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Vote for a Victory Garden at the White House!

Change.org (not to be confused with president-elect Obama's official website, Change.gov) is hosting a competition called Ideas for Change in America, which was "created in response to Barack Obama's call for increased citizen involvement in government." Anyone who registers with the website gets 10 votes to cast on projects spanning categories from Social Entrepreneurship to Peace in the Middle East. The 10 project ideas receiving the most votes will be presented to president-elect Obama on January 16 at a National Press Club event in DC.

Earlier this week, Michael Pollan sent Chris Stevens' post at Liveable Future to his mailing list, encouraging readers to vote for Victory Gardens 2.0. I would like to do the same. Understandably, an organic Victory Garden at the White House may not be the most pressing issue even for the strongest agricultural policy advocates right now, given what else is happening in the world at the moment, but luckily you get 9 more votes to address your other concerns, too.

Register with Change.org
See the other Ideas for Change in America
TheWhoFarm
Eat the View

Garlic Scape Deviled Eggs

Daniel Johnston - Devil Town (buy)

I refused to eat hard boiled eggs when I was a kid. Every Easter egg hunt ended with me emptying my basket out on the living room coffee table, separating its eggs into piles of hard boiled and chocolate varieties, and leaving the non-foil-wrapped ones for dead. Needless to say, I wasn't a fan of the egg salad that inevitably surfaced in our fridge after the festivities were over, either.

This all changed when my mom made deviled eggs for my dad's 60th birthday party a few years back. The recipe was a pesto variation, loaded with fresh basil and pine nuts. Turns out, they were also highly addictive. Since then, my opinion of hard boiled eggs has completely reversed; last summer I probably made three or four big batches of egg salad over the course of a couple months. And I ate it ALL.

About two weeks ago, I started craving deviled eggs like nobody's business. Maybe because they're one of the world's perfect picnic foods, or because that hard-boiled egg white is so cooling on the tongue on a hot day, but they just seem to perfectly encapsulate summer to me. So I set out on a mission to make some this past weekend.

What's more, we got another bunch of beautiful garlic scape in this week's CSA share, so they became my not-so-secret ingredient.

Scapes are spicy and pungent when raw, packing a similar initial punch to raw mature garlic, but the flavor is subtler and subsides quickly enough that it doesn't overwhelm the senses. This is not to say you won't experience a little garlic breath, but I guarantee it's of a much gentler variety. And well worth it.

These eggs start with Ruth Reichl's recommended method of hard boiling eggs, found in the latest edition of The Gourmet Cookbook and -- aside from peeling the eggs, perhaps -- are incredibly easy to make.

Hearty Roots Braised Bok Choy

This spring, my roommate Emily and I signed up for a vegetable share from the Greenwood Heights CSA, which gets its produce from Hearty Roots Community Farm in Tivoli, NY (yes, it's the farm that got the hipster treatment in that New York Times piece a few months back). Apart from feeling particularly good about local veggies in light of yet more food safety trouble -- we're now at 36 states reporting salmonella illness from tomatoes -- I am loving the element of surprise. We don't know what we'll get until the morning we pick it up; it's just whatever is ready for harvesting at the end of a given week.

The bonus is that the newsletter Hearty Roots sends along each week includes a recipe for one of the vegetables they're harvesting, and since some of what we've gotten so far is completely foreign to me (sweet Japanese turnips, anyone?) it's a very helpful thing. That's where this recipe for braised bok choy comes from. Braising makes the bok choy very tender and brings out the sweetness of the red onions, which is subtly offset by the acid of the rice vinegar. Easy and delicious, which was just what this lady needed after a wonderfully tiring weekend.

Blanched Sugar Snap Peas with Shallots and Thyme

As much as I might gripe that working in my neighborhood has stunted my experience of New York City over the last year (I hardly ever even ride the subway any more... it's just not right), there are distinct advantages to it. One of them is my weekly lunch break stop at the Bartel-Pritchard Greenmarket. I go right by it on my walk home, and it offers just enough to tide me over until the weekend.

Yesterday I not only got my paws on yet another pint of strawberries, but it was also the first week for sugar snap peas there. Sugar snap peas! They're like candy! Only with more fiber.

I figured I'd just leave them at the front of the fridge for easy grabbing by the handful whenever I wanted a snack, but when I got home from work last night and realized I hadn't thought at all about what I'd make for dinner, it was time to get a little more creative. This preparation calls for blanching the peas -- which both brightens them and crisps them up -- and then serving them cold. Very refreshing on yet another humid Brooklyn evening.

Strawberry Ice Cream, Strawberry Sorbet, Food Coma

Guess what I did this weekend.

What can I say? I'm the type of lady who likes to deliver on her promises.

While I was home this weekend, my parents were hosting some folks who'd come down for a nearby wedding. Turns out, they were part of the family that runs Butterworks Farm in Westfield, Vermont, and they arrived with arm loads of fresh yogurt and heavy cream for the wedding brunch and as thank you gifts. Between that and the pint of deep red strawberries awaiting us when we woke up Saturday morning, I took it as a sign. A rich, delicious sign.

Parmesan Roasted Asparagus

This is a little late in coming now that asparagus season is pretty much past its peak, but if you're still coming across bunches of it at your farmers market, I highly recommend you snag some and enjoy while you can. Grocery store asparagus has nothing on the fresh stuff. (Read Barbara Kingsolver's thoughts on the matter in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and you'll start to understand the significant difference.)

Because fresh asparagus is so delicious in its simplest state, I'm usually loathe to doctor it up too much. Other times, though, I can't help myself... especially when it involves cheese. I'm a sucker for cheese.

So If you must do something to your asparagus, whether to make it more palatable to your kids or to satisfy a craving for a little something salty and fatty, here's a simple but tasty preparation.

Summer Just Got Even More Awesome

It seems summer has already picked up in earnest, if you take my lack of updates as any indication. But there's so much good stuff happening food-wise right now that I just had to shun my responsibilities at work in favor of catching up on things here. You understand.

So I'd like to talk about how excited I am that local strawberries are in season. I'm SO EXCITED. This is something I await with just as much anticipation as tomatoes at the end of the summer, and the rewards are equally as sweet. Last year, my mom made some incredible strawberry ice cream with the tiny wild strawberries that grow near my parents' place in Massachusetts, and it was the fruitiest, freshest tasting strawberry ice cream I've ever had. Now that the season has come around again, I find myself daydreaming uncontrollably about the deliciousness.

(This pint of strawberries was waiting for me when I stopped by my folks' place on the way back to NYC from Martha's Vineyard last weekend. It survived for approximately 4 hours.)

Now, since wild strawberry season up in MA is barely three weeks long, I realized this spring that I could easily miss my window for mom's ice cream this year if I didn't plan my visits home right. That's when I decided I'd better develop a contingency plan:

That's right, gentlemen. I have the capability.

When it gets so hot in the city, it's impossible to motivate myself to make food that requires use of the stove or oven, but anything involving a frozen canister is something I can definitely get behind. Strawberry ice cream is first up, but if anyone out there has a favorite recipe or flavor combination, you know how to find me.

Delicious and Funny-Sounding, It's Rhubarb!

I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but I lived the first 27 and a half years of my life without ever knowingly consuming rhubarb. What?!

Happily, that changed yesterday. I'd gone up to the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket this past Saturday and rhubarb seemed to be everywhere, its red and green stalks poking out of crates at more than a couple stands. They were a hard sight to resist, so I went ahead and bought myself a bunch despite having no idea what I would do with it.

Remembering that I had some boneless pork chops in my freezer, I thought I might try out a sauce for them. I love sweet and savory combinations like pork chops and apple sauce, so maybe something similar could be done with rhubarb, which is so tart on its own it almost always needs to be sweetened.

The result of this experiment was a simple compote. Combining the rhubarb with shallots and fresh thyme yielded a dish that's indicative of this time of year for me - somewhere between winter and spring, at once hearty, fresh, and crisp. Needless to say, I was pleased. And, by the end of it, quite full.

Of Seeds, Weeds, Concrete, and Compost

So I already owe an update on what I'm about to post since this happened nearly three weeks ago, but I can't let it go unmentioned that Eric's backyard garden has officially been planted with the first of lots of delicious things, which promise to make this summer's barbecues all the better.

I took the day off on Friday a few weeks back and headed over to help do some planting, not realizing at all that the list of things a person can plant in one afternoon is actually quite long. After maybe 3 hours, during which Eric took on the unenviable task of digging out foot-long rhizomes of Japanese Knotweed from the end of his yard, I'd planted oregano, dill, three kinds of basil, Chioggia beets, Forellenschluss lettuce, Amish snap peas, black beauty and golden zucchini squash, and swiss chard.

The bonus was seeing all the sprouts from the seeds Eric had planted a couple weeks before that; they were springing up all over the place.

Sautéed Kale with Toasted Walnuts and Bacon

As I mentioned in the other day's catch-all, I've spent some time in the kitchen recently saying a happy goodbye to the last of my winter veggies. Sweet potatoes, swiss chard, kale... they're all delicious, but these longer days and warmer temperatures have cranked my spring vegetable craving to 11.

Kale received my favorite send-off last week, sautéed and complemented with toasted walnuts, some nice salty bacon, and a little black currant red wine vinegar, which might just be my favorite thing in the pantry cupboard right now.