Harvest Day

I dug all of the potatoes today. The haul was about sixteen pounds worth, which was a little disappointing. The French fingerlings had a better yield than the Yellow Finns, some of which I impaled on the pitchfork and hence became squirrel food. I may need to rethink having potatoes next year. They are unbelievably delicious, but they take up a lot of room. I have given up a lot of other crops for my spuds.

The fingerlings did contribute to a very tasty dinner, though. I simmered several of them until they were just tender, and then I sliced them and placed them in a baking dish, forming a bed. After drizzling olive oil over them and seasoning with salt and pepper, I added a halibut fillet and put the whole thing in my little convection oven, set to 450 degrees. (I had also drizzled the fish with some oil and seasoned with salt and pepper.) Thirteen minutes was about right. If the fish had contact with the pan, rather than resting on the potatoes, I think that ten minutes in the oven would probably be sufficient. I had the fish and potatoes along with some beets (a dark red and a salmon-colored) that I had diced small, tossed with chopped oil-cured olives, some julienned basil, and a few minced anchovies, all dressed with olive oil and sherry vinegar. This beet relish was the highlight of the meal. The combination of sweet beets, bitter olives, fragrant basil, and salty anchovies really did it for me, and it married extremely well with the fish and potatoes.

I paired the food with an albariño, a very pleasant white wine from Spain that I had heard about recently on "The Splendid Table." I thought that this quaffable wine would work well because of the Spanish feel of the food, and I wasn't disappointed.

New Potatoes

Potatoes are about the easiest thing there is to grow. I plant them around St. Patrick's Day, pay a little bit of attention to them during the spring (mounding up dirt around the hills, watering occasionally), and then summer arrives with a harvest of buried treasure. I dug the first hill this morning at 7:00 am, and we ate the spuds exactly twelve hours later. The flavor was absolutely sublime, enhanced only by a little butter, some cream, fresh chives, and salt and pepper. I could have eaten a whole plateful, but I had also prepared some pan-sauteed catfish and a beet and endive salad which, frankly, was disappointing. Something about it just didn't hang together. Maybe it was the rather bland goat cheese, which had none of the tang that the beets needed. Oh well, I'll try again. I think that beets and potatoes are the only things that will be coming out of the garden for the next week. But there are a lot of things on the horizon...

...provided that they stay alive. My volunteer cucumber vine succumbed over the weekend to the wilt that always seems to get them. Last week I planted some replacements that have come up nicely, so we will see if it is really a timing issue. Sometimes it is possible to plant things at a time that allows them to miss the insect that spreads plant viruses, and I have read that such a strategy can work with cucumbers. I choose to be optimistic. Meanwhile, my eggplant have been attacked by waves of flea beetles, and I actually have given in and started spraying them with a relatively benign, chrysanthemum-derived insecticide. I am trying to be sparing, because the spray is also toxic for beneficial insects, especially bees, which we have in abundance in the community garden. (We now have a beehive, one of several that have been deployed in community gardens in DC.) I just decided that I was unwilling to give up any hope of having eggplant, even if it meant having to make (very mild) organic compromises. And even with the spray, the leaves on the plants have plenty of little pin holes. So the pests are getting their fair share.

Sharing in the Garden

People share a lot in the community garden where I have my plot. It is probably just a part of the DNA of a place like that. Advice, seeds, watering help, and surplus produce all pass from one person to the next. Oh, there are also petty conflicts, territorial disputes, and grumpiness about weeds that are allowed to thrive, but the level of communitarian spirit is pretty high.

I have the good fortune to have the same neighbor at home and in the garden. Last year I gave her some surplus onion plants that I had left over, and she put them in her plot. I was a little puzzled when she didn't harvest the onions after they were ready, but they came up again this year and produced the flowers that my neighbor had been hoping for all along. Onions are biennial, meaning that they flower and produce seed in the second year of their lives. The flowers are beautiful, and she has a nice group of them that stand guard over my beets.

I, however, always harvest my onions, so I doubt that I will ever have onion flowers to show off. Tonight I grilled a couple, dressed them with a balsamic vinaigrette, and had them with a delicious New York strip steak. I also prepared some packets of little red potatoes for the grill; I boiled them for 15 minutes and then placed them in foil packets with rosemary sprigs, olive oil, some butter, and some seasoned salt from the Spice House, and then I put them on the grill with the rest of the food. We ended with an arugula and red lettuce salad, also dressed with a balsamic vinaigrette, but I used the really good vinegar for the salad. It almost seems obligatory to have some red wine with a dinner like that, so we had a Malbec from Argentina.

I had initially thought that I would make some kind of biryani tonight, to try something new. That would have been a real project, with a long list of ingredients and a melange of subtle flavors. The meal we actually had was nothing like that. In fact, it was pretty basic cooking, but it was probably just as satisfying.

Summer Cocktails

Several years ago at my physical my doctor asked me how many alcoholic drinks I have per week. He did not seem entirely pleased with my response of 1 - 2 beers or glasses of wine per night, so since then I have been careful to low-ball my estimates. What he doesn't know won't hurt him, and I am convinced that, in this area at least, it won't hurt me, either. I once had a landlady who had reached the ripe old age of ninety-three, and every night she and her husband (who was even older) had two 7 & 7 cocktails, one tall and one short. They didn't seem any worse for wear, so I am just following their example, though I think that I measure out the alcohol more carefully than they did.

I generally gravitate to wine, and somewhat less frequently to beer, but recently I have also been drinking the occasional cocktail. My plan to sample a new cocktail every week never materialized, but lately I have been trying my hand at mixing new things, like the Leland Palmers we had last week on Memorial Day. I made something similar for myself tonight, essentially a grownup lemonade. I am sure that there must be many versions out there, but here is the one that I mixed.

Lemon-Lime Fizz

Juice of half of a lemon

Juice of half of a lime

1 teaspoon superfine sugar

1 oz. limoncello

1 oz. vodka

ice

club soda

lemon slice

Muddle the sugar with the juices in a highball glass, add the spirits and ice, top with club soda, and garnish with lemon slice.

It is very refreshing, and would probably also be good with gin in place of vodka for a variation on a Tom Collins, which is itself a nice break from the ubiquitous gin and tonic. It's going to be pretty hot tomorrow, so I'll probably need something like that after all of the weeding that I'll be doing.

A Beet Salad

This entry could have been titled "Your Mother Knows Best." I was in Kansas City over the weekend, visiting my parents and sisters, and I baked an angel food cake for my younger sister's birthday. It was only the second "from scratch" angel food cake I have ever made, and I don't have the technique quite down. It ended up being fine, but I took it out of the oven a few minutes early, even though Mom advised leaving it in just a little longer. As soon as it cooled I was worried that it would be a little too, well, wet. I expect that angel food cake is one of those things that benefit from practice. But what is a person to do with all of those egg yolks?

Tonight we had a very simple supper. Chicken leg quarters roasted in a cast iron skillet with whole cloves of garlic, baked Yukon gold potatoes, and a very nice roasted beet salad, which also included a few steamed sugar snap peas, sweet onion, and fennel fronds, all dressed with a vinaigrette made of olive oil, walnut oil, and sherry vinegar. This year I planted Chioggia beets, along with golden and dark red varieties, so the salad had a nice mixture. I commented to Glen during dinner that I had started the salad back in the middle of March, when I planted the peas and onions. It was worth the wait.