Summer Salad

I cannot believe that I've let a month go by without posting--it will not happen again. Though I've not been writing, I have still been gardening, learning, reading, and cooking. I also helped a friend of mine with her Young Writers program and traveled to a bluegrass festival. But enough of that, let's talk food.

The photo you see is from a recent lunch with my friend Glenna, which was inspired by watching an old DVD of Julia Child making Salade Nicoise on the French Chef.

This beautiful salad deserved a photo of its own, but I couldn't help posting our little table in the corner of the kitchen with the beautiful napkins we bought while in Apt, France, two glasses of my favorite Sancerre, fresh cut flowers, and crusty French bread. Bon Appetit!

There was a bit of timing involved with this as I had a few potatoes left in the garden to harvest, and I wanted to use those potatoes for our lunch. Only one tomato was ripe from the garden, so I used that in our salad as well; and the eggs and cucumber came from Randle Farms. I wish I could say everything was local, but I cannot.

The potatoes have definitely been a learning experience, but that's what this year's garden is all about--learning so that we can be more productive next year. You can see the potatoes poking through the soil. This plant was fairly typical of what was produced this first season in the garden; each plant had two to three small red potatoes with lots of tiny spud babies (you can see one at the top center of the photograph).

The harvest at the left was what remained of the three last plants in the garden. With twelve plants, we did have a few meals with our own potatoes, but this was disappointing. What did I learn? A number of things. Potatoes are soooo easy to grow. I let a few potatoes from Earth Fare sprout eyes, and then I cut them into one-inch pieces and threw them into the ground, and covered them with straw after the plant appeared. Then I just waited. Even though I planted them during the window of opportunity suggested by Farmer's Almanac, it was too late in the season for this part of Alabama, I think. One of the causes of a small crop is hot temperatures, and we had plenty of that beginning the last week of May with temperatures consistently 90 and above. Potatoes also take up a good bit of room in the garden, and they take a lot of nutrients from the soil, so when I plant another crop in the fall, I'm going to plant them in a huge container. We'll see what happens.

Like a summer salad, this post will be several things tossed together in order to catch up.

In March and April, I wrote about Meatless Mondays, which was started by the Johns Hopkins Bloomburg School of Public Health. Today is Monday, and I wondered what might be floating out there on the internet from recipe sites, so I went to two sites with which I'm familiar. Apparently Meatless Mondays was not on either site's radar this week.

Yahoo has a weekly feature called "What's for Dinner This Week," and this week is mainly about meat. Five of the seven days feature pork, beef, or chicken; one day is vegetarian with a Mediterranean pizza; and one day features a fish recipe. Epicurious.com also has a section called Everyday Cooking that features menus for weeknight suppers, and meat is definitely on their menus this week with four out of five offerings made with poultry, beef, or salami. The remaining weeknight features fish. As for me and mine, we're having a summer squash and mozzarella tart for supper tonight. Father's Day weekend (yes, weekend at our house!) was filled with meat, and I'm ready to get back to vegetables.

Speaking of meatless meals, I did finish Diet for A Small Planet by Frances Lappe, which was listed as one of the top 10 sustainable food books by the Audobon Magazine website. While I enjoyed much of what the book had to say, especially Lappe's emphasis on connecting food to values, I was a little unsure of the recipes offered. I will try some of them, though I don't think she will replace Deborah Madison as my go-to cookbook guru for vegetarian fare. It is a good read, though, and may give you pause in considering US farm policy, hunger, and eating. Lappe looks at the "values" associated with policies that promote boundless growth in grain production and how that grain is exported not to hungry people around the world but to ranchers who feed that grain to animals who will then nourish anyone with the financial means to put meat on the table, which, incidentally, doesn't include any of the world's starving people. I agree with one of her concluding statements saying that turning everyone vegetarian isn't the answer to feeding the world's hungry, and while she seems to think it is a good place to start, I realized after reading her book and other food-related news, hunger is a much more complicated issue with no one solution. I do think a good place for everyone to begin is to look at their own set of values and bring their eating habits in line with those values. That's my family's focus this year.

J'ai besoin de la France

Today's blog is a little self-indulgent--that's what happens when one has too much time on one's hands.

I am patiently waiting for the phase of the moon to change so that I can plant more beets and transplant flowers, more broccoli seedlings, and sage cuttings. In my idle hours, I went to the grocery store and found these beautiful sunflowers marked down. Rambling around the yard, I picked a few things that were blooming, which included Spanish bluebells and vinca major, dogwood, azaleas, a Gerber daisy, and a rosebud.

After arranging them, I noticed I had paired the sunflowers with bluebells and vinca, and this reminded me of traveling to Provence in the south of France where sunflowers adorned linens and lavender bloomed profusely along the roads, especially going into the Luberon out of Apt. I smiled.

And I remembered what I tell my traveling friend Glenna: bring a little of France into your everyday life. So I did. I reveled in my flowers, and tonight I will enjoy a leisurely meal with my husband and a glass (or two) of good wine as I wait for the moon to cooperate with my itchy green thumb!

For the other arrangement, I used the flowers I had enjoyed last week to fill my teapot. I use this teapot only in the spring for the azaleas and dogwoods, daffodils and Spanish bluebells. I waited too late for the daffodils. As I was arranging last week's sunflowers, the petals began to fall off. I ripped them off two of the flower heads and noticed something: They reminded me of Van Gogh's sunflowers. My memory may be poor, but I believe some of the flowers may have been painted without the yellow petals. Either way, they are beautiful.

Well, this is a food blog, so I suppose I should end on a food note! In the garden, I have five potato plants sprouting leaves and two rows of beet seedlings have pushed their way through the soil. I've never grown either before, and I'm so excited to see them growing.

Leave me a comment. Tell me what you're doing to bring a special memory into your home. Or, maybe you're planting something new in the garden. I'd like to hear about it.

C'est tout!

Rooting in the Garden

Thinking I hadn't ordered seed potatoes in time--and too eager to wait for their arrival anyway--I cut up four small red organic potatoes that I bought from Earth Fare last month. If my information was correct, an organic potato from the grocery store can sprout and grow into potatoes in the garden, but a run-of-the-mill spud from the store cannot. We shall see.

Unfortunately, I don't know what variety they are; they are simply small red potatoes. I do know, however, they are not one of the three deemed worthy of McDonald's french fries. Follow the link to read more about McDonald's and its influence on potato growers. The site where I obtained the info says it cannot be redistributed or rewritten. After reading the article, I am puzzled. One of the favorite varieties of McDonald's is costly to produce and not very environmentally friendly. Why, oh why, then, are McFries so inexpensive? I think it has something to do with the way our government hands out subsidies. You can go to McDonald's and get a value meal for cheap that is filled with high fructose corn syrup, fat, and many calories. The movies King Corn and Food, Inc., can tell you about the corn, and Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, which I mentioned in an earlier post in January, can tell you about the real costs of your happy meal. Fast Food Nation was recently listed in the Audubon Magazine as one of the top ten books on sustainable food. See other choices by following the link.

Well, enough about potatoes. While I was hard at work planting potatoes, beet seeds, green onion seeds, and carrot seeds, Anthony was rolled up like a pupa in his hammock reading. I'm just giving him a hard time. He was actually decimating the backyard, making it less jungle-ish.

Even though I only planted seeds yesterday, I felt as though garden were fuller despite the vast coffee-colored soil and dots of greenery here and there. I think I was "fuller" from the good gardening vibes and dose of vitamin D from being in the sunshine.