been fascinated for some time with the practice of fermenting foods for preservation and have spent some years perfecting the production of sauerkraut from cabbage. Last year my husband gave me a Christmas present of a fancy crock from Germany (Harsch) that adds some low-tech ease to the process. While I have learned to use a standard crock with a wooden cover for the kraut, a weight (quart jars filled with water), and covered with a tea towel, then a bath towel, this crock takes care of a number of those requirements. The essential requirements are that the vegetable needs to be pressed firmly to make "juice" (after being salted at 3 Tablespoons pickling salt to 5 lbs cabbage), pressed down with a weight and covered with brine, then protected from molds and yeasts and allowed to ferment to an anaerobic condition. For a pictorial account of this method, see Kim's account.

The fancy German crock has its own ceramic weights that substitute for finding a plate to fit or buying a wooden cover, and the rock or jars used to weight it down. They are two semicircles that drop in elegantly. Then a water seal consisting of a grove in the top of the crock plus the lid prevents any contaminants from getting in and helps promote the anaerobic progress of the fermentation.

I used the crock this year for my second batch of sauerkraut. Since I had already made a batch using my standard recipe, I became a little more experimental. Both the recipes that came with the crock and those in a book on preserving food (Preserving Food Without Freezing or Canning,Chelsea Green Publishing Co.) had made me aware that some European traditions do a lot more with sauerkraut, adding different vegetables and some spices to the mix. Apparently one can make turnips into shreds for this process, and carrots are another popular addition, but there are many variations. I chose a very conservative combination of several recipes. I added one onion, shredded very fine, and 3 bay leaves, 3 sage leaves, 3 whole cloves, and 6 juniper berries to my 10 pounds of cabbage, layering as I went. After 4 weeks of fermentation, the kraut was flawless and my husband says it tastes "spicier". The taste of the added spices is barely detectable, very subtle, and probably would not be detected if cooked.

This year I abandoned the practice of canning my kraut and have preserved all of it in quart canning jars in the refrigerator. It is delicious but this method results in some bad moments when trying to find places for other things around all the kraut jars. The kraut is very good as is but also serves as a salad with a simple vinaigrette (3 T oil to 1 T vinegar, pepper, no salt) and a chopped scallion. Cooked with sausages and a few caraway seeds, it is just as tasty in a different way.

I grew two varieties of cabbage for use in kraut this year. The one I have grown for several years, "Stonehead" from Jung, began to crack in mid-August. Kim and I made it into kraut that was decanted mid-September. The other variety, "Tendersweet" from Johnny's Select Seeds, I used for the second batch in mid-September, decanted in mid-October. Tendersweet has odd flattened heads and very thin leaves. I thought it would be superior for kraut because it made very fine strands. However, the resulting product is not as crisp and clings together when served rather than standing out a bit. I probably won't use it again for that, but it is a superior eating cabbage.

Timing of kraut production has been related to head splitting, which ruins the cabbage for making kraut and invites bacterial soft rot. Tendersweet appears to be somewhat more resistant to early splitting. I've discovered that the splitting of the head is preparatory to blooming. Cabbage is a biennial but apparently our climate has enough cold shocks to induce flowering. Perhaps I should investigate to see what varieties the kraut packers in Wisconsin use. I recall that they had huge basketball-size heads and might be resistant to splitting.

A Bounty of Peppers

For several years now, red bell peppers have been an important crop for my garden. There has been a vogue for purple, yellow, and even "chocolate" peppers, but to me, a ripe pepper can be any color as long as it is red. We eat them fresh, but I've learned to roast and peel them for freezing or pickling, so I've dedicated a noticeable fraction of the garden to them.


This has also entailed a search for the best variety. This year I tried three. From left to right: Crispy (Burpee), Maxibelle (Burpee), and Karma (Park). Note that "Crispy" and "Maxibelle" are both the yield on one day from one row of 5 plants; "Karma" is the yield from two rows. I keep on growing Karma because the fruits are big, blocky, and thick-walled. But they take a long time to grow and ripen. I've noticed in the past that I was picking red fruit from Crispy before any coloring on Karma at all. This year I tried for a third choice with Maxibelle. But contrary to the name, the fruit is no bigger than Crispy's, and the yield appears inferior. (Since these were photographed, the plants have now borne a new crop of red fruit ready to pick.) So the answer to the Desert Island question is apparently Crispy. Still, I'll probably continue to plant Karma. The fruit really is more impressive than this photograph shows.

Then the real punishment: an afternoon and early evening spent cutting, roasting (broiling) till the skin blisters, and peeling. The resulting slabs of pepper essence can be used in salads or cooking and I'll now be freezing them in small portions to use all winter. From the fruit shown above, I prepared 3 1/2 pounds of finished peppers.

Steakplant

The late Clifford Simak wrote many science fiction novels in which the protagonist lived a quiet life in the rural backwater of some distant future world, often sitting on his porch, fishing, and of course tending his garden. One of the concepts I thought particularly intriguing was that one such garden included a "steak plant" right next to the potatoes and carrots - a plant that produced little steaks hanging from its branches instead of fruit. Obviously genetic engineering was well developed by that time. How nice not to be involved with caging and butchering animals, but simply to go out into the garden and pick a nice steak to go with your vegetables of an evening. (Simak used folksy phrases like "of an evening" a lot.)

Well, we are almost there. Eggplant satisfies a lot of that part of our appetites that yearns for solid meat-type food along with all the greens and starches. It is a staple of many vegetarian dishes and extends others that contain meat. I've been planting the variety "Neon", from Cook's Garden, for several years, after experimenting with other varieties. It has a firm nonbitter flesh and remains at a high quality in the garden for a long time (when it becomes seedy, it obligingly turns a lighter, duller color). While most recipes for eggplant call for salting and pressing to rid it of a bitter flavor, this is never necessary for Neon. I find that my husband, who usually expects meat as a part of dinner, will tolerate the occasional meatless dinner made with eggplant.

We used to visit an Italian restaurant in San Diego (Capriccio) where the Eggplant Parmigiana was so good that we skipped the similar Veal Parmigiana. Unlike most recipes for this dish, the poor eggplant was not breaded, fried, and baked with layers of sauce and cheese, but rather served up straight with the sauce on the side. The result was remarkably meatlike.

Eggplant Parmigiana à la Capriccio

Slice a large fresh peeled eggplant into disks about 1/2 inch thick. If eggplant is not overmature, it should not require salting and pressing and doing so will ruin the character of the dish. Dip the freshly cut slices into flour (they will be very thinly coated), then into a mixture of egg and milk (about 3/4 c milk, beat the egg into it). Then press the eggplant slice into a seasoned bread crumb mixture (try oregano, dash of garlic salt, and paprika). Sauté in olive oil until browned on both sides. Place on cooking sheet and arrange a slice of mozzarella on top. Bake the slices briefly until the mozzarella is puffy. Serve with any good Italian sauce on the side, such as a marinara, basil-tomato-onion-garlic, or a roasted red pepper sauce as shown here.

Squashed

Summer squash is a rewarding and easy vegetable to grow. The tiny tender fruit come along reliably once the plant reaches a decent size. Apart from a long-ago problem with borers and the occasional fruit rot in really moist conditions (Aspergillus, I think), I've experienced few pest problems. Those first succulent fruit are so tasty, just steamed or lightly sautéed. This year I grew two varieties, Magda, a kousa-type squash from Park Seed, and Supersett, a yellow crook-neck from Renee's Garden. (I consider zucchini to be bitter and overrated.) I was so late getting started that I just direct-seeded into warm garden soil rather than starting plants early in peat pots. Even so, the plants were generous. We had both squashes, sometimes one at a time and sometimes as a mixture. I like to cook slices with just a little butter and some fresh dill, and steam them in my grandmother's old chicken fryer. Magda has a subtle fresh flavor and Supersett is sweeter, with a bonus for cooking them till they are slightly caramelized but not scorched.

After a while we get a little more jaded and I start making squash gratin. This has various versions. I cut and steam the squash briefly before placing in a baking dish, usually with onions sautéed in butter, and perhaps some red or green pepper. Then either I make a white sauce (best with a little grind of nutmeg) or just drizzle some cream straight over the fruit after salting and peppering. Add a generous sprinkling of gruyère or Swiss cheese, and bake till bubbling and a light brown on top. I used to add buttered bread crumbs but this makes a heavy dish. If made with a large quantity of squash and a white sauce enriched with cream, the dish freezes well.

Eventually the squash stay in the produce drawer longer and longer as the season progresses and the generosity of the vines begins to overwhelm the menu. Even with various innovative ways to slip them into mixed vegetable dishes and soups, the delight of the early summer has become the albatross of the refrigerator.

Finally I go to the garden and find the dreaded Submarine. These are a known terror. Gardeners offer them to their friends and leave them on porches. Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Mineral) admits to locking her door to keep from having them left in her kitchen. About this time of year (late August to September), newspaper food columns begin to feature recipes for zucchini bread and offer chirpy suggestions like "scoop out the seeds and stuff". But after years of guilty efforts to use this bounty, my advice is — Compost. The goodness of the earth will be enhanced next year and you will still have the courage to plant squash again in the spring.

By now the Squash Monster is in full cry, with a new Submarine, it seems, every time I go to the garden. At least this year I didn't grow Renee's "Trombetta di Albenga" squash - a horrifyingly prolific long-necked squash that is at least a foot long even in youth. I would advise growing this squash only if you have (a.) a family of 10 to feed; or (b.) a distant relative has come to stay, rent-free, for the duration. Squash soup, squash casserole, baked stuffed squash, squash bread and squash omelettes should take care of that problem.

Salad Days

The meaning of the term "salad days" is in some dispute. A quick browse finds a number of opinions, with the predominant one that if you are in your salad days, you are "green" and therefore not quite with it yet.

Its origin is well known.

From Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra, 1606:

CLEOPATRA: My salad days,
When I was green in judgment: cold in blood,
To say as I said then! But, come, away;

Note that she does say she was "green in judgment", supporting the naivete argument.

But my notion of what the phrase meant even for Shakespeare is that it is a reference to the wonderful time in early spring when one can first have fresh greens for a salad. It is a fleeting moment, heady and happy, when those tender delicate leaves reach their edible stage and before they begin to age to something still edible but no longer as incredibly sweet and delicious. We have gotten somewhat used to such tender greens now that they are grown commercially and cut, bagged, and readily available (though I no longer buy them). But consider that with the natural seasonal cycles in place, this lasts only six to eight weeks in the spring. It is a perfect metaphor for heedless, happy youth, a bloom that soon fades to the disillusion of experience.

Our salad days are not quite over though it is now late June (I began the post earlier). The "Merveille des Quatres Saisons" is gone, as are the arugula and spinach, but a fresh wave of "batavians" are almost ready to eat, and the "Reine des Glaces" is still green and crisp. Now I've planted my old reliable Black-seeded Simpson, a good hot weather survivor. Still, before long we'll be eating cooked greens, not that tender fleeting lettuce.