Grow – Cook – Make

Fava beans, carrots, blood oranges, radishes, herbs… It’s still spring, I am still harvesting more or less the same I harvested last week with two important additions: savoy cabbage and kale.

I am so proud of this cabbage! A fine savoy cabbage that it is…

This is the first cabbage that I grow successfully in a long time. I was about to give up forever on cabbage. Too much time and effort spent, nothing to show for it. I was convinced that cabbage just doesn’t like my climate but I tried one more time. And it worked. It worked! I got a beautiful cabbage.

When we have our usual mountain winters with wild temperature swings, brassicas that spend a long time in the ground end up covered by aphids. Disgusting. Too many to successfully knock off the plant with water, which is as far as I am willing to go to fight aphids in food plants. I noticed that nearby farmers don’t bring these crops to market. I asked why. Too much temperature variation, too many aphids. Oh well, I am in good company. OK, I’ll try it one last time and otherwise, there are plenty coastal farmers growing beautiful cabbages.

And we had a cool winter. Cool days and cool nights, so the temperatures have not ranged as widely as usual. Overall, not that many aphids, and specially, no aphids in my brassicas. I got cauliflower, I got broccoli, and now cabbage. Next fall I’ll try again.

I’ve been filling baskets with mixed lettuce all week. Crisp and sweet spring lettuce. We are eating huge lettuce salads. Spring is time to eat leaves around here.

Now, head on over to Daphne’s Dandelions, host of Harvest Monday, and take a look at what other gardeners are harvesting. It’s a lot of fun to peek into everyone’s harvest baskets and celebrate the gifts from our gardens.

Remember those meyer lemons that I preserved back in November? As is generally the case with me, I put them in the fridge, nicely tucked in behind other stuff and promptly forgot about them. Completely, didn’t think about them once again.

Which is great, actually. That’s how I don’t mind making those things that take for ever to be ready. I just forget. No waiting. You can’t wait for what doesn’t exist, can you? So that’s the trick. It is also the trick to finding glorious surprises inside your own fridge. Moments of unadulterated happiness.

Moments like setting out to make some marmalade, and not really feeling like it, and deciding to take stock of what’s in the fridge in case I don’t need a new batch of marmalade yet, and… finding three jars of brilliant yellow preserved lemons in the back shelf.

Just there, behind the half used marmalade jars, which immediately get tossed aside so I can more comfortably contemplate the beautiful lemons. And use them. Who needs sweets anyway, let’s make a preserved lemon tagine! Stopped everything, savored the moment and changed direction. Found myself some stewing lamb, looked into the spice drawer, and got ready to make dinner for a few nights. If you are making a stew, you might as well make sure you’ll get a few dinners out of it, it is better the next day anyway.

Ingredients I had on hand in my kitchen:

• 3 pounds lamb stew meat. Best is lamb shoulder.
• A handful of shallots. Onion is best. I was out of onions but I had shallots, so I used them. As I say, what I had on hand.
• A cube of ginger, finely chopped. All recipes I’ve seen call for ground ginger. I never have ground ginger in my kitchen, so I use fresh. Apparently ground is the way to go but I cannot vouch for it personally.
• A good pinch of chili powder. I used ground New Mexico chile. I love New Mexico chiles, in any form. Any chili powder, paprika, or just plain flakes would work too.
• A pinch of saffron
• Salt and black pepper
• Other spices you can add: garlic, turmeric, cumin, mint, cilantro… Up to the contents of your pantry and you taste.
• Chopped tomatoes, a couple. I don’t have fresh tomatoes in April, so I took about a cup of fire roasted tomatoes from my freezer.
• 2 preserved lemons, rinsed and cut into large pieces. Rinse out the pulp and excess salt, you only want the peel. How much lemon to add depends on the size of your lemons and your desire for their flavor. In my case: a lot.
• A handful of green olives, pitted and chopped.
• Other vegetables you can add: peas, carrots, squash, beans…

This is a quick and easy stew to make, no browning involved. It is basically two steps and a couple hours of elapsed time:

1. Combine in a heavy pot: lamb, onion (shallots in my case), ginger, chili powder, saffron, salt (careful, lemon and olives are salty!), pepper, and any other spices if using. Cover with water and simmer, covered, for 1 to 1 1/2 hours or until lamb is tender.
2. Add tomatoes, preserved lemons, green olives and other vegetables if using and cook for a few minutes longer. Until the veggies are done, or just until the sauce is reduced to the consistency of your liking. I like it on the soupy side.

Serve over couscous, bulgur or rice, or just with fresh bread. If you’d like an extra touch, garnish with fresh cilantro or mint leaves and offer harissa or other hot sauce on the side.

A couple of notes. If, and only if, you think the stew needs degreasing, remove the solids from the pot, degrease and reduce the sauce, and then put it all back together. Careful with the salt: use moderately in step one, rinse the lemons well, and taste at the end to make any necessary adjustments.

That’s it, two steps and you’ve got my loose, non-authentic version of a grand Moroccan dish. If you’d like to make authentic tagine, look up the writings of Claudia Roden and Paula Wolfert, you’ll learn a lot about Middle Eastern cooking.

In my household three pounds of lamb stew are enough for eight servings. We get the yumminess of slow cooked food for not much work. Oh… how I love stews!

Turnips, carrots, blood oranges, cilantro, rosemary and a big bowl of fava beans. This was my harvest last night. A few cloves of last summer garlic completed my garden’s contribution to our dinner.

The meal started with a fava bean, blood orange and cilantro salad simply dressed with olive oil and a bit of sea salt. For our main dish we had roasted leg of lamb with a garlic rosemary rub and roasted root vegetables. I chopped the turnips and carrots, dressed them in a balsamic vinaigrette and put them in the oven while roasting the lamb. Nothing more to it, easy.

For dessert, Seascape strawberries from the farmers market–which reminds me I have to get in the ground a pail of strawberry plants I have sitting in the driveway.

Most of the produce in our dinner came from the garden. It has been like this every night since the days started getting a little longer after the solstice. As soon as the plants picked up their growing pace, we’ve had enough vegetables and almost enough fruit to eat every day. I still need to go to market to buy some things, like avocados and strawberries. However, an avocado tree is coming soon to our orchard, and strawberries… I’m still trying to figure out how to keep rodents from eating them before me and I haven’t yet given up.

Lately I seem to be in a flower mood. I take the camera out and all I see are flowering trees and shrubs everywhere. Flowers in the orchard, flowers in the chaparral… Well, it is spring after all and I do like flowers.

The hillside below the garden has a good number of greenbark ceanothus shrubs. Messy, large shrubs or small trees, bright green leaves and bark, full of thorns, growing at the edge between chaparral and oak woodland. If the rains were good, mid March into April they are covered with blue blossoms. They stay in their full glory for about a month, at most, then back to being messy shrubs. Yes, it only lasts for a short month, but what a month!

I don’t tire of going down to the orchard, camera in hand, to photograph the gorgeous flowers of the stone fruit trees. The peaches are now blooming. This one is a Frost peach, a yellow variety that I have yet to taste. The tree is young and has only been setting fruit for a few seasons. Not a lot, just a few peaches. Increasing over the years but not yet a substantial crop. So far the fruit has been invariably eaten by a visitor with quite bad manners. We’ve tried to protect the crop and it dismantles our barriers. A racoon, ground squirrels? Go figure, I am tired of this game. I will enclose the whole tree in a wire cage. A strong wire cage, actually. Anything to finally get to eat that fruit.

These are the flowers of the mystery peach. This tree is all flowers and no fruit. It  sets only some tiny, hard, inedible little nuggets of a fruit, neither almond nor peach, that never seem to ripen. I don’t know what’s going on with this one. Is it just a rootstock variety? Is it an ornamental peach that is not supposed to produce fruit? I really don’t know, it was planted before our time here. It is definitely a sturdy plant so I am keeping it to use as rootstock for a more productive variety. In the meantime, I enjoy it’s flowers, specially if I have the camera with me.