Tips
So there we were at the Union Square greenmarket,
in search of interesting squash of which there turned out to be not very much, and there IT was, Romanesco! The absolutely best cauliflower in the world, if cauliflower it is. ( Some say broccoli, some say cauliflower, most in the know say they don’t know; but if you go by culinary properties, it’s cauliflower)
Photo by John Walker
Doesn’t do to go on about the holy grail or anything, but Romanesco has yet to be readily available, even in the uppermost of upscale markets, and growing it is – see below – a pain, so it’s definitely a “must buy,” even when it costs more than the very reasonable 3 bucks a head they were charging last Saturday.
Romanesco is as delicious as it is gorgeous: less crumbly than other cauliflowers, more toothsome than broccoli, slightly sweet , slightly nutty, not sulfurous unless you let it spend too much time in table-décor mode.
Displaying Romanesco is simplicity itself; just cut the base so it stands level, then put it in a slick of water. (If you use a bowl, be sure the water doesn’t come more than a half-inch or so up the base.) It will stay handsome for 2 or 3 days if it’s kept out of the sun; you can get 4 or more if you put it in the fridge each night. The base is tough, difficult to slice without pressing so firmly you break off points. Use a serrated knife.
Eating Romanesco: For best flavor and texture, buy two, so you can display one and keep the other in the coldest part of the fridge until you eat it asap. Simplest thing is to eat it raw, with coarse salt. Next easiest thing is raw with just about any dip, although the very best may be
Bagna Cauda
Translates “hot bath,” and must be hot to be tasty, so the most important ingredient is a small chafing dish or a saucepan that fits neatly on a portable burner. Good with any vegetable firm enough to dip; just be sure to let whatever it is come to room temperature before serving; the vegetable will have better flavor and it won’t cool its coating and spoil the effect. This recipe is adapted from from my 1969 edition of Ada Boni’s justifiably durable – albeit currently out of print – Italian Regional Cooking. It’s much heavier on butter than most, and even I, the Dairy Queen, often use mostly oil. But before you dismiss the butter out of hand, try it, especially with strong flavored vegetables such as the traditional cardoon ( also endive, celery root, bell pepper and cole flowers ).
½ pound unsalted butter
¼ cup olive oil
2 – 4 tablespoons minced garlic ( use more if it’s hardneck , less if it’s conventional)
6 canned anchovy filets
optional : 1 small thinly sliced truffle
Melt butter with oil over low heat, then add garlic and let it seethe without coloring. Remove from heat, add anchovies and let them sit a minute to soften. Mush them around with a wooden spoon until they dissolve. ( Add truffle if using), salt to taste, reheat to simmering and serve ditto.
Please report back if you try the truffle; confess I’ve never in 40 years of using the recipe.
Cooking Romanesco: like broccoli and cauliflower, chunks are tastiest steam-sautaéed.
1. Cut off florets, cut interior into slightly-less-than floret size chunks. Boil about 1/2 inch of water in a non-reactive sautaé pan large enough to hold the pieces in a single layer. Add pieces, partially cover the pan and stay nearby, alert for the sizzle of “watersallgoneeeek!”. Shake pan (or stir contents) from time to time.
2. In less than 5 minutes, when almost all of the water has evaporated, test a chunk. If it’s still near-raw, turn down the heat, cover the pan and keep cooking until almost done. If initial boiling yields almost done, proceed at once to
3. Remove cover. Stand right there shaking the pan until it’s dry, then add enough olive oil or butter to coat all pieces thinly. Add seasonings if wanted: minced garlic, shredded lemon zest, julienned sweet or hot red pepper, toasted cumin seeds… Turn heat to medium and keep cooking until the chunks are just cooked through and starting to turn gold at the edges. Sprinkle w/ coarse salt and eat ’em up. Good cold if you use olive oil.
Why I say growing Romanesco is a pain:
There are a number of different cultivars, some hybrid, some open pollinated (Romanesco dates back to at least the 16th century), but even the earliest takes about 80 days to single-head-per-plant harvest , counting from when you plant out the 4 to 6 week old seedlings. Seedlings are frost tender, but those 80 days must all be cool ones, so Romanesco is a fall crop in the Northeast.
That means getting the seedlings going in the heat of summer, a challenge given their preferred growing temperature of roughly 60 degrees. Then, Romanesco being a cauliflower, it needs near-neutral, highly-fertile soil, plenty of moisture, plenty of room to grow – at least 18 inches between plants and 30 inches between rows – and plenty of attention to bug and disease prevention; Romanesco is vulnerable to every one of the 350,000 afflictions that target brassicas. Other than that, piece of cake.
The photographer:
John Walker was attracted by Romanesco’s fractal form, then fell briefly into vegetable love before once more romancing the math.
We don’t do it during the season; always too many buds coming and the urge to see ” how big can it get THIS year?”
But when the plants have to be cut back for winter…
This vaseful sat by the door in Cushing for over 2 weeks, constantly opening new flowers, perfuming the entryway, and giving me a chance to use one of the large vases made years and years ago by our friend Paul Heroux. ( He was getting rid of old work that no longer pleased him; I rescued it from certain death on the shard pile and have been enjoying it ever since). To see what he’s been up to lately, check out the show at Howard Yezerski Gallery, in Boston, from November 17th to December 23rd.
three warnings about brugmansia bouquets:
* Fragrance can be overpowering if the vase is in a small room.
* Cut branches are almost as willing as willows to root while they’re on display, so by the time the flowers are finished, you can have a whole herd of incipient plants. Good (ish) in spring. Not Good in fall; be strong and throw them away.
* Brugmansias are poisonous, even in quite small amounts. If your cat treats the bouquet as salad, adios Puffkins. One of the reasons we favor the porch is Mr. Earl, who was more or less normal as a kitten
but has grown up to be a vegetable hound.
Well, bringing in, anyway.
The brugmansia got cut back to the biggest stems, dug up – with attendant root pruning, as you can imagine – and replanted ( unceremoniously stuffed, actually) in a contractor-weight garbage bag. Bill then bumped it downstairs into the cellar, where it will remain until next spring.
The squash went into the living room while we try to find a storage spot that will stay between 50 and 60 degrees; winter squash rot if they get chilled. My food historian friend Sandy Oliver, editor of Food History News, whose lifestyle would not be alien to many of her subjects, recommends keeping them under the bed.
This isn’t just about preservation; most hard-shelled squash* are unready at harvest. They need about 6 weeks of aging to develop their smoothest texture and maximum sweetness.
* Everything except acorn, really: butternut, buttercup, Hubbard, you name it and especially Japanese “sweet potato” types like the knobby dark green Black Futsu in the wheelbarrow. It will turn a golden tan before it comes into its glory…
Even if you didn’t grow any winter squash, this is handy to remember, because the great array of nifty, offbeat squash at the farmers’ market will only be there until Thanksgiving. If you want to enjoy a wider, more delicious (and far more beautiful) assortment than the paltry selection at supermarkets, stock up now while the stocking’s good…
The frost is STILL not quite on the pumpkin – our few light dips below freezing have not even killed the summer squash, I’m sorry to say.
But almost.
So here are a few Garden Cleanup Tips:
* Before you start removing the evidence, make a rough map/ post mortem report that can be used for planning next year. Include relevant outside factors like deer predation – which you’d THINK you’d remember but if you’re like me you tend to have denial problems about the smaller, less painful losses.
It’s also helpful to note things like the amount of rain: lousy tomato taste, for example, may be blamed on too much water and the too little sun that implies. But that same rain is probably why the hollyhocks hit 10 feet.
* when removing sick plants, don’t forget to rake up underneath, especially around roses and peonies; diseased leaves are a prime place for badness to winter over. Put all possibly-infected ( or infested!) material deep in the woods or on the bonfire.
* Healthy garbage can go on the compost, along with the lawnmower-chopped leaves, but it’s even better to let it rot in place (lettuce, nasturtiums) or, if it has stiff stems, catch snow and protect crowns (echinacea, delphinium, most perennials).
* Better-to-leave-it notwithstanding, the combo of aesthetics and prep-for-next year does demand removal of spent annuals like basil and marigolds. If you can bear to take the extra time, it pays to cut them down, rather than yank them up; leaving roots in place helps preserve soil structure and minimize weeds.
If you don’t count chives, the first allium flower I planted was a leek that didn’t get harvested. Next spring there was a flower spike and not long after that, in early summer, a great big ball of little white stars that lasted about 2 weeks.
After that, the deluge. Every year there are more of the genuinely ornamental kind (the kind in the back of the bulb catalogs, after you go past the tulips and daffodils and crocuses and lilies and just about everything else), because even though they come back reliably it’s very hard to stop buying.
Favorites include:
* the fireworks special A. schubertii (not the composer. A 19th century naturalist/plant collector named Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert). It has pink stars that shoot out on long stems from a tight ball of other pink stars; a truly amazing effect.
* The graceful yellow A. flavum, which blooms in midsummer and is always in peril of being weeded out…until the flower stalk comes up it looks an awful lot like tall onion grass.
* A. bulgaricum, now Nectaroscordum bulgaricum. It has pink and green striped white bells instead of the more usual allium stars.
Allium christophii, the Star of Persia, is almost as lovely in the dried state as when fresh (and pale purple). This stem is about 3 years old and has been being used as outhouse daécor. I just stuck it in the pachysandra next to the barn in order to take the mugshot.
Christophii is an exception; most alliums don’t have common names. What they do have is one big flaw: leaves start turning yellow and dying just as the flowers bloom. Bulgaricum sometimes stays green throughout , but you can’t count on it. And most of the others are worse.
Solution? Plant alliums where the the leaves will be hidden by more obliging plants – even pachysandra will do. Just keep them out of the front of the border unless you want to see the gorgeous blossoms rising from decidedly unpoetic ruins.
A reflection on the spinach catastrophe is coming along as soon as I cool down a bit – talk about steamed! I’m ready to kill every news outlet that said nothing about “eat local.” But first, for those legions of sensible people who buy their spinach at the farmers’ market, a tip on washing . I’m sure the (currently radioactive) bagged stuff only got so popular because it’s so easy to use.
There are two tricks to easy greens-washing.
1. Chop first. Dirt and sand fall off more easily when pieces are small, especially if they’re pieces of something as corrugated as spinach.
2. Use a large basin of water. Dunk the material and swish it around, then lift into a colander. Clean the basin. Repeat until no more dirt falls to the bottom. If you live where water should be conserved, just use two big bowls and pour the water back and forth until the very last rinse.
It’s always special, but right now Stonecrop is special double, because there are 500 extra markers, telling you the botanical names of particularly striking plants. 
The markers will start coming down on Tuesday, so those who hesitate miss out.
The cimicifuga under the apple tree has beautiful big dark purple-green leaves all summer, then in late August and September a host of 6 foot purple stems topped with purple buds that open to plumes of sweetly fragrant white flowers. Completely hardy in Maine, bigger and bigger every year – and deer munch the apples under it without showing any interest in cimicifuga salad.
This passionflower is one of about 30 blossoms (if you count the buds), on a vine at least 15 long, woven through the blue border’s sand cherry, lilac and golden elder. Very soon – before frost comes – it will have to be cut back, untangled, dug up and taken from Maine to NY where it will be repotted and put in the greenhouse for winter. It is 3 years old. Every year the same story, twice, if you count bringing it up in spring. Not difficult, but not fun.
Dedicated garden shoppers can find great bargains long about now, and I’m not talking end-of-season clearances…
at least not in the usual sense. These are more the kind of clearance you get when somebody notices that no one has seen the back wall of the garage for over a decade. Translation: we’re into the last few weekends of genuine yard sales, where treasures for gardeners can lie buried in the piles of plastic kitchenware, overpriced ” antique” furniture and franchise-branded toys of the sort that make you fear for the future of the republic.
Among other things, yard sales are the last great repository of neat flower frogs, now alas “collectible” and going for ever larger and larger bucks wherever collectibles are sold.
My own weakness is for pin cups, the flower-arranger’s best friend, but there are beauts galore if you only look.
Among the tools:
I got my favorite trowel at a yard sale: wide blade, wide wooden handle with a waist that just comfortably fits my hand. Also an old ham knife that’s great for sawing out potbound plants. Also my favorite sprayer – I asked to try it and they let me; always a good idea with items that may work and may not and while we’re on the subject , beware of scissoring tools like hedge shears unless you know how to judge “blades, reparability of. ”
Hoes, shovels and garden forks are good bets; assuming there aren’t obvious defects like nicks in the metal, all you need to check for is funny angles – those tines are HARD to straighten out – and tired wood. If the collar area looks frayed there’s likely to be trouble before long.
