By Karen Cohen
Play with Your Food
Your mom may have told you when you were a kid not to play with your food. I am here to correct that notion. I play with ingredients. All the time. I don’t have a ton of patience to concoct meals that may require hours of pre-planning, pre-baking, or premeditation. I cook whatever I have on hand and what is growing in my garden. One missing ingredient is not a deterrent, just substitute by flavor. Did I forget to mention that I love trying new dishes? Experimentation is fun and a challenge!
I am not a fancy cook but I am a gourmand. My partner possesses a plethora of fine cuisine cookbooks. Dining out for us is a sensory activity and a big part of all our vacations. When I am in the kitchen, I cook by instinct and ignore those books. After years of consulting recipes, I have finally memorized what flavors work well with certain herbs, meats, and veggies. At least according to my taste buds!
So rather than give you some gardening ideas today, how about combining yours and my love of growing food and consuming food. In simple terms, let’s cook from our gardens.
Currently in late June in the Appalachian mountains I am still waiting on some crops to come to fruition: tomatoes, corn, eggplants, and peppers. What I can harvest, cook, and eat now is kale and swiss chard that has overwintered. Last fall we created a low hoop house using 5, bent, PVC tubes and draped them with thick, clear, durable, plastic sheeting all winter long. It worked beautifully at keeping everything under it alive. In the spring, a 10ft x 2ft swath of red russian kale, curly kale and Siberian kale appeared under it and is still growing now with its plastic covering off. We ate those all winter long and early spring of this year. Regular watering when the soil is dry, mulching with compost once or twice per season keeps it growing for months on end.
In June we have cool temperatures at night here and the greens are still growing strong. Very hot weather will cause these plants to bolt. When a plant “bolts” it sends out seed stalks. Basically it is coming to the end of its life cycle. The plant’s energy first will go into blossom production and then seeds. If left intact, the seeds will eventually drop and create a new plant. Life continues on its own if we allow it.
In the last few years, kale has become the new lettuce for salad lovers around the world. Add crushed pistachios, chopped pecans, sunflower seeds, diced carrots, cucumbers, feta cheese, and maybe a crumbled hardboiled egg for variety-voila! You have a nourishing and satisfying meal for lunch or dindin. We picked our first flush of cucumbers just this morning; they add variety, flavor, and crunch to salads.
Try cooking with the principles of Asian Indian cooking. They use six flavors: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, pungent, and astringent. Combine these and you can stimulate all your taste buds at once and create a totally appetizing, tasty meal. Throw in a few chopped, dried apricots, golden raisins, or freshly shelled peas for sweetness. Sprinkle diced pickles or capers for the sour taste. A tin of anchovies in oil adds salt without a defining fishy flavor. You can also add anchovies to your salad dressing as a salt substitute. Kale, spinach, arugula, and lettuce are bitter ingredients. Radishes are still plumping up in the garden now and can be the pungent taste for zip and a bit of heat. Caramelized onions add pungency and are not as strong as raw onions. For astringent flavors, use chopped raw green beans or shredded turnips. You can create a great salad with all the goodies that are in season and in your garden right now at the start of summer. Fruits in abundance now are blueberries and strawberries, both can be tossed into spinach salads for vibrant colors. Or you can make a tasty salad dressing from either. For a vitamin packed, homemade blueberry dressing, mash the berries (or you can use raspberries too), add balsamic vinegar or apple cider vinegar, olive oil, juice from a freshly squeezed lemon, some honey, salt and pepper to taste, and wow! These ingredients create a beautiful, blue-ish dressing that tastes even better with a sprinkling of blue cheese and toasted almonds. Salads shouldn’t be boring and if you dress them up even meat lovers will gobble them up. You might drop some pounds, too.
So play with your food, have fun mixing things up and creating your own new flavors. Enjoy the fruits of your labor!
Karen Cohen is an organic grower, seed saver, photojournalist, and avid explorer. Send your garden tips, recipes, and comments to: natureswaykaren@gmail.com.
