Breakfast

Leftover Basmati brown rice, Brussels sprouts, and Savory cabbage with parsley and chives from the garden. Season with salt, pepper, red wine vinegar.

Preparation time: 5 minutes

Shopping: none

The wife admonishes against eating Brassicas shortly before leaving the house to meet with friends....

Germination!

The radish seedlings are standing like proud little soldiers after being planted from seed just a few days ago. We are well on our way to a third crop for the year.

But for my sins, the bed where I planted so many rutabaga seeds and beets and turnips--well, it was completely overrun with crab grass within just a few days. Apparently, some grass got into the bed and went to seed. So now getting rid of it has turned into a major project.

Each morning I trek out to that particular bed, get down on my hands and knees and start pulling little crab grass plants out of the ground and tossing them into the compost bucket. Some rain lately makes the job easier as the soil is now moist and the young plants have not had a chance to grow their roots too deeply. I am perhaps three-quarters done with this task.

I work carefully around the beet plants. They've grown several inches tall since I planted the seeds and the crab grass sometimes tangles in the beet roots. Then the beets have to be replanted and you just hope for the best. But I am seeing hardly a sign of the rutabagas or the turnips that should comprise most of this bed. I can only imagine that this latest September heat wave was too much for the tiny plants. It seems that some brassicas are more heat sensitive than others. The radishes and the arugula are doing fine, where the mizuna planted next to the arugula germinated, then withered and disappeared.

My notes for last year indicate I waited a bit too long to plant the fall crop so I wanted to get a jump on it this year. But perhaps I pulled the trigger too soon, or simply did not figure the heat into my calculations. My guess is that when I finally finish pulling all this crab grass (and there seems to be a second flush following the first), I will be planting rutabaga and turnips all over again.

Brassica Rescue

I was out early this morning salvaging what I could of my crops of greens. This must be the first year that I've planted so many spring brassicas, because I don't remember my yard being awash in yellow, four-petaled flowers before.

I planted my greens mid-March and the big disappointment is, I hardly had a chance to use them. Well, there was a lot. Too much for just our family for sure. Still, I hate being without some of our favorites, such as arugula and mizuna. Yet there they all are, bolting like mad.

I had to toss a ton of radishes that were already tough and woody. What a shame. Hopefully, they will be happier in the compost heap.

I checked the seed packet from Johnny's Seeds to remind myself what the planting dates were. According Johnny's, mizuna should be good to plant "early Spring through mid-Summer." Well, I've got news...

Last year, I had beautiful mizuna and arugula. But that must have been the stuff I planted in September. Apparently, I need to get to work a bit earlier in the year. But the weather has been very fluky around here--balmy in January, then record lows in April.

What I did manage to harvest was a big bowl of Osaka purple mustard and some lovely Pink Lettucy Mustard. I gave them both a deep soaking in the kitchen sink. Then I'll move them to a big pot of salted boiling water. When they're tender, I'll give them a course chop, toss them with a cooked grain such as quinoa or brown basmati rice and season with sherry vinegar, perhaps, and some extra virgin olive oil.

This makes a fine breakfast.

So Much for Radishes

Talk about your global warming...

The radishes have started bolting and it isn't even summer yet. When they go to flower, the radishes turn tough and woody. Time to get them all out of the ground and start eating.

For that matter, all of my brassicas have bolted. That would include the mizunas, the mustard greens, the pac choi and tat soi. Even the Brussels sprouts, hardly more than juveniles, are sending up flowers.

The lettuces, thankfully, are still going strong. But for how long?

Is it possible to be so busy gardening you don't have any time to cook what you're growing?

That seems to be the case here. Time to get the tomato seedlings in the ground, plant more beans. I'm always a month behind it seems.

If it's Thursday...

...it must be delivery day for our box of goodies from the farm.

Let's see. What do we have here...

...a gallon bag of mesclun...some Siberian kale...tender collards...a Ziploc of salad mix with tat soi and Asian mustard greens...English cress. And, for us "Yes-eggs" subscribers, one dozen eggs from Brett Grohsgal's brown chickens. A veritable riot of produce, and it isn't even April yet.

I've mentioned the subscription from Even' Star Farm so many times I thought you might like to see it. Brett gets up--oh, about 4 in the morning--usually on Thursdays to make the almost-two-hours drive from his 75-acre spread outside Lexington Park, Maryland, and drop off more than 100 of these boxes to clients in and around the nation's capital. We drive about 15 minutes from our home in downtown D.C. to fetch our box off the front porch of a "neighborhood coordinator" in Chevy Chase. (You get a big discount on the subscription if you coordinate your neighborhood.)

We are among the "winter" subscribers, a season that runs from early November into May. Brett loves his brassicas, hence the profusion of cresses and collards and tat sois and arugulas. We've come to love them, too. But there's so much in one box that we share the subscription with my sister and her husband. The cost: $311 per couple for the season.

As good as the vegetables and the eggs--and sometimes jams and spice mixes and flower arrangements--are the notes Brett sends out each week telling us what's on the menu. Who knew a person could write so much, and so vividly, about the contents of a box? Brett's missives are written with such gusto and precision--they are so detailed--that I've saved every one going back three seasons now as. As well as providing evidence of every seasonal thing we have consumed for the past three years, Brett's e-mails are a window into the mind of a truly impassioned philosopher-farmer, someone who cares deeply about the land and how we feed ourselves. I'm not sure you could just bind them all together into a book. If you did, it would constitute a kind of encyclopedia of brassicas and the life of a subscription farmer, the kind of book I imagine Alan Davidson--a man of equally intense interests, and author of The Oxford Companion to Food--might write.

Brett also operates a summer subscription. But by then we will be swimming in the produce from our own front-yard garden here in the District of Columbia. We also like to see what the local farmer's markets are offering.

Now to figure out what to do with all this stuff. So many greens, so little time. Salad? Vegetable saute? Or, could there be a frittata in our future? A little goat cheese, anyone?

Edible Buds

For a vegetable gardener, a flowering plant usually means an ending is nigh. The vegetable "bolts," then goes to seed and is no longer edible. Or at least not edible in the usual way. Our genius farmer friend Brett Grohsgal, being ever so resourceful as a farmer must, harvests the flowers from his bolting plants and sends them along in our weekly subscription packages.

Here you see the yellow flowers of the napini plant. Napini, like its cousin rapini, is a member of the brassica family, which includes cabbage, kale, collards, mustard and so forth. A distinguishing feature of these vegetables is the four-petaled flower they bear. It's usually yellow. But on the right in this picture are arugula flowers. They are white. All are edible. I add them to a salad and they give it the same peppery zest as the parent vegetables from which they bloom.

We Love Cauliflower: A Helluva Soup

I have to admit a strange brain tick: I collect cauliflower recipes. I think this started at a time when I had a client who was beginning the South Beach diet and I noticed that people--some people, anyway--were substituting non-caloric cauliflower for starchy potatoes. Suddenly I was seeing cauliflower recipes everywhere, and I began to collect them and stash them away in a manila folder for who-knew-what future purpose. Because up to that point, the only cauliflower I was really familiar with was the kind my mother boiled, then drenched with one of those Hollandaise sauces made out of a foil packet. I was desperate to know every other possible way to prepare cauliflower. This week I needed to make a soup, so I thought it was high time I look into my cauliflower file and make a cauliflower soup before spring arrives and we move on to fava beans or something.

Cauliflower to me is the Cinderella of the brassica family. It doesn't get noticed much. Typically it is consigned to a corner of the steam table, mixed with some bland, overcooked carrots. But cauliflower has an almost ethereal flavor, hardly brassica at all, and the most yielding texture. This is a vegetable made for small children, a fairytale brassica, but it also dresses up well for adult tastes and without much bother. I like to toss it with extra virgin olive oil, salt and lots of curry powder, then roast it in a 450-degree oven to get an almost crusty brown on it. It also transforms completely in this soup preparation with potatoes, milk and cream. It is so delicious, I would eat it all the time, were it not for the potatoes, milk and cream. But see how easy it is: there's hardly any work at all. You just need to make absolutely sure when cooking the soup that the milk doesn't boil and separate. The soup should barely simmer until the vegetables are cooked through. Don't be surprised if this takes a half hour or 45 minutes. Just poke the cauliflower with a trussing skewer. It should slide through easily.

1 head cauliflower, broken into florets

2 medium boiling potatoes, peeled and cut into thick slices

1 quart milk

1 cup heavy cream

salt and white pepper to taste

Place cauliflower, potatoes and milk in a heavy pot or Dutch oven. Over medium heat, bring soup just barely to a simmer, then reduce heat to lowest setting, cover and cook without boiling until the vegetables are perfectly tender. (If using an electric range, you might want to move the pot to one of your smaller burners so it doesn't overheat. For a gas range, a heat deflector might be called for.)

When vegetables are done, run the soup through a blender or food processor in batches until very smooth. Return soup to pot. Stir in heavy cream. Season with salt and white pepper. Serve hot with buttery croutons.

When I made this two days ago, I think I had somewhat more than the called-for potatoes. It was a thick but extravagantly velvety soup. My wife swooned over it, and I can't remember the last time she swooned.