The Cabbage Chronicles

Young cabbages, back in December

The cabbages are in! Lots and lots of them, in spite of a Christmas season warm enough to fool the other cole crops into thinking it was springtime. We grew three heat-tolerant varieties this year:

•  Chieftan Savoy, a gorgeous crinkly blue-green cabbage with smallish heads and a sweet, mild flavor. Especially tasty in soups.
• Red Acre, a reddish-purple cabbage which The Perfect Man uses to make coleslaw. (Anybody know a good pickled red cabbage recipe? I’d like to try it.)
• Early Flat Dutch, which makes enormous shiny pale-green heads weighing in around 8-10 pounds apiece. The heads are very tightly packed, as well, making it harder for hungry insects to gain access.

All three produced well — despite the vagaries of our coastal weather — without chemical fertilizers or pesticides. We planted them in late September, in rotation behind tomatoes and green beans.  Cabbages are happiest in rich, moist soil, so we added an inch of fresh compost (made from a well-rotted blend of leaves and kitchen scraps) and hoed it in before planting.

We have a big garden and I have a strong aversion to gasoline-powered tillers,  so  everything gets a heavy hay mulch to prevent weeds, preserve moisture, deter fire ants and provide a nice dark habitat for earthworms.  (If you’re still getting weeds, your hay isn’t thick enough.) One layer of mulch will last a full year — two crop cycles — before it needs replacement, and we just roll it back like a big brown carpet to add compost or set transplants.

Our cabbages like the mulch carpet method. They are shallow-rooted and thirsty, so the protective layer keeps them moist. And here’s an interesting bonus: among the brassica clan, the tendency to bolt is affected more by root temperature than by air temperature. Mulch insulates the cabbage roots when we get those freaky 75-degree spells.

Once harvested, cabbages in our warmish winter climate need to be processed quickly. The Perfect Man ramped up the shredding-bagging-and-freezing operation to the point where the motor on our overworked food processor burned up. Cabbage-loving relatives and neighbors carried off recycled grocery bags bulging with leafy orbs. We experimented with some new cabbage recipes.  Now they’ve all been put away, given away or eaten… and we’re prepping the beds for the next occupants.

 

Ode to kale

Tags

cooking, food, kale, organic gardening

Well, not just kale. Cabbage and broccoli, as well.

Is there anything prettier than cruciferous vegetables in the morning dew? We are awash in a rising tide of broccoli and cabbages this week, as the winter garden reaches maturity.  Neighbors and kinfolks are handed bags of tasty green stuff as they walk out our door.

But the wonder crop of the winter garden, as far as I’m concerned, is kale. I first tasted the tender little green about 20 years ago, when an elderly neighbor told me that kale was her secret for staying youthful and energetic.

“I cook a big pot of it once a week,” she confided. “Never been sick a day in my life. Never took a vitamin pill, either.” At 73, she was still tossing hay bales into the back of a farm truck like a teenager. I immediately ordered a packet of seeds.

 Each fall, we plant a small bed of Russian kale — a sweetly mild variety that grows rapidly and abundantly right through winter. We sow it thickly, and it’s up within days. At the two-week mark, we thin the bed and eat the tender baby plants in mixed salad. After that, we harvest the mature leaves weekly as new shoots continuously grow up from beneath the dense, eighteen-inch canopy of ragged tops.

Here in the deep South, most people cook kale the same way they cook collard greens: stew it into submission along with a big hunk of ham bone.  But (a) kale cooks much more quickly than the bigger, coarser greens, and (b) we’re vegetarians around here. So we simmer it briefly in vegetable stock, then use it in our favorite quiche or pasta recipes. It’s very tasty.

Or, to warm ourselves during a south Alabama cold snap, we make a pot of incavolata. It’s a hearty, rustic Italian soup made of kale and white beans. Seasoned with garlic and sage, then thickened with cornmeal, it is a wonderful winter meal. Here’s my favorite version, from my dogeared copy of the Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant cookbook:

• 4 cups chopped kale
• 4 large garlic cloves, minced
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 6 cups cooked cannellini (white kidney beans) or 4 cans
• 5 cups vegetable stock, or water from cooking beans
• 2 heaping tsp tomato paste
• 6 fresh sage leaves or 1/2 tsp dried sage
• 1 tsp salt
• freshly ground black pepper
• 1/2 cup finely ground cornmeal
• 2 tbsp lemon juice
• freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Remove the stems from the kale and coarsely chop the leaves. Soak the leaves in a bowl of cold water while you prepare the soup. In a soup pot, saute’ the garlic in the olive oil for about a minute. Add half the cooked beans and part of the stock to the pot. Puree’ the rest of the beans and stock in a blender or food processor along with the tomato paste and sage. Stir the pureed beans into the soup. Add salt and pepper to taste. Drain the kale. Mix it into the soup and simmer for at least half an hour, until tender.  Mix the cornmeal with the lemon juice and enough water to make one cup. Pour this paste slowly into the simmering soup while stirring constantly to prevent lumps from forming. Simmer the soup for another 10 to 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Taste for salt and pepper and adjust the seasonings. Serve immediately, topped with freshly grated Parmesan. Enjoy!

A few more good things about kale: bugs dont like it. It’s packed with Vitamin A and antioxidants. And finally, it is a terrific “green manure” crop when you’re through eating it. It will grow happily through our cool winters, but the party’s over around late March, when daytime temperatures climb into the 80s again. That’s when we plow the remaining plants into the ground, where it rapidly breaks down… to the delight of our earthworm friends.

The herbivore vs locavore smackdown

Tags

Eat Local Challenge, gardening, sustainability, vegetarian

 

Okay, I’ll just come right out and say it: The 2008 Local Food Challenge was not the transcendent experience I anticipated. Suddenly confronted with surviving on mostly starches and dairy, I gained five pounds the first week and promptly developed chronic indigestion.  Chocolate and avocados haunted my dreams.  Was it enlightening? You bet. Was it fun? No way.

On the positive side, the Challenge provided an ideal opportunity for The Perfect Man to master his techniques for making butter and cheese.  And, in the absence of spinach or broccoli, we discovered that fresh-picked kale makes a very respectable quiche. But drawbacks included large amounts of gasoline required to round up a very limited variety of veggies… and large amounts of time required to prepare basic ingredients.

I have enormous admiration for the brave souls who shepherded their entire families through the long month of local-only menus. Ang Jordan at Gulf Coast Local Food is at the top of that list, because she’s right here in south Alabama, where sustainability is a new and exotic concept. (Ask someone in Mobile if they support CSA, and they’re likely to assume you mean the Confederate States of America.)  Then there’s Cafe Mama, who writes about her local food quest in prose as spare and sweet as poetry. And Sarah Beam makes it all sound easy at Recipes for a Postmodern Planet.

Call me a curmudgeon, but my mood soured by the middle of the second week — around the time that I ran out of innovative ways to cook sweet potatoes.  When I turned to my fellow bloggers for inspiration, their posts sounded so…so… chipper. Was it possible that I was the only cranky Challenge participant, a vegetarian doing without vegetables, grumpily counting the days until the local-only pledge would finally end?

Well, bad attitude and all, I may have actually whittled away at the old carbon footprint much more than I thought — just by being a longtime herbivore. According to a study by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, raising animals for food results in more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined. Yikes.  But here’s the good news: even a modest reduction in meat consumption takes a big bite out of fossil energy use. 

 On Saturday, I accompanied The Perfect Man to a last-chance plant sale at Mobile Botanical Gardens. All the unsold plants left over from their annual autumn sale were offered at bargain prices. Fun! We brought home two big Bengal Tiger cannas, a new Louisiana iris for the water garden, a pot full of pineapple sage and a tiny container of the whimsical succulent my grandmother calls “hen and chicks.” Our loot is pictured below, but excuse the camera strap dangling in the upper right corner. It was early, and I needed some coffee.

 

Orange you glad it’s autumn?

Tags

autumn, flowers, gardening

Our garden is dressed in fall colors. Click on each image for more details:

Aloe vera

Cosmos

Texas tarragon

Marigolds

Zinnias

Recycled florist mums

Green Tomato Days

I struggled all morning with a corporate illustration assignment that simply wouldn’t come together, then gave up and did some therapeutic baking. Ahhhh. Six dozen chocolate chip oatmeal pecan cookies later, I feel much better.

This is the time of year when tomatoes crowd the windowsills and spill over onto other available horizontal surfaces, get sent home with friends and relatives, and find their way into everything we cook. We grow Homesteads for slicing and romas for cooking — we also use the meaty, low-moisture romas to make enough truck-dried tomatoes to last through the winter.

This weekend, The Perfect Man harvested all the garlic that we grew in the winter garden and now it’s dangling in a pungent row on the cottage porch, drying out. The potatoes have all been dug, washed and stored. We’re steadily picking Japanese eggplant and Cubanelle peppers, and if green beans were money we’d be Bill Gates.

He also whipped up a batch of Green Tomato Chow Chow, using a new recipe. We haven’t tasted it yet — we won’t open a jar until the requisite two weeks have passed — but it smelled so wonderful in preparation that here’s a link to the recipe anyway. (Instead of the jalapenos, which we don’t have in the garden this season, we substituted a cup of tangy Cubanelles.) Mmmm.

Frog choruses are holding raucous, all-night concerts in the water garden. They are amazingly loud. Lying in bed, you can hear them clearly despite closed windows and air conditioners. (Researchers at the University of California have discovered that frogs accomplish most of their impressive amplification by resonating their croaks not through their mouths, but through their ears. I liked the fact that they determined this by fitting the test frogs with tiny foam earmuffs. I’m not making this up.)

Back to work…