Cinnamon Basil Cupcakes with Fresh Tomato Soup for Novel Food

If you are a gardener, cook or voracious reader of mystery novels, (or all three like me) you will love diving into Susan Wittig Albert's China Bayles series. Set in the Texas hill country, China is a former high-powered defense attorney who shifts gears mid-career to open up an herb shop surrounded by gardens in a small town. Her main side kick is a red-haired Amazon, Ruby, who wears flamboyant clothes and shares commercial space with our heroine to run her New Age shop full of crystals, tarot cards and incense.

I had a thoroughly enjoyable time this summer reading through the cozy series, which now numbers 19 books in all.  Albert has a different herbal theme for each book and its title and one can learn a lot about gardening, folklore, the medicinal use of herbs and even try out some delicious recipes from the back of many of the books. I was particularly taken by a scene in Book 2, Witches' Bane, in which China and her mom dine at former nun Maggie's Restaurant and have a lunch of Cinnamon Basil Cupcakes, thick Tomato Soup and Greek Style Broccoli Salad. That sounded like a fantastic combination, so much so, that I ordered cinnamon basil seeds from a catalogue just to try out those cupcakes (which are more like savory muffins).

That's where I was stymied. I had a nice little bunch of Cinnamon Basil plants sprouting up in a clump in the garden when the overzealous weeder, husband Dan, yanked them out by mistake. It was a long interval between reading about this mouthwatering literary feast and actually seeing this project to completion, but it was a worthwhile wait.

A bunch of Cinnamon Basil with gorgeous purple stems

Back to the garden patch I went to plant some more, this time carefully marked with a special stake, and they duly grew into the handsome plants you see above. This basil variety really does have a spicy cinnamon fragrance and taste and are a striking plant with dark purple stems and light purple blossoms. In addition to using them in the following Cinnamon Basil Cupcake recipe, I used the chiffonaded leaves liberally in my tomato and noodle salads all through August.

The Cinnamon Basil Cupcakes come out a pale shade of green, which is not the usual color for a muffin or cupcake, but they are so delectable and they certainly make for a colorful meal paired alongside deep red tomato soup. I will reduce the amount of sugar in this recipe when I make them again, as I felt they were a little too sweet, but they really were a wonderful accompaniment when served warm from the oven and dunked into my soup.

Gluten Free Cinnamon Basil Muffins (or you can call them Cupcakes like China)

1/4 cup cinnamon basil leaves, stripped from stems
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg, lightly beaten

1/2 cup white rice flour
1/2 cup cornstarch
1/2 tsp. xanthan gum
1 tsp baking powder

1/4 cup sour cream
1/4 cup milk
1/2 cup walnuts, finely chopped

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Puree cinnamon basil leaves in a blender with the oil until it is a fine puree. Add sugar and egg and mix well.

Sift together dry ingredients. Add to basil-oil mixture and combine. Add in sour cream, milk and walnuts and mix well.

Bake at 350 degrees F for 15-20 minutes, or until muffins feel springy.

While muffins are baking, you can whip up a quick tomato soup by sauteeing some onions and garlic in olive oil until golden, adding in a bunch of fresh or canned peeled, pureed tomatoes and then cooking over low heat, stirring often, until desired thickness. Season with a little more fresh cinnamon basil and salt and pepper and you have an awesome, literary-inspired light meal.

I hope this whets your appetite for this excellent herbal mystery series and to plant a patch of cinnamon basil yourself. You'll want to read the China Bayles series in order, as China, Ruby and various family members go through a lot of changes in life. I saved up this tasty post just for the 14th edition of Novel Food, which is hosted quarterly by Briciole. Novel Food invites participants to cook up recipes inspired by a literary work which has been particularly captivating.

If you haven't already discovered this fun blog event, you can check back through the archives to discover novels, plays, short stories and poems which have inspired bloggers to whip up wonderful creations in their kitchens. This round of Novel Food ends this Sunday, so you still have time to join in the fun or wait until after the deadline to see what others have been reading and then eating.

**And now for a bit of Crispy Cook housekeeping. I am pleased to announce the winners of my Lundberg Family Farms and Stonehouse 27 giveaways. The five winners are: Lindsey, John, the Swedenese Family, Simona and Kathleen. Congratulations to all and I will be contacting you to get your mailing address so that you can receive your Lundberg Brown Rice Bowl and Stonehouse 27 Cooking Sauce sent to you.

Stay tuned for another Giveaway post this week to learn how to get a copy of a great new GF cookbook: Laura B. Russell's "The Gluten-Free Asian Kitchen". I've made several recipes from this cookbook and all have been terrific.

A Fantastic Poblano Pepper for Home Gardens (and Kitchens): The Tiburon Pepper

Growing peppers in our Zone 4 garden zone is always dicey. If the tail end of our growing season has warm, sunny days and cooler nights, there will lots of fruit setting on our pepper plants. But if not, we will have lots of small fruit and definitely not an abundance of fruit.

With the Tiburon pepper, a dark green, glossy poblano variety, the rules were set on their ear. We got beautiful, sturdy plants with plenty of flowers and fruit, and they reached an unbelievable circumference of an inch or more at their stems. I had to put metal tomato cages around a couple of plants to hold them up when they started to tip over from their burden of fruit.



While the taste of these thin-walled peppers only had a mild kick, the oils from these peppers really made the skin on my hands burn so I used gloves after that experience and one time when I was chopping some up on a hot August night, I got a squirt of pepper juice on my forehead. I rubbed the offending juice off with a swipe of my hand and spread a burning ring of fire across my face that throbbed for the better part of an hour. So be forewarned! And use gloves. And maybe some eye protection if you don't wear eyeglasses like the Crispy Cook!



It's easy to preserve your Tiburon pepper harvest by dicing or slicing them up and slipping them into freezer bags. We also roasted some up and then froze them. They are too thin-skinned to peel, so I just roasted them whole in the oven, then pulled on the stem end to remove it and the seed core.



These gorgeous peppers were wonderful fried up with onions and garlic for omelettes and vegetable soups and stews and they kept on pumping out peppers through our abnormally long garden harvest season. They soldiered on through a light frost and didn't flag until we had a killing frost only a week and a half ago.

I'm sending this pepper post over to Weekend Herb Blogging, a weekly blog event started by Kalyn's Kitchen almost five years ago, and now headquartered by Haalo at Cook (Almost) Anything At Least Once. This week's host of WHB #257 is Almond Corner. She'll be putting up the WHB roundup after Sunday's deadline, so head on over there to see what other fantastic blog posts and recipes there will be featuring the edible members of the Vegetable Kingdom.

Roasting Up Some Garlic Scapes for WHB #238

I am delighted to announce that The Crispy Cook is once again the guest host of Weekend Herb Blogging (Number 238!), a weekly blog event that celebrates all posts herbaceous, vegelicious and fruitastic. Weekend Herb Blogging was started by Kalyn's Kitchen and has been organized by Cook (Almost) Anything At Least Once for the last year.



From now until Sunday, June 20, 2010 I will be happy to accept recipes featuring plant ingredients (herbs, vegetables, fruits, seeds, stems, flowers, etc.) Entries must be submitted by:

* 5 pm Sunday - New York City Time (EST)
* 3pm Sunday - Utah Time
* 10pm Sunday - London Time
* 11pm Sunday - Rome Time
* 9am Monday - Melbourne (Aus) DS Time.

Your post can be informative, spotlight a particular ingredient and/or include a recipe where your chosen ingredient is one of the primary ingredients in the recipe. WHB posts must be written specifically for this blog event and may not be cross-posted in other events. Your post must include a link to The Crispy Cook and to the WHB rules page.

If you have a great veggie recipe to share this week, please send your posts to oldsaratogabooks AT gmail DOT com with WHB#218 in the subject line and the following details:

Your name Your Blog/URL
Your Post URL
Your Location
Attach a Photo: 250px wide

For my contribution to this week's WHB edition, I turned to what's flying out of the Crispy Garden, and this week it is garlic scapes. Scapes are the flowering stalks that emerge from the garlic plant and are trimmed if the home gardener or farmer wants the garlic plant to save all its plant energy for making a juicy and delicious garlic bulb to be harvested next month. I planted a boat load of garlic last November and have a handsome crop of various varieties of garlic that have been sending up scapes for the past week or so.

We've been using them just like scallions, chopping them into stir-fries and whizzing them up into Herbed Cream Cheese and Creamy Garlic Scape Dressing. They taste like a mild garlic and as you can see below we have a a real abundance of scapes.



I did a little Internet research to see what other ways cooks were using for their scapes and found this blog post gem in which the fanatical scape-lover author and self-described Crazy CSA Lady provides seven fabulous ways to cook with garlic scapes. This is followed by many more tantalizing comments in which other scape nuts mention different ways to use their beloved alliums. One commenter talked about roasting them so that is what I did, tossing them with olive oil, salt and pepper and then roasting them in a 425 degree oven for 30 minutes, stirring twice.



The roasted scapes are nice and crispy at their pointed little ends (though you must be careful not to skewer the inside of your mouth when you fork them in) and have a mild roasted garlic flavor. We ate them over green salads and as a pasta garnish and I still have others to use later on. Perhaps I will chop some up and freeze them to use later. Let me know if you have other fabulous ideas for roasted scapes.

Looking forward to seeing what's cookin' in your kitchen this week. I've already had several cool WHB submissions and can't wait for more to include in the roundup.

I Heart Pumpkin: A Multiplicity of Gluten-Free Pumpkin Treats

I Heart Pumpkin. What a great bounty from the old pumpkin patch this year. I planted four hills of Rouge Vif d'Etampes, a French heirloom variety this year, and even after giving away pumpkins to various friends, I still have ten pumpkins adorning my kitchen floor (we have had our killing frost so my babies have to come inside).



After last weekend's pumpkin bonanza, where I got 16 cups of pumpkin puree out of a 30 lb. beauty that was almost as big as Cinderella's Coach, I cooked up a big batch of pumpkin treats for my family.

There was a moist and spicy loaf of Pumpkin Bread, which I studded with a cup of golden raisins:



And a couple of Impossible Pumpkin Pies using Susan the Fat-Free Vegan's great recipe. You mix up all the ingredients in a blender or food processor and then pour it into your pie pans. This pie comes out very custardy and makes its own crust on the bottom. No foolin' around with rolling out crumbling gluten-free crusts between waxed paper and then cursing while attempting to transition them into the pie pans.



Then came the roasted pumpkin seeds. They were so ridiculously easy to make, I wonder why I never tried them out. Here's what I did:

Roasted Pumpkin Seeds

Rinse and remove pumpkin flesh from seeds. Pat dry.

Toss with corn oil to coat, sprinkle with salt and pepper.

Place on lightly oiled cookie sheet and toast in a preheated 300 degree F oven and toast, stirring every 15 minutes, for about an hour.

Voila! A nutty, healthy treat!



This trio of pumpkin delights is being sent over to Life, Gluten Free, who is the current hostess of Go Ahead, Honey, It's Gluten Free, a monthly blog event started by Naomi at Straight into Bed Cakefree and Dried. The theme of this month's round is "Pumpkin Treats" and I look forward to the roundup for other autumnal cooking ideas as nine other pumpkins await me in the Crispy Kitchen. Life, Gluten Free will post the roundup after the end of October, so do join me in stopping by for a tasteful peek at some more pumpkin fun.

The Great Pumpkin Invades the Crispy Kitchen

Pumpkins and gourds have never been big players in our home gardens. The vines and umbrella leaves are so huge and I've really only thought of them for table use in pumpkin pies, so I never wanted to devote a whole lot of valuable garden acreage to their cultivation. One time we had a volunteer pumpkin vine running out of our compost heap from a decaying roadside stand giant pumpkin purchase, but planting them on purpose was never considered until this spring, when the voluptuous curves of the French heirloom variety, Rouge Vif d'Etampes, made its siren song from the seed catalogue.

This heirloom variety looks like a giant red cheese and after a slow start in the wet back garden (those cucumber beetles kept bedeviling my seedlings) they took over the entire patch and were very poor neighbors to my adjacent rows of string beans and cabbages. We had a nice harvest of varying size pumpkins, and they come in an array of red, yellow and orange shades, with varying degrees of ridginess.



The Rouge Vif d'Etampes variety is an old French market pumpkin, so naturally they make for good eating in addition to their stylish good looks. I decided to cook up one of my best-looking monsters (and one of the biggest, weighing in at 30 pounds!) and brought this lovely pumpkin inside.



My trusty scullery hound, Martha, was a little apprehensive about this Giant Vegetable, but a little peanut butter spread on the outside eased her mind.



The first order of business was to wash the outside and then attempt to carve the pumpkin into wedges for roasting. This was quite a feat and worthy of a Halloween horror movie. It involved a cleaver. And my biggest kitchen knife. I thought about a machete, or perhaps a small brush chainsaw, but Martha objected. The pumpkin grinned in a terrible rictus.



In the end, I would cleave deep into the pumpkin, then remove it and lever in my kitchen knife to hack off small wedges. The Rouge Vif d'Etampes is flattened (some might say squashed) so I found that trimming the tapered ends worked better to scoop out the seeds and strings. A grapefruit spoon was the instrument of choice for that project. I filled a roasting pan and my largest baking dish with a 1/2 cup each of water, laid in the pumpkin slices and then roasted them for 1-1/2 hours at 375 degrees F. And that only dealt with half of the pumpkin! So I repeated that process over the course of an afternoon.



When cooled, I scooped the pumpkin flesh from the skins and then pureed it in my food processor. That 30-lb. pumpkin made somewhere just shy of 20 cups of pumpkin puree! Some went into my already-stuffed-with-garden-harvest-freezer and about half was set aside for a second day of pumpkin mania.

There is a Royal Foodie Joust underway over at the Foodie Blogroll Forum and the three ingredients which must be jousted with to create a recipe are pumpkin, dark beer and sugar. I wanted to make something savory, rather than sweet, so after perusing a bunch of cookbooks and Internet recipes for pumpkin pasta recipes, I cooked up this very elegant variation on the old comfort food standby, macaroni and cheese with a Crispy crumb topping.



I am happy to report that this creamy, pale orange concoction was gobbled up by my Crispy Crew and was even better heated up the next day after the delicate flavors melded more. I made our recipe gluten-free with GF pasta, bread crumbs and gluten-free beer, which are now so much more readily available in local food markets. Here's my autumnal recipe:

Pumpkin Macaroni and Cheese with Crispy Crumb Topping

1 lb. gluten-free pasta (I used Sam Mills corn rigatoni - $1.50 bag at Odd-Lot)

2 large onions, peeled and sliced thinly
3 Tbsp. olive oil
1 tsp. salt

1 cup Red Bridge sorghum beer

2 cups pureed pumpkin
1 cup Greek yogurt (or sour cream)
2 Tbsp. brown sugar
1/2 cup grated Parmesan

2 cups fresh, soft bread crumbs (I used half a baguette (the end parts) from Saratoga Gluten-Free Goods from my freezer)
2/3 cups walnuts
2 Tbsp. chopped fresh sage
Salt and pepper to taste.

3 Tbsp. softened butter

Cook pasta in boiling salted water until just al dente. Drain and rinse with cold water. Set aside.

Heat oil in frying pan. Add onions and cook over low heat until softened, about 10 minutes. Sprinkle with 1 tsp. salt and add beer. Turn up heat, bring to boil and then cook until beer is reduced by half, about 7-10 minutes.

Meanwhile, in large bowl, mix together pumpkin puree, yogurt, brown sugar and Parmesan. Mix in cooked onions and blend well. Carefully mix in cooked pasta (GF pasta tends to be brittler than wheat pasta) and pour into a greased 9 x 11 baking dish.

Place walnuts, bread crumbs, and sage in food processor and whizz it up until crumbs are coarse. Season with salt and pepper. Sprinkle crumbs over macaroni in baking pan and dot with bits of softened butter.

Bake at 375 degrees F for 30 minutes, or until topping is Crispy and golden brown.

Makes 8 generous servings.

This was truly a great recipe for our family. My kids liked the familiarity of the mac n' cheese, while Dan and I enjoyed the subtle flavors of beer-braised onions, earthy sage and pumpkin. Enjoy!



My only reservation about this recipe is that it ONLY used 2 cups of my vat of pureed Great Pumpkin, so I spent a bit of time baking stuff up the next day to use up more of my reserves. Stay tuned for more pumpkin recipes....

A Tour of the Autumnal Garden and a Bowl of Soup

Things are winding down in the Crispy Garden. I'm finally getting around to weeding some of the beds, I'm embarrassed to say, but the weather has been lovely and in between weeding, I'm tucking in various kinds of garlic to harvest next summer.

Those fecund Busillus frying pepper plants are still setting fruit,



I've got a forest of kale that will keep on chugging through the coming snowdrifts,



And this prehistoric patch of Brussels Sprouts awaits our consumption after the first frost, when the little sprouts are even sweeter.



I have my herb patch still soldiering on and a couple of lonely red cabbages. A single Tatsoi plant remained from my Spring planting, at least one that hadn't gone to seed, and was shivering under some fall leaves. So I grabbed it and into the cooking pot it went!



I had been thinking about this month's round of No Croutons Required, the vegetarian foodie event alternately hosted by Tinned Tomatoes and Lisa's Kitchen. The current challenge is to make a soup or salad using the contents of one's cupboards (and maybe a nip out to the autumn garden!). Frugality is the name of the game and participants may not go to the store to purchase ingredients specifically for their chosen dish.

My lonely bunch of tatsoi was the inspiration for this Chinese-style soup. I had read that tatsoi is often a soup ingredient in Chinese cooking, but hadn't yet experimented with it. I chopped the crunchy stalks off and diced them up to add to the soup pot a few minutes before adding the leafy parts and that made a nice counterpoint. The leaves got very silky and tender and were perfect in this hot, noodly broth.

Chinese-Style Noodle Soup with Tatsoi

10.5 oz pkg. rice stick noodles

1 small bunch tatsoi, washed several times (makes about 4 cups)

6 cups water
4 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced thinly
2 vegetable bouillon cubes (Knorr's was gluten-free, but check ingredients for other brands. Better yet, use homemade vegetable stock)
1 Tbsp. finely chopped ginger
3 Tbsp. soy sauce (check to make sure it is gluten-free)


Cook rice stick noodles in a large pot of boiling water for 6-8 minutes, or until soft. Drain and rinse under cold water for one minute to remove starch. Reserve.

Remove stems from tatsoi and dice finely. Rough chop the leaves.

Bring 6 cups of water to a boil. Add garlic, bouillon cubes, ginger and soy sauce. Return to boil and then let simmer 10 minutes to cook garlic and ginger. Add tatsoi stems and cook, stirring often, another 5 minutes. Add leaves and cook only a minute or two to get the tatsoi to soften. The tatsoi leaves get velvety soft and the stems still retain a nice crunch. Add noodles and heat through.

Serve hot. Makes 6 servings.



I reheated this soup the next day and threw in some leftover diced smoked tofu and that made it a little richer. The noodles had also soaked up more of the soup stock and got very plump and soft.

In addition to sending a bowl of this garlic- and ginger-scented soup over to Tinned Tomatoes for No Croutons Required, I am going to wing a bowl over to Deb of Kahakai Kitchen for her weekly Souper Sundays event. It was that good.

Sights and Scents at the Bennington Garlic Festival

My mom and I had a great little jaunt over in Bennington, Vermont at the Garlic and Herb Festival. The weather was great, there was good people watching and the blues band was foot-tappingly good. Mom was on the hunt for garden ornaments and edibles and I was looking for more garlic varieties to plant in October since this year's exploratory garlic harvest was so successful.



We saw lots of garlic vendors and chatted them up about different varieties, while sampling many a spicy clove. There were garlic pickle slivers to eat, pickled garlic and lots of vinegars, pestos, sauces and garlic-spiked barbecue seasonings to sample. We had a completely enjoyable day.

There were a couple of fellow Saratoga residents vending their wares at the Garlic Festival, including the very cute young couple that own Rutkowski Farms in Ballston Spa. I bought some Ukrainian Red Garlic from them, some of which we'll munch now and some of which we will plant. The Rutkowskis note that Ukrainian Red is a mild garlic that is especially nice minced into a bread dipping oil and you can see other cooking advice, recipes, and information about different garlic varieties on their lovely, clean website.

The good folks at Saratoga Garlic were also on hand to offer tastes of their luscious aiolis. My favorite was the Saffron Aioli, as documented in this Crispy Cook Action photo.



Mom bought a bottle of Sapling Maple Liqueur for us to toast with later that evening and it was a smooth and tasty product. It is 70 proof, so since I was the designated driver, I had only a dropperful for my snoot at the Fair, but later that night we all enjoyed a proper shot. It would be even more appropriate to sip before a fire in the woodstove, so I will be looking forward to buying my own bottle when I am back in Vermont.



We were full of garlicky ideas after the Festival and so Mom decided to prepare us some Creamy Mushroom Soup, spiked with a lot of garlic and some fresh herbs from her kitchen garden. It was really rich and full of flavor and full of maternal goodness.



Here's my Mom's recipe for:

Creamy Mushroom Soup with Garlic and Fresh Herbs

4-5 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped fine
2 Tbsp. butter
1 Tbsp. olive oil

1 (8 oz.) pkg. baby Portabella mushrooms, washed and sliced
Salt and Pepper

4 Tbsp. chopped fresh herbs (Mom used lemon balm, thyme, oregano, basil, and sage)

2 Tbsp. butter
2 Tbsp. cornstarch

1 cup warm milk
1/4 cup heavy cream

Melt 2 Tbsp. butter and olive oil in small frying pan. Add garlic, and cook on low heat, stirring often, until softened, about 10 minutes. Mom warns: "Don't let the garlic burn!"

Add slice mushrooms to pan and saute another 10 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Take off heat and add chopped herbs. Mom says: "Let the mushrooms have a little rest".

In a small soup pot melt 2 Tbsp. butter. Add cornstarch and stir. Take off heat and whisk in warm milk. If lumps remain after whisking, press sauce through a colander. Heat soup through and then add heavy cream. Just heat until cream is hot and serve immediately.

Makes four small servings. Lovely as a first course for dinner or paired with salad and bread for a light lunch.

I haven't had a soup recipe to send over to my Cook the Books buddy Deb of Kahakai Kitchen for her weekly Souper Sunday event, but this Creamy Mushroom soup will be shipped over there post haste. Look for Deb's roundup on Sunday, September 13.

Canning Spicy Zucchini Relish

While I missed Leave a Zucchini on Your Neighbor's Porch Day (August 8th), I have been able to unload some of our overflowing garden bounty on family, friends and bookstore customers. We only planted four zucchini plants, but as usual, once these gigantors sense a certain heat and humidity factor in the air, they bound out of their carefully tended plots and start shooting tendrils and umbrella leaves over their poor neighbor plants.

Even when we hack our zukes back they keep reproducing, so I've been cooking up lots of sauteed zucchini to pack away into the freezer and grating it into my homemade vats of tomato sauce (cooked down in the crockpot overnight to reduce some of the heat in my warm summer kitchen). It's been too steamy of late to do any baking of zucchini bread or muffins, so I turned to my cookbook collection to get some ideas for canning zucchini. I once made a batch of tasty yellow zucchini pickles, but nobody but me would eat them, so I needed inspiration.



I found a Zucchini and Green Chili Recipe in my copy of the Time-Life Good Cooks volume on Preserving and subbed in some of my own Busillus frying peppers and some hot red pepper flakes for the green chilies and cut the sugar. The result was a really nice hot and sweet relish that we sampled on our sandwiches and got preserved into pint jars for later use. Here's my recipe for:

Spicy Zucchini Relish

(Adapted from Time-Life Good Cooks volume "Preserving")

2-1/2 lbs. zucchini, trimmed and finely chopped
2 green frying peppers or ancho chilies, seeded and finely chopped
4 large onions, peeled and finely chopped

5 Tbsp. kosher salt

2-1/4 cups cider vinegar
1 tsp. dried red pepper flakes
3 cups sugar
1 Tbsp. dry mustard
1 Tbsp. turmeric
1 Tbsp. nutmeg
2 tsp. celery seeds

I used my trusty food processor to whizz up my zucchini, peppers and onions, and it had the added benefit of steering the onion fumes away from my tear ducts, but you can just chop up the veggies by hand if you like.

Toss vegetables with salt in a glass or ceramic bowl and cover and refrigerate over night.

The next day, rinse vegetables in a colander with cold water and squeeze out to draw out juices. Repeat again. Place vegetables and remaining ingredients in a non-aluminum pot and bring to a boil. Boil thirty minutes.

Pour into 4 hot pint canning jars and seal. Process in boiling hot water bath for 15 minutes. Let cool and seal. If your lids don't pop down, refrigerate them and use the relish within one month.

Makes 4 pints.

This recipe is being submitted to Weekend Herb Blogging, the weekly blog event that celebrates posts about vegetables, fruits, herbs and other plant ingredients that is headquartered at Haalo's lovely, tasty blog, Cook (Almost) Anything At Least Once. This week's guest host for WHB is The Cabinet of Prof. Kitty, a musical food blog (you'll have to check it out yourself for the fullest flavor....And a great salad recipe that can't be BEET.

Our First Garlic Harvest

Last Fall Dan and I were casting about looking for seed garlic to plant with no luck after many calls to garden stores, when my wise friend Linda gave me rhetorical thump on the head and suggested I just find some garlic at a farmer's market and plant the cloves. Of course! That's how people have planted garlic for eons before garden stores were invented. Duh.



We were late getting our cloves in the ground (November) but almost all of the garlic we planted raised their pointy green heads this Spring and we hovered over them, snipping off their scapes and checking the state of their advancement from the green to the yellow leaf spectrum. Some of the garlics were flopping over entirely, so after some consultation with Linda and her love, Leo, my personal Garlic Guru, who lives one garden zone south, I yanked up a few bundles to see how the bulbs were filling out.

Some heads of garlic were small, some were plump, but all looked ready to cure. I yanked them all out, tied then into clumps of 7 or 8 with twine and have them hanging in our open-ended garden shed. It's been a week of curing time now, and their formerly damp, purplish skins are turning into the papery white heads that I am used to with store-bought garlic.



My garlic investment has been rewarded six times over from the initial sack of garlic we planted, so I am very happy. It's an easy crop to grow, as I didn't really need to weed or water it much and my most voracious garden pests (voles, Japanese beetles, flea beetles, cutworms) don't seem to mess with the Stinking Rose.

I found some good information about harvesting garlic here at this website, although the authors gave me frights with their warnings about treating garlic like eggs and having only up to a week to harvest the garlic to avoid ruining your crop. I tried to avoid bruising the garlic and will pick the fattest, healthiest cloves to replant later this Fall. As they adapt to my soil and micro-climate, I should have some even plumper, more spectacular garlic in the years to come.

To celebrate my homegrown garlic harvest, I'd love to hear about any recipes or special ways of preparing my favorite Allium. Garlic, yum..........

My Legume Love for Fava Beans

The fresh fava bean is a legume I have heard people swoon over and certainly Hannibal Lecter's infamous comment about them pairing well with liver and a nice Chianti in the book and film "The Silence of the Lambs" is arresting, so they have long "bean" on my list of vegetables to try out in the Crispy Garden. The seeds are huge: as big as my thumb and look as magical as any fairy tale bean, so they were easy enough to plant.

The plants are unusual and lovely as well. They grow fast into crunchy, squared off stalks with graceful leaves and black and white blossoms.



Unfortunately, as soon as the plants started to blossom, regiments of black aphids invaded, with accompanying camp followers of ants to stroke their adbdomens for some sort of insect "honey". They must have taken Lecter's culinary advice, because they were all over the delicate tips of my fava plants and I couldn't really squish them off without hurting the plants. I tried blasting them with water, but again, the fava tips are somewhat delicate, so I had this black blight on some of my fava beans when they developed their large seed pods. They come right out of the stalk of the plant, so this is truly an unusual looking vegetable to have in the garden.



The yield from one packet of seeds was not huge, but I did harvest one colander's worth of fava pods. They are very cute legumes, all snug in their downy sleeping bag pods. It is somewhat laborious wrestling them from these coccoons, sort of like waking up a teenager on a dark winter's morning. You can't just split open the pod and shake out the beans, like one does with fresh peas, as the pods are very fibrous and the favas each have a tough little umbilicus that one has to snap individually with a fingernail. After my wrestling match, my colander's worth of produce had shrunk down to 2 cups of favas.



Now I had still one culinary prep step to go with my favas. The bigger beans have a tough membrane that needs to be slipped off, so I prepared a hot and salty water bath for my favas and blanched them for 5 minutes. After they cooled, I again had a laborious project of attempting to slip off their skins, which worked on the bigger beans, but which only served to smash up my smaller favas, so in the end, I left the membranes on the smaller ones.



From two rows of fava plants to one colander of bean pods, now I had only one cup of precious, delicious, buttery favas. Such green gold must be accorded the finest treatment, so I hovered over cookbooks, cooking websites, perused my friend Linda's multiple fava recipe emails (she had been over for a garden tour earlier) and ended up making a simple, but luscious sauteed fava topper for some pasta.

It's a simple recipe: I heated some olive oil in a skillet, sauteed a few cloves of sliced garlic, seasoned with salt and pepper and added my favas for the last couple of minutes to heat through and then added this green crown to our bowls of pasta with some slivered fresh basil for an elegant Spring supper. Legume love indeed.

I'll have to consider planting favas again in another garden season. While the plants were gorgeous, if aphidious, the harvest was somewhat meager. I enjoyed picking them and cooking them, but it does seem unproductive to end up with one cup of edible greens after all that time and effort. Sort of like trying maple syrup production when one has only one tree.

Perhaps if I can research aphid control, it would make sense to grow them again if I could grill them in their pods as per this delectable recipe for Grilled Fava Pods with Chile and Lemon, and avoid the arduous shelling. I (with Linda's guidance) also noticed some other tasty recipes for favas which intrigued me for the future: Saute of Fresh Favas with Onions and Fennel, Tagliatelle with Favas and Romano, and Persian Sabzi Polo.

My kitchen and garden experiments with fava beans seem like a good submission for one of my favorite monthly food blog events, My Legume Love Affair, the brainchild of Susan, The Well-Seasoned Cook, which is being hosted this round by TongueTicklers. You can join in the fun by submitting a post about your favorite legume to TongueTicklers by July 31st. There are even a couple of prizes involved, including a cookie cook book and a collection of dried beans, so be sure to check out the MLLA Event this month.

The Return of the Green Lance: Braised with Ginger

Previously, I filled you all in on a new resident in our garden, the Green Lance, a hybrid Chinese broccoli variety (also called gai laan, spelled various ways). It is a very attractive Spring vegetable, a cruciferous family member that sets up a fleshy stalk that one cooks after there are several flowering buds. Inspired by the superhero name, I pounced upon some Green Lance recently



and harvested some more stalks to cook up in the Crispy Kitchen. The stalks definitely were woodier after some toughening in the early summer sun, so I would peel them at the base like one does to asparagus next time. I braised them with lots of slivered fresh ginger after learning a little bit about traditional Chinese cooking and the medicinal properties of various foods in "The Last Chinese Chef" by Nicole Mones. This book is the current selection of the foodie book club, Cook the Books, hosted this round by Deb of Kahakai Kitchen. If you would like to join us in reading this book and cooking up something inspired by your reading, check out the Cook the Books blog. The deadline for reading and blogging about our current book is August 28.

Anyway, we like the flavor of the Green Lance and it was braised up with some ginger to reduce the "wind" that has been causing various members of the Crispy Casa to sneeze and get congested during this damp and cool summer.

Green Lance Braised with Fresh Ginger

1 bunch Green Lance (or gai laan or Chinese broccoli), woody parts trimmed and sliced into one inch sections

2 Tbsp. peanut oil
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 (1 inch) piece gingerroot, peeled and slivered

2 Tbsp. soy sauce
1 Tbsp. sesame oil


Heat oil in wok until very hot. Add garlic and stir constantly for one minute. Add ginger and stir 1-2 minutes more, or until very fragrant.

Add Green Lance and stir-fry 3-4 minutes. Add 1/4 cup water and cover wok to steam another 5 minutes, stirring once or twice. Remove cover and add soy sauce and garlic and stir-fry another several minutes, or until Green Lance is tender.

Serves 4.




Haven't been blogging as much as I have been gardening and working hard at the bookshop (it's our busy season) but I will return soon with more gardening/cooking posts and a fuller Cook the Books post about "The Last Chinese Chef", which was a terrific read. It made me want to explore Chinese cooking and try out some new kitchen techniques, so stay tuned. And you never know when the Green Lance might just show up again.....

The Green Lance: A Captivating Asian Vegetable

One of the delights of living in the Great Northeast is cuddling up in winter next to the fireplace with a hot mug of tea and a pile of seed catalogues. The kitchen gardener dreams of resplendently tangled beds of vegetables and herbs when the warmer weather rolls around again and it makes for many a pleasant reverie. One of the vegetables that caught my fancy this past catalogue season was the Green Lance, an Asian vegetable also known by many aliases, such as Gail Lohn, Pak Kah Nah, Chinese Kale or Chinese Broccoli.

I was captivated by the comic book name, the short growing season (50 days) and the description of its taste as being somewhere along the broccoli-asparagus spectrum. Yum yum. I got my seeds from Johnny's Selected Seeds and planted them during the cooler Spring weather and am now harvesting my first crop of this tasty, hardy vegetable. I waited until I had a couple of flowering stalks and then cut the plant down to a long stub, as I will hopefully have a future crop of smaller side shoots in a few weeks.

The plant itself is very attractive with long spears and elegant little florettes on top. A couple of white blossoms opened, so I knew I better get out my knife and harvest a bouquet of Green Lance to cook up for dinner.



Somehow, I don't have any cookbooks with recipes for cooking up my beautiful Green Lances, so I just did a simply stir-fry, served over rice, for my inaugural experiment with this elegant vegetable. I am not clear as to whether one should just cook the stems and flower buds, and not the leaves too, but I went ahead and we munched on all three with equal relish. I did find some other Green Lance cooking ideas listed at this informative post from a Santa Barbara, CA restaurant, so look for some more recipes in the future from yours truly as I harvest and experiment later in the garden season.

Stir-Fried Green Lance with Black Beans

1 bunch Green Lance (5 fat stems with buds), chopped into 1 inch sections
2 fat cloves garlic, peeled and sliced
1 Tbsp. peanut oil
1 tsp. fermented black beans, rinsed and drained and coarsely chopped

Heat oil in heavy pan. Add garlic slices and cook, stirring, one minute.

Add Green Lance and stir until stems are crisp-tender, about 3 minutes. Add black beans and stir another 2 minutes. Even the fattest stems are tender after this cooking time, although later in the season, when the plant's skin is thicker, I may have to adjust the cooking time.

Serves 2.


I know I will be enjoying this tasty veggie many more times and will definitely grow it again in the Crispy Garden. It was very easy to grow, and despite a little damage from cutworms and flea beetles, there were so many seedlings in the row I planted that we will have a more than abundant crop, particularly if the side shoots start popping out in the hotter summer weather.

This post will be shared at the always fun, always informative blog event Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted this week by Erbe in Cucina. This bilingual blog hails from Italy, and is a great resource for gardening and culinary information about a rainbow of herbs. Weekend Herb Blogging is the brainchild of Kalyn's Kitchen and is now headquartered at the Australian food blog, Cook (Almost) Anything At Least Once.

My Green Babies in the Spring Garden

There's lots cooking up in my Spring gardens, or should I say, in MY garden and MY HUSBAND's garden. My garden is more of a curvilinear tapestry of flowers, herbs and vegetables,



whereas Dan's garden is a geometrically precise and orderly space for serious plants that intend to feed us early and often.



Both styles work well for us: I love seeing which annuals have reseeded themselves and love the surprise of finding a hardy tomato or tomatillo struggling up through the Spring soil. I haven't had to plant dill or cilantro in years, and a packet of wildflower seeds strewn on a bare patch of garden five years ago still renews itself each year in a long-blooming patch of delicate red poppies. Dan's garden soil is the more fertile, however, as he is diligent about laying down mulched grass clippings and stepping only where his wood chip pathways intersect the veggie beds. He has an lovely bunch of broccoli plants right now and we are looking forward to a second year of the tropical vines of red noodle beans grown all around the wooden pyramid trestle he made.

A mama robin has nested in the crotch of a wild cherry tree, right next to my garden, which drives her mate frantic whenever I'm in weeding or planting, so I'm trying to be careful about not disturbing them too much. You can see a tiny yellow sliver of beak in this photo.



Two new vegetable varieties await consumption a little later this month: One is Green Lance, an Asian cruciferous vegetable which is supposed to be harvested when it gets a little bigger and sports a miniature broccoli headpiece. It has suffered a tiny bit of damage from ravaging cutworms, but I should have a nice little harvest in a week or so:



The other garden newbie is the Fava Bean, which is a beautifully sculptural plant with square stems and lovely leaves and is now wearing some eye-catching black and white blossoms:



We have been enjoying our first lettuces in the past week and the shot below captures the first harvest that went beyond a handful of radishes or herb snippets. I had a couple of leafy Black-Seeded Simpson lettuces sprout up from a row I had planted last year, so I let them fatten up and then harvested them for a delicate salad with home grown chives and radishes. Unfortunately, my kids won't eat my salads for a while, as I somehow didn't notice a stowaway in my salad greens, who survived several soakings in water and a ride in my salad spinner. I plated up a toothsome quartet of green salads and was bringing them to the table, when a coin-sized Daddy Long Legs marched out of his hiding place and made a dash for it off the dining table. I suppose the vinaigrette was the final indignity.



See if you can spot the spider in the photo above. Obviously I couldn't.

Stay tuned to see what the Crispy Cook concocts out of her Green Lance and Fava Bean harvests and whether my children will cured of their arachnophobic eating habits.

The Spring Garden 2009

Ah, Spring... Time to play in the dirt and walk around the yard barefoot. The birds have started sitting on their eggs and the first herbs and vegetables are arriving onto our dinner plates. We've already had a couple of meals of our own asparagus and have reveled in the fresh tastes of dill, oregano, chives, thyme and even a few surprise cilantro plants popping up in the garden beds.

I am a first-time garlic grower, and have been hovering over the cloves planted last November. They are green and vigorous and managed to survive a weird winter of freezing and thawing and an onslaught of meadow voles, so I see some garlic scape pesto and garlands of dried garlic in my future.



Every year I try to add a few new herbs and vegetables to my repertoire. Last year I tried leeks, but was foiled by those voracious voles who chomped down on my tender baby leek bulbs in a sneaky subterranean assault. I also planted Anise Hyssop from seed and didn't really see much action there, but this Spring a luxurious little shrub of this herb has unfurled and I look forward to harvesting its leaves for tea. If anyone out there has some other culinary or medicinal information about Anise Hyssop, please leave a comment below.



New to the Crispy Cook's kitchen garden this year is a lovely legume I've always wanted to try, based on the raves I've heard about fresh fava beans. The seeds were huge, like magic beans, and have sprouted into very robust bean seedlings, so I have high hopes for actually consuming some later in the season. Again, any fava bean recipes and tips gratefully appreciated. I have heard that steaming the fresh favas and then slitting open their skin and serving them forth with shavings of Pecorino cheese is divine, so I'll keep you posted. I also have a recollection that they go well with liver and a nice Chianti, but that could be hearsay.



Another new inhabitant in the Crispy Garden this year is Green Lance, a variety of Asian green residing somewhere along the kale-broccoli continuum. Green Lance is supposed to grow up to be a thick-stemmed, flowering cruciferous vegetable that likes to be steamed and stir-fried, so voles and cutworms willing, we will dine on them next month.



Memorial Day Weekend is the traditional day of planting the more tender veggies in our area. We just had a frost last week, so I am holding off on sticking the tomato plants out just yet, but when I am off tomorrow, it will time to get muddy toes and fingers planting string beans and zucchini.

With visions of sugar snaps dancing in my head....