Radishes

Spring continues to be wet, cold and windy. My tomato plants, which I hoped to plant this weekend, are huddled on the front step, toughening up as best they can while still being protected from the wind.

That is why it's very clear to me how important it is to like "cold weather" crops. I used to think I liked to eat everything, but that's really not true. When it comes to gardening, it turns out there are a lot of vegetables I'm suspicious of or not interested in eating. I've never been an eggplant fan. I don't think I've ever bought radishes, though I don't mind them on the salads my mother makes. It never occurs to me to eat celery. I won't go near a kohlrabi or daikon, based pretty much just on the way they smell. My only experience with beets was with pickled, canned beets.

This year, going on the idea that everything tastes better when grown in a garden than it does when bought in a produce department, I planted some radishes, two rows of beets and an empress eggplant (the smaller the better when it comes to eggplant).

Well, I can attest now to the radishes. They DO taste better from my garden than they do from the store. I planted a variety called Cherry Belle. I wondered how I would know it was time to harvest them.

It was easy to know because they poked their beautiful red heads out of the ground. When I pulled one out, it was perfectly round, perfectly red and about the size of a 25-cent gumball. 

I thought garden produce was supposed to be ugly!

The flavor is delicate and crisp. They are delicious raw and even better on a salad. Some went into the Asian noodle salad I made for the graduation party last weekend. I have seen on a Facebook friend's page that you can use them as a topping for pizza, which is intriguing. I only wish I'd planted more! I've started some more seeds, which popped up overnight through the soil, and have scattered them where there are small spaces in the raised beds.

Maybe I should put in another eggplant...

American Cress

When I was living and working on the campus of Saint John's University/Abbey, I was the recipient of regular spring gifts of watercress. The watercress was established by Fr. Godfrey Diekmann, a monk of St. John's Abbey who was quite involved in the translation of the post-Vatican II lectionary in English. He is a bit of a legend at Saint John's, for his liturgical work and also for his mushroom collecting and other culinary adventures-- of which I count the watercress as a small piece of his legacy. Brother Walter, who also heads up the maple syrup operation each year as "chief tree tapper" and other functions, would bring me plastic bread bags full of the stuff. I went with him once when he collected it, in his waders going out into a shallow spring that fed Lake Watab, down below the Johanna Kiln. There was still snow on the ground, but this area of watercress was a bright green spot on the landscape. Walter managed to keep his balance and cut huge swaths of the stuff and there we had it-- the first greens of the season.

I hate to admit that much of what he gave me over the past several years went to waste. It is strong stuff, so a little goes a long way, and also it has lots of stems. Trying to prepare it for a salad was labor intensive. Still, I wanted some on our property, and took around various rooted bits to the wetlands and laid them in the edges of the ponds. However, that doesn't work. I knew from the reading I'd done that it probably wouldn't because you need running water, a spring is ideal, to grow watercress. 

This year, next to where I've planted the raspberry bushes my friend Deb gave me, Steve and I noticed a beautiful patch of yellow weeds/wildflowers that he couldn't identify. This past week when his friend came out who knows basically every plant in this region, Steve learned that what we had was a stand of American cress, also called land cress or bank cress. It is a perennial, but only does well in really wet springs, which is what we're having in spades. It grows near water, like this stand near our pond, but not in water (thus "bank").

According to Wikipedia, it's been cultivated as a leafy vegetable in England since the 17th century. So now I have plans, of course, for cress soup and salads. In another week I'll have baby spinach and lettuces, and the radishes are peeking up their red heads from the ground. So here we are, with cress! and I will probably avoid eating dandelion greens this year.

Minnesota Television

I am a fan of public television, which varies in different regions of the country. Since I'm in a "cultural critic" frame of mind, I thought I'd share what I love and dislike about Minnesota public television.

First, I love that we get three different stations. And the programming is not the same on all three. I can watch "Frontline" at 8 p.m. instead of 9 on Tuesdays, and so be free to watch "The Good Wife" at 9 p.m. Channel 17 always has cooking shows on for an hour or two in the evening, which I like watching better than any sitcom. There are old Julia Child programs, which are always fun, and another good cook with good guests, Ming.

Then there is my favorite, a show I don't think you'll see anywhere but Minnesota, "New Scandanavian Cooking with Andreas Viestad." Andreas is from Norway, and the show also features chefs from Sweden, Denmark and Finland (though I've only seen the Swedish chef, Tina Nordstrom, and Andreas. The hallmark of the show is the chefs setting up an outdoor cooking station and making dishes on the spot. There's lots of herring, salmon and lingonberries. Salt and sour cream and dill are frequent flavorings. These two are delightful, and the food they cook is simple, fresh and beautiful. I particularly enjoy their accents and the way they tie their shows to tourism information about different regions, festivals and holidays in their countries.

Also on Minnesota Public Television are some first rate survival and wilderness shows. There are documentaries about people who homesteaded in the Boundary Waters or Alaska. There are also documentaries about great blizzards or the architecture of old homestead farmhouses. Some date back to the 1980s, and they seem to show periodically. I never get tired of watching them.

On the other end, is the unwatchable "The Red Green Show." I have not been able to watch enough of it to tell you much about it. It insults my intelligence and is not funny. It is 100% charicature of the Great North-- possibly Canada, or possibly Minnesota. Whenever I see it, I think of the constant showings of "The Benny Hill Show" on Chicago public television. Or that British comedy about the department store that played constantly in the San Francisco area, along with "Tales of the City."

If you move to a new place, watch public television. You'll learn a lot, maybe even how to cook a lingonberry tart.

First Harvest

The rhubarb has been, like everything, slow in coming in, but I did manage to get four cups of rhubarb picked on Friday for the first dish from the garden. With some remaining frozen strawberries and help from epicurious.com, I made strawberry-rhubarb compote with shortcakes. I didn't really like the orange rind in the biscuits, but I subsituted orange marmalade for some of the jam in the compote recipe and that was delicious.

Last night, which was the first night of eating dinner on the screen porch, I "harvested" the baby arugula from a window box I started back in March when I was planting seedlings, and it was enough for two small bowls of salad-- a squeeze of lemon, champagne vinegar and olive oil and they were good to go. I took photos to mark the occasion, but the CF card wasn't in the camera!

Last night's dinner was a great homemade chicken korma and I did have a few sprigs of cilantro I grew from seed to garnish that as well. It's the time of year I look with interest at the dandelion greens, but I haven't gone there yet. It seems like it would be too close to eating grass! And mostly, I think indoor planting doesn't result in much in the way of food. I have some lovely looking, but quite sparse, kale plants. I put a few seedlings out and instead of "taking off," they got windblown and shriveled. The basil and some other herbs I planted indoors also look weak and I'd diagnose them with "failure to thrive."

Starting peppers and tomatoes makes sense, but I don't see getting a good planter of lettuce going with my current set-up. Some things just need to start in the ground and tough it out.

And so those two meager bowls kind of depleted my indoor veggies. Other than rhubarb, I now will have nothing to eat (a sprig of cilantro and basil here and there) from the garden for probably three weeks. But there is promise out there, including little fields of lettuce and spinach dotting the landscape. There are tiny beet seedlings and snow peas almost ready to reach the first rung of the fence. Most exciting of all, most of the asparagus plants have little stems poking up through the bottom layer of dirt. I can't eat from those plants for three years, but they are alive!

Strawberry Rhubarb Shortcakes

4 cups 3/4-inch-thick slices fresh rhubarb
3/4 cup sugar
2 T water
2 T strawberry preserves
1 tsp minced orange peel (note: I used 1T raspberry preserves and 1 T orange marmalade, which complemented the allspice and gave it a more sharp flavor)

1/4  tsp ground allspice
1 quart strawberries, hulled and thickly sliced

Biscuits
2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
6 T sugar
4.5 tsp baking powder
1.5 T minced orange peel (I would skip this in the future, and maybe use another T sugar)
1/4 tsp salt
9 T chilled butter, cut into pieces
3/4 c plus 3 T whipping cream (or half and half)

whipped cream or ice cream

For compote:
Combine first 5 ingredients in heavy large saucepan. Bring to boil over medium heat, stirring until sugar dissolves. Reduce heat to medium-low, cover and simmer until rhubarb is tender but some pieces remain intact, about 7 minutes. Remove from heat and add allspice. Cool completely. Stir in strawberries. Cover and refrigerate until well chilled (3 hrs or overnight). This last seems optional to me!

For biscuits:
Set oven to 400 degrees. Combine first 5 ingredients in medium bowl. Add ubber and cut in using pastry blender or rub with fingertips until mixture resembles coarse meal. (In the future I will use my food processor for this step. It's the only way I know to quickly make good "coarse meal" of dough.) Add 3 T cream and stir until dough comes together. (Again, the food processor is good for this, since you can add a little more at a time to make it come together.)

Turn out dough onto lightly floured work surface and knead until smooth, about 6 turns. Flatten dough to 3/4 inch thick round. Cut out biscuits using a cookie cutter. Bake on an ungreased cookie sheet about 20-23 minutes. Transfer to rack and cool slightly. If making ahead, can reward them in 350 degree oven for five minutes before serving.

Cut biscuits in half, load on the compote and top with ice cream. (Garnish with mint, optional.)

The Future of Television

As an early adapter, I'm not very impressive. I'm guided more by my desire to live simply than to try something new. Although I've had a Honda Hybrid since 2002, I've actually all but given up my cell phone, which is now prepaid and has no message system attached to it. No iphone for me, though I do love my ipod touch, especially for the epicurious app that lets me get recipes right in my kitchen.

I am a fan of television, and though I think it would be virtuous of me to just disconnect the dish and not get any programming, I have been unable to pull the plug. We were among the first to get a Roku box from Netflix to stream videos on our television, and I could almost get by with that. It was a first step toward computer-driven television. So I haven't gotten a DVR, because I don't really want to pay to save more television shows. I want to watch less! And I definitely want to pay less than $600-$800/year for television.

Yesterday, I took the first real step and bought a cable to connect my rather outdated laptop to our pretty new television set. It's just a VGA cable, basically turning the television into a computer monitor. It also just connects video, so I brought down some speakers to run with the computer for sound.

As an experiment, it was successful. I was able to watch the episode of Upstairs, Downstairs that I missed, and the sound was only slightly out of sync and the images only slightly choppy. Later that night we had less success downloading a PBS Frontline episode, and settled for an episode of 30 Rock that was pretty badly synced. It was still funny!

I'm thinking what's in order is a dedicated computer (preferably a netbook) and an HDMI cable. And with those one-time investments, I could possibly return the dish! It's odd to think of the future resembling the past, but it means we would get down to radio as our primary news source (which it is already) and a limited television schedule. If we had to think of what we want to watch, instead of flipping channels to find something, I'm thinking at least the time I spend watching infomercials for extreme exercise programs will diminish.

And this morning, reading the campus electronic bulletin board, I ended up at a Web site that has a "live loon cam" focused on a loon nesting in Central Minnesota. I really like the idea of having something like that up on the television. Kind of like the yule log.

So here's to the future! And I'd welcome any advice on computer set-ups, etc.

National Celebrations

I could not call myself a proper blogger if I didn't make some mention of the big Wills and Kate wedding Friday. I had not planned on watching it, but got sucked into the BBC rebroadcast at about 10 p.m. Friday night. What I found most interesting was the procession by the public down the mall to Buckingham Palace to catch "the balcony scene," as the media kept calling it, as if it were Romeo and Juliet. People moved in an orderly fashion behind a row of Bobbies, until the entire area was filled in. While this slow-moving procession was happening, the BBC coverage kept switching to other places where parties were happening: Kate Middleton's home town, Hyde Park and other parks and places.

I delighted in watching a national day of celebration unfold much more than watching the wedding, although that was nicely done. A friend in Scotland said that she had no interest in the wedding but had ended up going from party to party all day, drinking cheap champagne and mingling with friends. This sense of an international day off to celebrate something as simple as the marriage of a young couple was truly refreshing.

Saturday, in the glow of this lovely experience, I finished making my way through the Historical Books volume of The Saint John's Bible. I've been writing on the illuminations for the third volume of the series: Art of the Saint John's Bible. I finished by writing about two illuminations: "Square Before the Water Gate" in Nehemiah and "Esther" in the book of Esther.

Both Nehemiah and Esther were written after the people of Israel returned from exile. Nehemiah recounts the story of rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. At the center of the book, the part related to the illumination, all the people are called together inside the newly constructed walls of Jerusalem and the book of Moses, the book of the Law, is read aloud to them. There are also people on hand to explain what's being read. It's a really unusual means of establishing national identity after Exile: here is our story and the way we have been called to live. Like many before them in the historical books, the first impulse upon hearing the story is to rend their clothing and go into mourning. But, although there are plans for a national day of confession and mourning to come, the priest Ezra declares that this day will be a day of feasting and celebration. Everyone is commanded to have a big party, to celebrate, and so they do.

If you want to read a Biblical princess story, you can't do better than Esther. She is the beautiful virgin, a natural beauty among those who need cosmetics to attract attention. She is a member of the underclass in the Persian Empire, a Jewish orphan (worse than a commoner!), who nonetheless wins the hand of the king. In fact, the king will do anything for her. She saves his life by uncovering an assassination plot and then saves her people from the pompous and evil Haman. What caught my attention, however, was the account of the wedding. "The king loved Esther more than all the other women; of all the virgins she won his favor and devotion, so that he set the royal crown on her head and made her queen instead of Vashti. Then the king gave a great banquet to all his officials and ministers-- 'Esther's banquet.' He also granted a holiday to the provinces, and gave gifts with royal liberality" (Esther 2:17-18).

For me, it was working with these passages that connected the past to the present. How long has a royal wedding been an occasion for deep celebration. In these times of deep trouble-- wars and natural disasters-- how I long for a day of international celebration. There will be time for mourning and resuming the struggles of life. For a day, let us celebrate who we are and our collective story with hope and joy. Given the response to the Royal Wedding, it seems that many people share this longing.

photo of the crowd on the mall from: http://media.oregonlive.com/oregonian/photo/2011/04/9531399-essay.jpg

Dirt

When I was ordering seeds in February, I also ordered a few books from the Seed Savers catalogue. One that caught my eye was Buffalo Bird Woman's Garden: Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians. It is one of those interesting things about ordering books from catalogues or online-- you are never sure what you're going to receive. The reviews of the book listed in the catalogue included: "A gem of a book useful for today's gardener," (Organic Gardener); "One of the best gardening books around," (City Pages); and "Every gardener and agricultural scientist should find gems of practical wisdom in these pages, borne from an age-old tradition when sustainable agricultural practices... made the difference in sustaining life" (Foster's Botanical & Herb Review).

The Hidatsa are from North Dakota, and lived with the Mandan in a place called Like-a-fishook village. One of the Sisters at the monastery where I work, Mara Faulkner, OSB, wrote a memoir called Going Blind set in the same area, and so that further piqued my interest. And the catalogue sells dried bean seeds called Hidatsa Shield Figure beans that look interesting (for another year).

The book arrived, and it is basically an anthropological text. After a long introduction and foreword, we get to Buffalo Bird Woman's text. It is a very readable oral history of her farming life. It follows a nice structure too, including sunflowers, corn (lots on corn), beans and squashes, which they saw as the four basic foods.

I have read parts of it, but still have lots to go. But what has stayed with me the most is the part about her grandmother clearing land for a garden. She used a "digging stick," and some of the women used bone hoes (there are diagrams of course). All she was doing, really, was loosening the soil. She'd dig/pull up any plants and shake off the dirt, then gather them in drying piles. After a few days, she'd burn the piles. It clearly took weeks to loosen up enough soil to plant. What was also pointed out was, she didn't loosen all the dirt in the plot. She just loosened the areas where she put the seed. Digging down with the stick, she could loosen areas and drop seed in. Then, throughout the summer, she'd return and keep loosing more soil between the plants. When that was done, she'd start going at the land with her digging stick around the edges, so that the following spring, more land would be cleared.

It just reminds me that really, the miracle of plants is that they grow in dirt. They grow in more or less any dirt. All you need are seeds, dirt, water and sun. I spend a lot of time thinking about the nutrients in my soil. I have a mixture of compost and soil for good drainage. I add manure, chicken and cow, as well as more compost each spring. In the new boxes, Steve put a mixture of manure compost with soil dug up from near one of our ponds. It is not as rich as the dirt in my other boxes-- will stuff still grow in it??  Well, of course it will!

Recently he dumped two more small loads of dirt wher I want to grow the squashes and potatoes. Well, it doesn't go down very deep and is sure to be full of weeds. So I went out with my shovel and tried loosening up the soil, mixing it with the hard soil beneath it. I'm not as strong or as patient as Buffalo Bird Woman's grandmother.

On YouTube, there are a few humerous videos of people with backyard gardens where they grow gigantic vegetables. I would never want to eat a beet as large as large as a pumpkin, but yes, it is impressive. They pour in fertilizers, and grow in beds that have very complex formulations of earthlike substances. Some of it is even organic.

In that way, I appreciate Buffalo Bird Woman's account. Because when I look around, I can see that I do indeed have a lot of dirt! And if my seedlings can withstand the wind pounding down today, and more to come this month, it should be a good summer in the garden.

image found here: http://www.slowfoodusa.org/index.php/programs/ark_product_detail/hidatsa_shield_figure_bean/