Let The Vegetable Orgy Begin! or The Return of Gary the Toad

Crops Arise! All of the planning, digging, mulching, watering and weeding I’ve undergone since May is about to pay off big time: the vegetables are coming! I’ve been enjoying lettuces and herbs for a few weeks now, but the advent of the big veg really feels like pay dirt. This week I plucked the first good-sized zucchini from the squash beds. Granted, zucchini is so prolific that in a few weeks I’ll be begging neighbors to take the stuff off my hands, but for right now it tastes like sweet, crunchy victory. Without a second thought I knew just where this sweet little zuke was going to end up. On the top of a pizza.

Lacking the free time that afternoon to make dough from scratch, I made a quick request from my noble breadwinner, and on her way home from the office she procured a beautiful loaf of French bread to split into quickie pizzas for dinner.

Another trip to the garden produced some basil, spinach, arugula, and a few red onions—all we would need for a delicious garden pizza that would only take a few moments to make after Mama got home. This is super easy to replicate, I hope you do it right now.

***Please note: no photos exist of these pizzas because we were very hungry, and devoured them so quickly that all was left was a dirty baking sheet and a heavenly smell.

Papa’s Quickie French Bread Garden Pizza

You’ll need:

1 big long huge loaf of crusty French bread, the fresher the better

1 medium onion, or a handful of small young onions that you keep eating, though they aren’t fully grown, you just can’t stay out of ‘em.

1 medium zucchini

Handful of fresh basil leaves

Handful of baby spinach

Handful of arugula

About a cup of shredded Mozzarella cheese

A sprinkling of grated Parmesan cheese

Garlic powder

Oregano flakes (my oregano isn’t up yet. Boooo.)

A cup or so of pizza sauce. Use the kind from a can, or just mix up some tomato paste with garlic powder, oregano and salt.

To make ‘em:

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.

Cut the loaf into thirds, then split the sections lengthwise, lay crust down on a baking sheet. Keeping the pieces small helps you not drag all of the cheese off of the whole thing when you take the first bite, scalding your chin and wrecking the aesthetic of the beautiful, gorgeous pizza.

Spread on the pizza sauce liberally, the bread will soak up a lot of it, use two coats to make sure there is still a little on the surface.

Sprinkle with garlic powder and oregano.

Chop up spinach, arugula, and basil. I saw this sweet technique on TV where you roll the leaves up, then slice them crosswise, to make nice little shreds of the leaves without bruising all the flavor out. Totally works. Lay the shredded greens on, except for the arugula, which we’ll put on later.

Sprinkle the Mozzarella all over. If it doesn’t look like enough, USE MORE. There is no such thing as too much cheese. I firmly believe this.

Slice up the zucchini and onion, place over the cheese.

Sprinkle the Parmesan cheese over the top.

Pop in the oven for about 8 minutes, or until the cheese is melted and starting to get all brown and crispy on the edges (salivating while typing)

When it’s done, toss the shredded arugula on top. For some reason it tastes better if you don’t heat it up.

DEVOUR.

Sidebar: The Return of Gary, the Not-So-Suicidal Toad.

I’m sure you all remember the saga of Gary, the toad who tried to end it all, way back when the garden was just a pile of mulch and a dream. Well, needless to say, Gary did NOT go through with it, I like to think partly because of my intervention. Well, it seems Gary is back, living it up big time in the moist humus under the protective leaves of the potato patch. I caught a peek of him when I tripped as I wheeled Alice’s new big girl bike past the patch and nearly fell on the plants. He hopped out from under the plant I jostled, gave me a stony glance (the toad equivalent of the middle finger) and hopped it right back into the shadows of the patch. Some gratitude, Gary.

How to know if you're a jerk: Sisyphus, the passivist, and dandelion soup

Usually it's easy to tell if someone is a jerk.

I would say that generally, I am a well-meaning, honest person, who intends no real harm on anyone. Sure, I get angry at people sometimes; litterers piss me off, tailgaiting makes me insane, and I have very little patience for telemarketers, proud idiots, or anyone who is willing to put common decency aside to get in line ahead of me at the Target checkout. But for the most part I’m a nice guy. Imagine my distress when evidence comes to light that suggests I may actually be a jerk.

Please provide an example you say? Ok.

My neighbors are ridiculously nice retired people. They are avid readers, gardeners, church-goers, hard workers, and have raised a clutch of well-adjusted grown children, who in turn spawned a bevy of grandkids, each more sweet and wonderful than the next. There is NOBODY who doesn’t like this family. Especially the patriarch, who I will call Joe, because it is the only name I could think of that would suit him as well as his own. Joe is kind and patient, generous but firm, wise, handy, and actually shares many of my own interests. He built his home and impressive family with a lifetime of hard labor in a coal mine. He is a good man, a veteran, one of the old guard, the kind of guy who has had a standing appointment with the same barber for the last 35 years, the kind of guy who changes his oil exactly at 3000 miles and NEVER forgets. And he could also definitely still kick your ass.

Joe takes care of his lawn with near-religious fervor. It is never too tall, too dry, too weedy or all weird and spotty. It is a point of pride, and he wears it like a medal from the war. But even Joe is no match for nature. Every spring, after the first few lawn cuttings, the dandelions appear. This is a fact of nature, and no amount of human interference will stop it. They are coming. But Joe fights them. He fights and fights, and always loses, and I always laugh. Today, as I write this, Joe is out in the lawn with a tool, (possibly homemade) kind of like a little flat spade on a long handle, stabbing at the dandelions, one by one. He slowly kills them all. I watch from my kitchen window, giggling quietly because I know that in 2 days or less Joe will be there again, doing exactly the same thing. He looks over toward my lawn, which is easily 40% fat, happy dandelions and shakes his head. Joe labors long, conducting his ritual killing for a solid 3 months, and for the life of me I can’t understand why. Maybe this is how people who don’t drink cope with their own smallness in the universe. I don’t know. But I think it’s funny. So why, with all his admirable qualities, do I enjoy watching this man suffer this indignitiy? Because, I am a jerk. And if you think any of this is funny, so are you.

"But why, jerk?" you may ask, "are the dandelions such an invincible enemy that a gifted writer like you could use them as an allegory for the endless, pointless, Sisyphean struggle for life on our planet?"

Mostly because Joe will never defeat the dandelions. Why? Because nature HATES his lawn. You see, nature abhors an empty space. And lawns, though humans find them soothing and attractive, are basically a wasteland, ecologically speaking. To make a lawn, the ground is usually marked off into rigid, squarish shapes, stripped of it’s thatchy, loamy surface layer, impregnated with a single species of grass, squirted with chemicals to kill anything that already lives there, then fertilized, weeded, fed, watered and mechanically brutalized to keep it looking just right. Without human intercedence a lawn is not really sustainable, it would just die. Then nature would quickly reclaim it, via little green storm troopers, like the dandelion.

Dandelions are pioneer plants. Mother nature sends them bursting forth into any ecosystem where there is room for biological improvement. They are sentries, pilots, an elite occupying force. They take root in immature or badly damaged ecosystems (like Joe’s lawn, and yours, btw) and never let go. They germinate almost instantly, grow quickly, flower and produce a bazillion seeds in a matter of days, and drill a foot long taproot as thick as your thumb (that you will never be able to remove all of) through even the hardest ground, seemingly overnight. They are bad emmer-effers, at least among flowering annual varieties.

So what’s to be done? Nothing, as far as I’m concerned. I actually think the dandelions are kinda pretty, and interestingly enough, most of the plant is edible! Dandelion leaves, when young and tender (before flowering) make a delicious salad green. Hell, you can even get them in bag salad at the grocery store. The root can be roasted and ground to make a weird, chicory-like drink, which is weird, and I doubt anybody really does this anymore, and the flowers are edible too, though they can be put to much better use in one of my favorite hobbies, making booze at home!

While you may have never heard of dandelion wine outside of a bluegrass song, it is a real thing. My grandpa, a homemade wine legend (in Sebring, Ohio) made it, as well as wines from blackberries, watermelons, and pumpkins — pretty much anything that would ferment, and was easy to grow in great abundance. Sadly I do not have grandpa’s recipe for homemade dandelion wine. It's probably for the best, as I'm not sure about the health (and legal) implications of doling out booze-making advice on the internet.

Instead, I found another old-timey favorite to share with you. While researching dandelion-based fare, one writer quipped: "Only the very poorest and the very richest people eat dandelions." Which I like. I was able to talk to a few neighbors about eating dandelions in the old days, and the only thing I heard repeatedly, aside from the Grandpa/Uncle/Cousin/Best Friend/Preacher who made wine, was dandelion soup.

Indeed most of the recipes I found online were of the fancy-pants french cuisine variety, so I had take a few of the best and drag them through the holler a little bit, hoping to conjure something your granny might cook up when the seasons finally began to turn, at the forefront of the great bursting-forth.

So all jerkiness aside, enjoy this recipe, I did.

Spouse review, quote — Dandelions? from the yard? —endquote.

Papa’s Dandelion Green Soup

You’ll need:

2 tbsp butter

4 cups dandelion greens (pick the nice light green leaves near the crown of the plant, and pick from plants that haven’t flowered yet, otherwise the leaves will be too bitter and rubbery)

2 carrots, peeled and chopped

8 or 10 ramps, wash, cut off greens and roots, dice. (If you don’t have ramps where you live, use a few cloves of garlic and a little extra onion.) More on ramps later this spring!

1 Medium onion, chopped

1 head of fresh cauliflower, chopped (or 2-3 cups frozen)

6 cups veggie stock

2 cups milk

2tbsp Dijon mustard

1 tbsp chopped parsely

Salt and pepper to taste

What you do:

Sautee the onions and ramps in butter in your big soup pot over medium high heat until they begin to soften. Add carrots, cauliflower and greens and cook for another 5 minutes.

Add stock, bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 10 minutes or so, until all the veggies are nice and soft.

Use stick blender, or transfer big chunks to the blender with a slotted spoon and blend until its all nice and smooth, return to soup.

Mix in milk and cook for 5-10 minutes until it begins thickening up.

Add chopped parsely leaves

Add salt, pepper , then Dijon, a little at a time, until it’s just tangy enough for your taste. The tang shouldn’t overpower the dandelion greeny flavor.

Serve with crusty bread, or grilled cheese sandwiches.

Wait, Watchers: Wasting time, losing weight and how I met Gary, the suicidal toad.

Egad, the first blog post since when? Oh dear. Well you know how it is, I could drag out a dozen excuses why my blog fell off the face of the earth for an entire season, but you would probably enjoy reading them even less than I enjoy imparting them to you, so let us move on! FOR THE LOVE OF GAWD, SPRING IS ALMOST HERE!

And with it comes a blush of new energy on the cheeks of my creativity. Work, of late has been humming through the mac, songs are born of the echoing womb of my guitar on nearly a weekly basis, and maybe most exciting: seeds, mulch, trellises and tools are stockpiling themselves across the grounds of the Hughes compound in anticipation of THE GARDEN. Oh, even writing the word makes me happy. Truly spring is springing, and a young man’s fancy turns to decomposed organic matter.

However, winter hasn’t passed us by without noteworthy events, just without notation. Perhaps most important to the scope of this blog is my wife’s subscription to Weight Watchers, and the practices and theories bundled within. Both of us have tried many diets, programs etc., with largely the same result. PTHHHPT. That is how I imagine one could spell a fart sound made with mouth and hands. But you get the idea, no? WW, however is a different animal altogether, so far. Therein lies more emphasis on healthier eating, not just less eating. The points system has allowed Beth to change the way she thinks about food, as well as the way she eats it, and really has resulted in a pretty impressive lifestyle change, not to mention a substantial weight loss. (Go baby!, you are awesome!) The best feature, from my perspective is the massive archive of WW recipes, which members (subscribers? devotees?) can readily access to make healthier eating easier for the entire family. Many of these (very tasty, and very copyrighted) recipes feature clever ways of substituting veggies and purees for eggs, sugar, oil and so forth. Before this becomes an ad for WW, let me just say that the key, at least in Beth’s experience, seems to be based on the fact that fruits and veggies are worth zero points, and therefore add nothing to your daily points limit. This means you can eat as much as you want, which is awesome. I shan’t run down the myriad reasons why you should eat more fresh veg, but I will say this, you really should. Since Beth (and the rest of us, by virtue of the WW recipe archive) began eating more vegetables, we’ve lost weight, had more energy, and generally feel better. And it has made my mission for this summer clear: GROW MORE VEGETABLES, PAPA.

Indeed. Though we are weeks away from planting time here in the Ohio Valley, my brain is bursting with new growth. Over the winter I’ve done much research and have decided to take a more ecological approach to gardening this year. Where in years past, I’ve spent countless hours tilling, watering, weeding and otherwise busting my ass trying to scratch a few vegetables out of a half acre or so behind my in-laws’ place, this season, I’m keeping it local. Producing my veggies, herbs and flowers in carefully designed boxes, beds and trellises right outside my door. This should make maintenance simpler, save water, and prompt me to actually be a more effective gardener, as I will have to walk right through the middle of the garden to go anywhere at all. I’ve also learned much about how soil works, how to make it work better, and how to get the most food production from a small growing space. Which brings us to Gary the toad. In a sec.

The key to better soil, in a word, is mulch. Mulching is basically the practice of composting in place. You add organic material in massive piles, right where your plants will grow. It rots, deposits nutrients in the soil, the plants use them to make wonderful veg, and so forth. A simple idea, and certainly not a new one, but just one of those things I’d never really considered. Gardening tends to be learned on a personal basis, from friends and family, traditions passed long through generations, some good, some, well… less good. At any rate, I’m big into mulch now. Ask anyone. It’s my new thing. And while gathering leaves, dead grass, and other yummy, decompos-ey stuff from the yard to add to my growing mulch beds, I met Gary.

I can only assume Gary had been harboring suicidal thoughts for some time, laying, half frozen under the bushes, as I’d never met another toad so bent on his own destruction. I first saw Gary when he fell out of a big load of leaves I had scooped up and flung into the wheelbarrow. In the cool of the morning, his lethargic body made sort of a dull, squishy thud as it hit the turf. I thought to myself, this toad is out rather early, or maybe it’s that I’ve just compromised his cold-weather home with my eager raking. I tried to gently urge Gary to move back under the bushes, where I promised I would disturb him no more, and he went. But not for long. Next trip, I returned with my wheelbarrow and filled it with more much-fodder. As I turned back toward the garden, I noticed a slight movement and heard a desperate “UUUURP.” There was Gary, pinned under the fat pneumatic tire of the wheelbarrow. Again, I gently escorted him to the safety of the bush, and went about my business. Two more loads came and went, and I’d figured Gary had learned to stay where wheels and rakes and big black boots entered not. I dumped the last load of mulch into what will be the new potato/broccoli/carrot patch, and grabbed my freshly sharpened spade to ventilate the sod a little so that all of the mulchy juices could get down into the soil. As I raised the spade to make my first stab into the dense ground, out hops Gary from the pile I’d just deposited, right under the falling blade. I just barely avoided slicing him cleanly in two, and resolved to let Gary be wherever he wanted to be for the rest of the day, and go on to a different project. When I checked back a little later, Gary was nestled, snug as a bug in a little pocket he’d burrowed for himself in the mulch.

It was then I gave him his name, and decided that he should be the keeper of the mulch bed, and act as a sort of health gauge for the soil there. As long as I was doing a good enough job keeping the garden healthy, the soil should always be so moist, warm (due to decomposition) and crawling with tasty bugs, that Gary should never want a better home. If Gary relocates, I shall have nowhere to look but in the mirror. Unless he jumps off the garage in front of the moving car. Then I’ll know it was just that Gary had problems all along.

TIME TO MAKE THE DONUTS. or NOTHING IS EVER GOING TO BE THE SAME, EVER.

Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, teach a man to make donuts and he eats for a lifetime. Or something like that. All proverbs aside, this morning gave witness to a momentous occasion: Papa learned to make donuts his damn-self. The implications are unfathomable. If, in the future you notice that everyone around me is fat and happy, there is good reason. And that reason is donuts.

I have long been a fan, no, an aficionado of the humble donut, and for the first time, donuts have come into existence in my kitchen. The seed as planted when by some strange coincidence, an issue of Better Homes and Gardens which prominently features home-made pumpkin donuts was left laying casually on the coffee table. Moments later the boy shredded and devoured most of the magazine, but it was too late, the idea had taken root.

Off to the internets! I was into the donut idea, but the thought of deep-frying in the skillet first thing in the morning made me a little afraid, so I opted for a baked cake style donut. Maybe a little sissified for you purists, I know, but give a Papa a break, eh? I found a recipe that didn’t require a trip to the store, since I had leftover pumpkin puree from a stuffed shells recipe (Thanks Jody!) and in no time I was a pre-heating, egg beating, glaze-drizzlin’ fool. The end result was DONUTS! Real donuts. That I made. I was overjoyed.

The ‘nuts were very well received, though I think I baked them a little too long, causing them to crack and dry out a bit. This was solved by simply using more glaze. And more, and more and more.

Aside from having one flat side from baking on a regular cookie sheet, these donuts were fantastic, easy to make, and may have inspired a new, fatter lifestyle. Or at least a hobby.

Papa’s (ok, not really, this one was lifted right from an internet recipe) Bad-Ass Baked Punkin’ Donuts

DONUTS

2 cups all-purpose flour

1/2 cup packed brown sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

3/4 tsp cinnamon

1/4 tsp cloves

1/4 tsp ginger

1/4 tsp nutmeg ( I think you can buy “Pumpkin Pie Spice” that has all of these spices together already, but I don’t have any, and didn’t want to go out in my PJs anyway.)

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 cup pureed pumpkin (you could use canned, but nobody will like you anymore, plus there’s a shortage on.)

2 eggs

1/4 cup milk

1/4 cup butter, softened just enough to make it mix up easily

Icing

1 cup powdered sugar, sifted, you will probably need to add a little more to the mix to get a nice glaze consistency

1/4 teaspoon vanilla

4 -5 teaspoons milk

Make the Donuts!!

Stir up the dry ingredients well in the electric mixer bowl (if you have one.)

Add pumpkin, eggs, milk, and butter, or margarine; beat with the electric mixer on low speed till dough is pretty smooth.

Put the mixture in a quart size freezer bag and cut the tip off of one of the bottom corners to use as a pastry bag that you don’t have to wash, or use a pastry bag with a big round tip.

Pipe onto baking sheets, in appx. 3-inch loops. I covered them with parchment paper first, but you could also just grease them.

Bake in a preheated 375 degrees F oven for about 10 minutes, watch for them to brown, but not crack, or they will dry out fast.

Cool doughnuts on a rack. Salivate. Your whole house now smells like angels having sex with the great pumpkin in the alley behind a bakery.

Make the Icing!!

In a small mixing bowl stir together powdered sugar and vanilla.

Stir in enough milk to make a smooth icing of glazing consistency.

Place rack with donuts over waxed paper.

Brush icing over donuts with pastry brush, or spoon over surface. I gave ‘em several coats, and later flipped them over and glazed the other side too. Healthy!

EAT.

THE.

DONUTS.

You like-a-the-sauce?: A Tomato-based saga

As Pheidippides ran from the great battle of Marathon to Athens, so runs the story of the Sauce. Ok, maybe that is a bit of an overstatement, but let me tell you who haven’t done it: making spaghetti sauce out of tomatoes can take a very long time.

There are a few preparatory steps that will not be included in this timeline, like digging the onions out of the ground, and going to the farmers market for a peck of tomatoes. Though those things DID happen, and have a place in the time-space continuum, but even so, it took the better part of two days to get the sauce I wanted from a sack of tomatoes.

One of the great things about spaghetti sauce is that it’s so easily customized, depending on what you and your family like, what ingredients you have available, and how much time you have to put into it.

Since I had access to tons of sweet fresh tomatoes, in several varieties, plus a great selections of peppers and onions and herbs, I opted for a long-simmered sauce, looking for a rich, complex flavor, nice thick consistency and big juicy chunks of veggies. I wanted a big batch so I could freeze some, and enjoy it later in the season.

I bought a peck of fresh tomatoes at the farmers market, and added a handful 6 or 7 Romas from my own garden. I would have done all Roma tomatoes because of their sweet, mellow flavor, but they are much smaller and harder to peel and seed than the bigger varieties, making it even more of a pain in the butt. Cleaning the fruit is really the only labor-intensive part of the whole process. The tomatoes must be skinned, and the only good way to do that is by dropping them in boiling water for about a minute, till the skins burst, then plunge them into ice water. This makes the skins slide right off once they are cool enough to handle, and also makes the tomatoes very slippery and easy to drop on the floor where they may well explode all over your feet and legs. You know, if that were to happen. Once the tomatoes lose their shirts, they must be cored, cut in half or quarters, and all the seeds and juice and guts squeezed out. This is tricky and messy. You should do it over a very big bowl so as to save the juice for later. The cleaned tomato corpses then go into the food processor and mashed up all nice and chunky and saucy. Strain the juice and save to add later. If you’re really plucky, save the seeds to plant next season.

Next comes my favorite part, preparing all of the OTHER stuff that goes in. Peppers, carrots, onions, spices and herbs, YUM!

The wonderful flavors in this recipe are unlocked by sautéing the ingredients before putting it all together to simmer. Do this in your stock-pot so none of the good stuff is lost. Start with the usual suspects, oil, garlic, onions… then add in the interesting stuff, multiple varieties of bell pepper, orange, red, yellow, chop some carrots and celery. I was lucky enough to have plenty of fresh basil and oregano on hand from the herb patch. Pick or buy your own, chop them up just a little, and toss them in. If you’re feeling kinky, add a little ground mustard seed. I had to resort to a dried bay leaf (gasp!) but as usual, the fresher the better for all ingredients.

I’m not entirely certain why, but one of the recipes I consulted tells me to add some chopped (non-mushed peeled and seeded per the earlier process) tomatoes at this point, so I hacked up a few more sweet Romas and tossed them in as well. A little splash of wine, let it all stew for a few minutes, then pile in all of the processed tomatoes and simmer it forrr-ev-errrrr. I added the juice from processing the tomatoes, this might have made it unnecessarily wet, but whatever. Some recipes say simmer 2 hours, but at that point, my sauce smelled wonderful, but looked watery and just not quite done. 2 more hours—better, but still not right. I really wanted that thick awesome chunkiness, but I just wasn’t getting it. I could have just added some tomato paste or flour or something, but I felt like that was cheating the whole concept. I ended up running out of Tuesday for this project, took it off the stove, let it sit for a bit, then stuck the whole works in the fridge and picked up simmering the next day. All in all it simmered a bit over 6 hours, then sat and congealed a couple more, but I got my sauce. And it was worth it. Sweet, tangy, chunky and satisfying. I was very pleased.

My original intention was to make a big batch, eat a meal out of it and freeze the rest, but the sauce turned out so well that we ended up eating more than half of it the first couple days with only 3 portions going in the freezer. Oh well, I’ll just go whip up some more!

Papa’s Slow Burn Spaghetti Sauce

10-14 ripe tomatoes, depending on size

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 tablespoons butter

3 small onions, or one huge grocery store one, chopped

1 red, 1 orange, 1 yellow bell pepper, chopped

2 carrots, chopped

4-5 cloves garlic, minced

1/4 cup chopped fresh basil

1/4 chopped fresh oregano

1 tablespoon ground mustard seed

1 tablespoon salt

1/4 cup Burgundy wine, or a nice deep red of your choice

1 bay leaf

2 stalks celery, chopped

Bring a pot of water to a boil. Have ready a large bowl of iced water. Plunge whole tomatoes in boiling water until skin starts to peel, aboute 1 minute. Remove with slotted spoon and place in ice bath. Let rest until cool enough to handle, then remove peel, cut in half and squeeze out seeds. Chop the squeezed tomatoes and puree in blender or food processor. Chop one or two more tomatoes and set aside.

In your stock-pot, over medium heat, sauté onion, bell pepper, carrot and garlic in oil and butter until onion starts to soften, usually about 5 minutes. Stir in chopped tomato, basil, oregano, salt and wine. Place bay leaf and celery stalks in pot. Dump in the pureed tomato. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low, cover and simmer AT LEAST 2 hours. After that point, check on it occasionally, sniff, stir, taste, until it’s just the way you like it. Good luck not eating all of it at once, over your favorite pasta.

Save the beans! Won’t someone please think of the beans?

In the great bursting forth of the summer growing season, the last thing anyone wants to think about is winter. But winter will come this year, people, just like it always does. “So, Mr. Smarty Vegetable man…” you may say to yourself, “what am I supposed to do about eating local fresh produce during the other 8 months of the year when the only vegetables around come from a can, the freezer isle, or some hot, scary, South American country?”

Well, that’s a tricky one. Obviously, unless you or a friend operate a hydroponic system in the basement or have a huge greenhouse, you can’t reeeeaaally get fresh local vegetables when they are long out of season in the dead of winter. That means if you want the best stuff, you’ll have to get it now, and figure out a good way to preserve it.

Get thee to the farmers market. Our local-est market (one of two that run all summer in Wheeling) always has a great selection of stuff, though I find great joy in the seasonality of the foods available there. One stand I always visit is the East Wheeling Community Garden vegetable booth. It is a well-run community garden, in an otherwise kind of desolate part of town, an unassuming collection of raised beds on a barren hillside under the overpass of Route 250 that raises some of the finest produce you’ll ever have. I have the greatest respect for the volunteers—largely young people—who work the garden, run the stand, bring the neighborhood together and generally kick ass in the name of providing a better food choices for their community. They are also raising money to build a greenhouse, to extend their growing season (see paragraph 1 for information on why one would want to do so) and as a nursery for seedlings which the organization can sell for fundraising purposes in the community. All in all, these are stand-up people, doing great work and all of us could learn a thing or two about what a community really is from them.

Find more about the EWCG, it’s mission, and how you can help: www.eastwheelingcommunitygardens.org

Anyway, once you go and procure your veg, how to go about preserving it? Most people immediately think of canning. Canning is a great option because once canned, food requires zero energy to preserve, and massive quantities can be prepared at once, making it a pretty efficient process. But for some, eating canned vegetables is just a sad reminder of how far off summer is. Canned veg is sometimes soft and mushy, less flavorful, and boiling can undo some of the great nutritional benefits of eating fresh vegetables. Much of this has to do with PROPER canning, and knowing how to get good results. There is an art to canning, and though I’ve tried it, it still escapes me. I will try again, but it does take a little finesse. It’s also a pretty labor-intensive business. Not that I mind working hard at something, it’s just that sometimes I don’t want to.

If you’ve got the resources (a big-ass freezer and some bags) freezing fresh veg is an option. Freezing is thought to cause less damage to the food, preserving it’s nutritional value and making it taste better than canned. Freezing vegetables usually involves blanching, a process in which the veg is plunged briefly into boiling water, then into an ice bath, and then frozen. I’m not sure what this process does exactly—something to do with killing enzymes— but everybody on the internets seems to do endorse this principle, so I figured I would give it a try.

First I needed a batch of veggies to experiment with. On our weekly trip to the Wheeling Farmer’s market, we noticed that EVERYONE seemed to have a ton of green beans. Since beans are only ready for a relatively short time, they seemed like a perfect candidate for preservation. We bought several quarts of roman, wax and regular old green beans, from a few different stands, along with our other regular market booty.

Once home, I thought I would engage in some warm and fuzzy memory-making by inviting Alice to sit on the porch and snap beans with me—which she did for about 3 minutes before something urgent, likely princess-related, required her attention inside—to get them ready for processing. One thing I hate is how little finished product you seem to have after cleaning 3 bazillion beans, or peas, or whatever. What I imagined would be an entire winter’s worth of green beans fit into one big pink bowl when all was said and done. Oh, well, I guess it depends on how many times we eat green beans, eh?

Anyway, here’s the procedure for freezing green beans. I’ve read that it also works pretty well for asparagus, cauliflower, carrots and broccoli, and I intend to try it with cut up bell peppers as well, once they start pouring into the markets.

Save the Beans: Papa’s guide to Green Bean Preservation

Step 1. Get some beans. We bought an interesting mix, because so many varieties are available. Get what you like. Preserved food is only useful if you actually eat it later.

Step 2. Clean the beans. Snap the ends off, or snap off bad spots, bug-bitten areas, etc., then wash gently in cold water.

Step 3. Blanch the beans. I did some research, and there seem to be a range of recommended boiling times, but the consensus is about 3 minutes. It apparently (hopefully) can also be done with a steamer, which is what I opted for, since it reduced the risk of spilling boiling water in the kitchen, where I’m largely wearing flip flops. While the steamer did its thing, I prepared my big bowl of ice water for the plunge. The ice bath stops the beans from cooking too much, just enough to get the job done. After steaming or boiling for 3 minutes, strain the beans and dunk into the cold water for a while, until they are nice and cool to the touch. Put them back into the strainer and let them dry a bit.

Step 4. Freeze the beans. Spread a piece of wax paper over a cookie sheet, and arrange the beans in a single layer. It may take more than one sheet. Put them in the freezer. Once they were frozen, I bagged them in small portions, just enough for a side dish, or to add in a recipe. I keep the bags small because you can always open more bags, I would rather have too few than waste any precious beans.

Step 5. Wait for winter. Then eat the beans. Smile and remember how awesome summer was.

It’s CHOWDA!

Thanks to the bounty of the season, it’s time again for a perennial favorite in our house, the storied Potato Corn Chowder! (Heretofore known as PCC) It’s Beth’s favorite soup, maybe one of her favorite foods period. She had me send the recipe to the caterer for her baby shower. When she’s eating it, nobody ought to talk to her (well, you COULD talk to her, but there is no guaranteed response or cognition). She describes the act of eating it as “having a relationship” with it. What I’m getting at is that she likes it… with good reason.

PCC was born of the excess garden product we were trying to make use of last summer before it went to waste. By this time of the summer zucchini, most other summer squashes, corn, onions, and carrots are going nuts, and this is one recipe that takes full advantage. It’s bursting with fresh flavors, it’s creamy, it’s chunky, it’s a little spicy, and it’s very satisfying. Even Alice (known soup-hater, and general vegetable detractor) will eat a few spoonfuls with the promise of impending dessert.

This chunky chowda is also one of my first cooking creations, and may well be responsible for my climb to the lofty position of head cooker in charge at our house.

PCC is by no means a light dish (it uses almost an entire stick of butter and half a sack of potatoes) but it is packed with lots of nutritious vegetables, which makes you feel a little better about eating a second bowl. As for the grilled cheese that went with the first bowl... can’t help you there. (More on the grilled cheeses at the end of the post)

This is also not a quick supper solution for you busy, worky types. There is a lot of chopping and dicing, a lot of cleaning veggies, a lot of boiling and waiting and boiling and preheating and boiling and stirring and boiling, so forth and so on. From the first scrubbed spud to ass-in-seat suppertime, we’re talking about roughly 2.5 hours, especially if you don’t have any pre-cooked spaghetti squash just lying around like I did when I made the recipe.

So it’s fattening, it’s a ton of work, and it takes forever. What DOES this soup have going for it? Flavor. It tastes like the whole garden crammed itself into your mouth and kicked your tongue’s sorry ass. Fresh sweet corn, garlic, onion, rosemary and squash? Come on, awesome.

The key to the flavor overload is, of course, the fresh veg. Try to use ingredients that were in the dirt as recently as possible. Personally, I will cheat the cooking times a little to add a little more veggie crunch to the mix. Boil it only as long as it takes to get the potatoes and other big chunks soft enough to blend up without ruining any appliances. And while frozen food has its place, The Green Giant bag isn’t gonna cut it here, so don’t do it.

All things considered, this is one of my favorite things to make. It’s delicious, always well-received, and it makes me feel like a culinary badass because it requires me to spend all afternoon sweating in the kitchen. But like most things that take a little sweat, it is sooooo worth it.

Papa’s Garden Orgy Potato Corn Chowder

6 cups diced red potatoes (with skin is ok)

1 Large Chopped Onion

2-3 medium stalks fresh diced celery

2-3 medium carrots, chopped

3 ears fresh sweet corn from someplace you trust (the importance of the quality and freshness of the corn cannot be overstated)

2 Cups cooked and shredded (with fork) spaghetti squash (appx 1 small squash)

1 Small zucchini, cubed (about 2 cups)

About a quart of veggie stock

6 tbsp Butter

2 Cups Organic Whole Milk

3-5 cloves crushed and diced fresh garlic (depending on your relationship with garlic)

1 tbsp onion powder

1 tbsp Sea Salt

1 tsp fresh ground black pepper

1 tbsp thyme

1 tbsp fresh rosemary (adds a great summery flavor, and looks nice floating around in there)

In a large soup pot, melt butter and sautee onions garlic and celery until they get soft. Add diced potatoes and carrots and turn to coat with the butter/onion/celery/crack mixture. Cover the potatoes with veggie stock or plain old cold water and reduce heat to medium/high. Add seasonings and let cook for 20 minutes. Stir often so it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pot.

Add zucchini, cut corn from the cob, add to pot and cook for an additional 20 minutes. Keep stirring.

After corn is in for 20 mins, check potatoes. If they are soft enough, blend soup with a handheld mixer or egg beater, or do what I do and spoon the big chunks into the food processor, blend them up and return to pot until you have about 50/50 smooth goodness and chunky awesomeness.

Add milk and cooked squash. Cook for an additional 10 minutes. Never ever stop stirring. Take a couple of tastes to test the seasoning, then take it off the heat and let it sit for a while. It will thicken up a bit, and give the flavors some time to meld. Not to mention, if you eat it now it burn the inside of your mouth into to those weird little gross shreds, because it has been boiling for over an hour.

Sometimes I garnish with some shredded cheddar and parsley, but mostly not.

Ladle it up, devour, repeat.

Sidebar: How to Cook Spaghetti Squash

Preheat your oven to 375. Put about an inch of water in a glass baking dish. Using a big, sharp knife, split the squash in half, lengthwise. Scoop out all of the guts and place the halves rind up in the dish of water. Bake for about 30 minutes. Take it out and let it cool off, you will need to handle it, and nobody likes squash burns. When it’s cool enough, take a fork and scrape the insides lengthwise into a bowl. It should shred into long spaghetti-like stands. If you like the added texture in the soup, leave them long and toss it in. If you get freaked out by weird, crunchy noodle-y things in your soup, chop it all up before adding to the pot.

Sidebar 2: Making and saving veggie stock from your scrap stuff

We live by a “use the whole buffalo” kind of code around here, so instead of just heaving all of the scrap from this meal into the compost pile, I like to make veggie stock with it, which I can then freeze, and use again in another soup. The circle of life! Well, the circle of soup, at least.

Keep all of the onion bits, carrot ends, squash rinds, celery greens, etc. in a bowl while you prepare the chowder. After all of the veg is in the pot, get another pot, put your scraps in, add some salt, and fill with water. Bring it to a boil, then reduce the heat and let is simmer the whole time you are cooking and eating the rest of the meal. After you guilt your guests or beat your children into clearing and doing the dishes, strain off the fluid and freeze it in quart Tupperware containers. Thaw it out on the next soup day, and there you go!

Thanks to my Mama for this bit of wisom, she looked horrified last time she was up and saw me crack open a can of stock when I started a soup. She then quickly whisked about the kitchen and threw this together, making me look like a schmuck with my fancy organic-eat-fresh-don’t-buy-stuff-from-the-store ass.

Sidebar 3: Grilled Cheese!

No soup is complete without a gooey grilled cheese sandwich cut in half and wedged jauntily under the bowl. After the milk goes in the soup, I fired up the griddle (because I was making 5 sandwiches for extended family supper) and started the sandwiches. I used some nice wide cracked whole wheat bread — buttered, of course— and filled with swiss, provalone, sliced tomato and onion. Grill 'em up golden brown on each side ( I set my electric griddle to 350, it only takes a few minutes per side) cut and serve. Regular American slices on white bread works too, just ask Alice.

Sidebar 4: Enough with the sidebars!

I apologize for all of the sidebars, and upon proofreading, for the somewhat more frequent than usual use of swear words in this post.