What to do when you just can’t wait for ripe vegetables
The radishes are ravishing, the carrots are cautiously
sprouting. Parsley and cilantro are on their way. There’s a row of
corno di toro Italian peppers coming along and the tomatoes,
chiles, eggplant and potatoes go in this week.
What to do when you just can’t wait for ripe vegetables
The radishes are ravishing, the carrots are cautiously sprouting. Parsley and cilantro are on their way. There’s a row of corno di toro Italian peppers coming along and the tomatoes, chiles, eggplant and potatoes go in this week.
We try to squeeze in a new variety of tomato or two every year. Early Girl always goes in, a reliable producer of heavy crops of medium-sized fruit.
Among the others this year is Stupice, an eastern European variety that we’ve enjoyed through Paul and Letty Hain’s farmstand at the Hollister Farmer’s Market. Ditto Mortgage Lifter, a delicious tomato that would be worth growing just for its name. The wild card this year is a Himalayan variety that we had never heard of.
When it gets just a little warmer, we’ll add some squash and probably cucumbers to the mix.
Thinking about this year’s vegetable garden, I marvel at the cornucopia that opened when Europeans first bumped into the new world. Potatoes, corn, tomatoes, chiles, and chocolate were added to the menu. Three of our staples – potatoes, eggplant and tomatoes – are all botanical cousins. They are members of the nightshade family. Nightshade itself is a showy wild shrub with beautiful purple flowers, punctuated with bright yellow centers. It’s often called deadly nightshade as a reminder that it’s quite toxic. So are the leaves of other members of the group, including potatoes.
Once the vegetables go in, the waiting begins. The earliest ripe tomato we ever plucked came on Independence Day. In a more typical year, they arrive about two weeks later. We never can seem to wait until things are ready to begin eating from the garden, and that’s a good thing.
If you’ve never grown potatoes, you’ve missed out on a lot. They are ridiculously easy to grow. Prepare loose soil, dig a shallow trench, pop in seed potatoes and as the plants grow, continue to mound earth around the stems to ensure a large crop. Even easier, I’m told that the plants will do fine if planted just below the surface in fenced beds that are filled with layers of straw as the plants grow. That way, the spuds needn’t be dug at all, but just plucked from the straw.
Potatoes offer the fun of the Easter egg hunt adventure of rooting through the earth, trying to locate the tubers with your fingers. And there’s the flavor. Anyone who believes that to be rendered edible, a russet must be tarted up with butter, sour cream and chives knows nothing of the tuber’s real character.
Freshly dug potatoes taste of the earth, with a complex flavor and rich aroma. Typically, growers are told to harvest once the tops have bloomed and started to die back.
We seldom wait that long. When the plants are mature, starting to flower, we begin plucking small potatoes from the edges of the garden.
The best are no bigger than a ping pong ball. Tossed with a drizzle of olive oil and placed in a hot oven, or a covered pan, we roll them around until the outside is brown and crisp. The inside of each tiny potato has transformed itself into a fluffy mouthful. With a sprinkle of salt, the potatoes beg for no other addition.
Back to those tomatoes. We’ve had our share of misadventures with America’s favorite garden crop. Once a healthy number of green tomatoes appear, we begin waiting. And waiting. One year, tomatoes disappeared just as they were nearly ripe. Then I began finding green tomatoes secreted around the garden, each bearing four puncture marks that matched the bite of our springer spaniel, Buddy.
He’d been cultivating a taste for produce, but since dogs are color blind, he did not bother to try looking for ripe fruit. He just sampled until he found what he liked.
We do the same thing, picking green fruit for an early summer plate of fried green tomatoes when the wait for ripe fruit gets to be too much to bear.
After trying different approaches, some of them elaborate with baths in beaten eggs and dips in a variety of coatings, we settled on the simplest approach, one that leaves a light, crunchy exterior and little else. The summery taste shines through. The same batter can be used to great effect on squash blossoms.
All squash bear two kinds of flowers – male and female. They’re easy to tell apart, since the female flowers already have the start of a squash attached to their base. A few male flowers are needed to ensure that the female flowers are pollinated so they can bear. But plants typically have many more male flowers than are needed.
Even if the mention of zucchini makes you wrinkle your nose, squash blossoms are a revelation. Dipped in the same batter we use for fried tomatoes and briefly fried in olive oil, they are marvelous, a delicate mouthful speaking of sunny days.
A plate of fried green tomatoes and fresh squash blossoms is a fantastic way to begin the harvest season. This simple batter was introduced to us by Marcella Hazan in her “Classic Italian Cook Book.”
Vegetable Batter
1 cup water
2/3 cup flour
Salt
Enough olive oil to coat the bottom of a pan
Put the water in a shallow bowl and slowly whisk in the flour until it’s the thickness of buttermilk. Pat slices of tomato or whole squash blossoms dry. Dip briefly in the batter and fry until done. Drain on paper towels and sprinkle with salt. Serve hot.
