A Season of Hope: Food, Gardening and the Human Spirit: July 2012

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Remedy for Squash Vine Borers and Garden Updates

squash vine borers

burying the stem afterwards

One of my favorite activity is to walk by the garden and admire how well the plants are doing. I also decide then what I can pick to serve the guests for lunch for that day. Today, I noticed that a couple of the squash plants looked wilted and made a note to myself to give them more water. Luckily, Judy Fallows of Healthy Waltham ( http://www.healthy-waltham.org/) came by and knew the plants didn't lack water, but had squash vine borers. She showed me the telltale signs - little piles of yellow material (see the first photo) on the stem. Judy took a sharp knife and slit the stem lengthwise to dig out the worm. There were three worms in each of those two plants! On closer inspection, all the yellow squashes and zucchini plants were infected. After I served lunch, I went to the garden and I carefully cut into the stem like Judy instructed me. Later, I buried the vines (see second photo) and deeply watered each plant. I don't know if this intervention will be successful, but I hope so because the plants were very productive.


red lettuce

kohlrabi

Next, I pulled all the arugula plants because they were flowering and the leaves were very bitter. Some people, like my staff Karen, love the taste of bitter arugula in her salad, but after I tasted a leaf, I thought it might be too harsh for the guests' palates. At the same time I also pulled out all the red lettuce for our salad tomorrow. This allows for more sunlight for our cabbage and kohlrabi plants. The tomato plants towered over the other plants heavy with their fruits. After staking them, they were better neighbors.

Check out the Swiss chard, collard, kale, tomatoes, beans, beets and carrots!

Food Memories: Are Heirloom Tomatoes Worth The Buzz-and the Money

Today, while searching for the Boston Globe puzzle, I saw this article on why heirloom tomatoes are so popular, while according to the author Beth Teitell, "with [other] popular varieties, the power of nostalgia bears fruit." Ms. Teirell claims it is because this variety has been passed from one generation to another, probably from grandmother's garden to her kitchen that people are willing to pay heirloom prices for them. Since this falls within this month's theme of food and memories, I thought I'd share this article with you. See article below.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/food-dining/2012/07/24/are-heirloom-tomatoes-worth-buzz-and-money/yigf4uOy4nBS8wnJg9T3OM/story.html

Monday, July 23, 2012

Food Memories: Tiny and Almost Impalpable is the Essence of Memory

Catherine comes from a long line of strong, talented and visionary women and is the co-creator of this blog.

Tiny and Almost Impalpable is the Essence of Memory

July 22, 2012

As far as I can remember, my first thought upon waking every morning is “what shall I make for dinner today.” I have always cooked for family, friends, holidays, social events and large gatherings of people. Cooking was therapy and contact sport rolled into one. Cooking was self-identity. However, it was only recently that I understood the centrality of food in my life.

During a rather dark time in my life, I was working in New York City and commuting home on weekends. One snowy Friday night, I struck up a conversation with the taxi driver who was taking me home. The driver asked what I plan to do for the weekend and I said: read, drink tea and maybe make a large pot of chicken soup. He then gave me his chicken soup recipe. It sounded absolutely delectable. So, I said: Do you love to cook; and he said “yes” and that he used to own a restaurant. At which point I remarked: Oh, business must be slow; you are moonlighting, driving a taxi. “No,” he said, “the restaurant was doing really well. Customers loved my cooking. But, after a while I just realized that I don’t enjoy cooking for people I don’t know and love. Eventually, I started to dread cooking. That’s when I decided to give up the restaurant, so I can keep my love of cooking.”

This was my “Madeleine” moment. A moment best depicted by Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, when the smell and taste of a madeleine dipped in a cup of tea triggered a flood (6 volumes and over 3,000 pages) of forgotten childhood memories (http://www.geoffwilkins.net/proust/). Growing up, I spent every school vacation with my grandparents – more specifically, in my grandmother’s kitchen. My grandmother came from Shaoxing, China, not far south of Shanghai. She cooked with fresh ingredients, deftly seasoned with just a touch of soy, sugar, sesame oil and family lore: How she married my grandfather (He was the only man willing to marry a girl with big feet); how she and my mother escaped Japanese occupation (Your mother carried the family bedding that was bigger than she); and how she gave birth to ten children and only three daughters lived to adulthood.

Recalling each story, I can still taste her river shrimp with petite peas -- little jade pearls, so slippery to a child’s chopsticks, safely nestled against the pink succulence of the tiny shrimps, and all are enveloped in the comfort of silky egg white pillows. Each ingredient, each color and each flavor is so alive that they shimmered like so many dew drops in morning sun. Later, I learned to make pastas and dumplings from my mother, who never shied away from bold flavors or dishes that depended on perfect timing and technique for their success. Every holiday, major or minor, secular or sacred, is reason enough to put on a large feast for her students or anyone who did not have family nearby. Eventually, I was given the exclusive right to make pies and stuff turkeys for my mother’s holiday repasts.

These days, I cook only simple foods for those I love. No more big parties or showing off at social events. No chasing after food feds. I cook by thinking about the enjoyment I am to receive from my dinner companions, instead of the requirements set out in recipes. I make my mother’s Zhajiang Mien (noodles with brown meat sauce) when my sister visits from Australia. And, my college-aged son makes pumpkin pies for me for Thanksgiving – a dish he learned in first grade and, even since, has declared with great conviction his unwavering refusal to divulge the secret ingredient, notwithstanding that neither he nor I ever used a recipe for pumpkin pie.

What I learned from the taxi driver – and Proust – is that cooking for family and friends is an act of love. And, I would add, each time they eat the food we make, they reciprocate. I have lost count of the “compliments” from my father after eating, with great showing of gusto, the eggs I made with ketchup, the soups I made with ketchup, the rice with ketchup, and the roast with ketchup….. No matter, each small, quotidian dish of food served and consumed adds to and strengthens the bond we have with each other. This is why I am always touched by Proust’s realization that, “the smell and taste of things ….. tiny and almost impalpable [are] the essence of the immense architecture of memory.” Because even after memories of many novel and exciting experiences have faded in our mind, there is the taste and smell of food that stand ready to remind us of the things we treasure the most.

Thursday, July 19, 2012

Food Memories: Food is more than an essential of life

This is the first in a series of blogs on food and memories from friends, members and guests of the Community Day Center that we will be posting over the coming month. We want to encourage readers to comment and share their food memories with us. – Marilyn and Catherine

Food Is More Than An Essential of Life

Our garden has provided us this spring and early summer with many wonderful and nutritious meals. The red lettuce, peas, radishes, herbs, pansies, and nasturtium and arugula flowers have provided us with six meals of fresh crispy side salads for over 30 guests. Now these vegetables and flowers are looking tired so I have cleaned them out of the beds. Due to the intense summer sun, the broccoli, spinach and arugula have flowered early and have been removed as well. In their places, we have a row of robust kale with its beautiful spear shaped leaves. In the next row, we have the Swiss chard with its attractive shiny green ribbed leaves and bright red stalks; and not to be outshone, the ornamental loose leaf collard greens. Peering out of the squash plants we can see the trumpet shaped flowers and the young yellow squash and bright green zucchinis. In the next bed, the tomatoes are bearing fruit that are slowly turning from green to juicy red.

kale

Swiss chard

collards, tomatoes and squashes

Food is more than just essential to life. It is also about our relationship with nature, about the economy, about border policies, about race, culture and religious struggles, and about memories and traditions to name a few. Probably the centerpieces of our early memories for those who live in the United States and Canada are the large festive (and sometimes stressful) meals at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

My most vivid childhood memories are also associated with food. My family and I immigrated to the United States from Hong Kong when I was five years old. My mother scrimped and saved on all things, but food. She would walk a mile to Chinatown to purchase chicken from a live poultry store because she felt “freshly killed” was more nutritious than “packaged chilled chicken”. We had chicken a lot because in Chinese, the word for “chicken” is pronounce the same way as “luck.” As we sat down for dinner, my mother would pick all the choice pieces of food to give to each of her three children. When we were full, my mother would then finish eating. On my birthday, I knew my mother would give me the drumstick, my favorite piece! Even though we never got birthday presents, I always felt special and loved by this act.

Mom also regulated our health by giving us “cool” foods like watercress soup when we ate too many “hot” foods like potato chips. (In Chinese food therapy, the belief is that some foods have hot or heat properties and others have cold or cooling effect on the body. The imbalance of these properties would cause illness). All year round she would make medicinal soups. It would take hours to boil down a pot of herbs, meats and liquid down to five cups of broth. She would always know what we need to eat and drink to stay healthy.

It has been over 23 years since my Mom passed and I still miss the foods she made especially for me. I guess it is true what the American food writer M.F.K. Fisher wrote,

It seems to me our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it . . . and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied . . . and it is all one. (Fischer, M.F.K. The Gastronomical Me. New York: North Point, 1989, p. ix.)

Many of our guests are excellent cooks, but do not have the money nor the kitchen facility to cook. Using the vegetables that have been flourishing in our garden, like, kale, Swiss chard and collard greens they have been able to give back and show their talents to everyone. Craig Claireborne, the restaurant critic, food writer and former food editor of the New York Times was right on the mark when he said, “Cooking is at once child's play and adult joy. And cooking done with care is an act of love.

Here are some of the foods we have made. They are kale crisps, bacon with Swiss chard and kale, and stir-fry collard greens. You can get recipes from the popular cooking sites like: www.foodnetwork.com/.

Kale Chips