Initial Veggie Notes from Julia

Potato Salad Season: This week Steve will send out red white and blue potatoes, I would cook up all of them and then dress with a vinagrette so you can see the color of the potatoes: make sure NOT to skin the red potatoes! (they are white inside I think.) You can add onion, hard boiled egg, parsley, etc.There is an ‘official' recipe below.

The rosemary is very good in marinade (chopped up some) if you are doing the barbeque thing for the long weekend. I've also included a recipe for rosemary cookies below.

The bok choy is great steamed and served with rice and an Asian sauce, it can also be sauteed with garlic and olive oil much like chard, the white stems take a little longer than the green leaves to cook.

Tell your friends!

We now have room in the CSA at most pick up sites, as summer is upon us the fields are full and we are looking for more CSA members. thanks for your help. There 3 more paid shares including this week: For those of you paying every 9 weeks this season, July 16/17th is your last paid share. You can send a check this week or next for $162 (vegetables only) or $216 (vegetables and flowers). The address is Two Small Farms PO Box 2065 Watsonville, CA 95077-2065 We will try to leave some envelopes with our address on it at most of the pick up sites on the clipboards, take one if you like.

Farm EVENTS

-July 19th Potato Upick-nic

-Every Saturday in July: Berry upicks at High Ground

-Sunday August 10th Farm dinner at High Ground benefitting Open Space Alliance

-More on the website: Farm Events Page

E Pluribus Onion

by Andy Griffin

Ramakrishna compared the ego to an onion. Peel away an onion's rings the way spiritual experiences strip at the ego until finally, after all the layers are gone, there is nothing; no central core with an egoistic structure, and no onion either, just voidness with no barrier remaining to a union with Brahma. I wouldn't know, but it's not for lack of trying. I peeled an onion, a saucer-shaped bianco di maggio onion to be exact. After eight layers I was left with a tiny pearly white, tear drop-shaped piece of lily bulb. I broke it open - layer number nine - and nothing remained but tears in my eyes from the oxidized sulfur compounds released from the onion's tissue by my violence. Is this a deep and metaphoric experience, I wondered, or have I just wasted an onion?

So I gathered the curled, juicy onion pieces together and tossed them in a bowl of cool water so they couldn't oxidize any more and turn bitter. As cheap and ubiquitous as they are onions are not easy to grow, at least not organically, so I didn't want to waste one. I have shed more tears over the trials of growing onions than I ever have from eating them.

To yield well an onion bed must be kept completely free of weeds for allium roots are quite shallow and the plants can't tolerate much competition. Without recourse to herbicides and soil fumigants organic onion culture can entail costly handweeding once the plants are too large for mechanical cultivation. Onions grow slowly, too, giving weeds lots of opportunities to sprout, and onions are hungry for fertilizer and thirsty for water. Onions demand full sun and perfect drainage. It is fair to say that onions are among the most self-centered and egoistic of the garden vegetables. Am I what I eat?

There was sourdough bread on the table in front of me and a cube of butter. Feeling a void at my core I spread some butter on the bread. I poured the bowl of onions into a colander and shook it to drain them. "Would Ramakrishna approve?" I asked myself as I cobbled the buttered bread with puzzle pieces of raw onion and sprinkled them with a pinch of salt. Not everyone appreciates onions they way I do. Some religious traditions in Hinduism hold that Brahmins, Kshatriyas, and vaisyas, or the priestly, warrior, and professional classes, should avoid "hot" foods like onions that lead to lustful thoughts. Jains supposedly don't eat onions either, and neither did the priests or royalty of ancient Egypt. The slaves who built the pyramids ate onions, though, raw and cooked, with great frequency. We can't all have been Cleopatra in a past life I decided as I bit into my sandwich. Some of us are always peasants.

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The onion I was eating was sweet and mild and hardly bit me back, but it's aroma reawakened Ramakrishna to my mind. Funny how the onion Ramakrishna saw as a perfect metaphor for the illusion of individuality and the nothingness of the void should have been seen by ancient Latins as a symbol of wholeness. Our words onion and union share a common Latin root in unio, meaning unity. The successive layers of an onion wrapped up in a single round bulb do suggest unity, especially when compared to their alliaceous cousins, the multi-cloved garlices. And somehow, even if you can never spy the life force at the heart of an onion or see it moving between the layers of an onion as you peel them away when you plant an onion bulb it will give birth to more genetically identical onions, thus wrapping the past, the present, and the future of vegetal individuality into one silky tear-jerking ball.

Maybe it's just the onion causing my mouth to water but I say onions are like the spicy, girly, back-up singers whose role on stage is to sway back and forth cooing sweet harmonies that allow some otherwise hunky but mediocre lead singer to sound good. What cuisine hasn't been sweetened and enhanced by onions? Where would we be if onions didn't add zest to American potato salad, or sugar to Pakistani dal, or bind together Chinese dumplings? If ancient Egyptian priests, Jains, Brahmins, warriors and Vaisyas can't share in my onion harvest that just leaves more for the rest of us.

I swallow the last bite of my onion sandwich and feel full for a moment; full of onion, full of thoughts about the onion-eating pyramid builders that came before us, and full of hope you all will want to savor these beautiful onions too. Peeling onions and looking for your ego can get anybody feeling hollow and teary-eyed, but gather up those aromatic scraps into a meal you can share with friends and you can transform the moment; people will be talking, glasses will be clinking, and spicy lilys will be shaking their hips and harmonizing in the background. What did those ancient latins used to say? E Pluribus Onion?

Copyright 2003 Andy Griffin

Photo Links

A Photo of Momina cooking onions for dal. She is Julia's friend from Pakistan, and was visiting California during the summer of 1989: http://www.mariquita.com/images/photogallery/onions.momina.jpg

Here's a photo of Julia making the famous Chinese dumplings in 1987 in Beijing: http://www.mariquita.com/images/photogallery/jiaozi.beijing.jpg

And another photo of a more recent ‘jiao zi party' at our house with Yi Ling the organic nursery farmer, and her friend, a Professor of botany from Shanghai. This photo shows many hands making the dumplings: http://www.mariquita.com/images/photogallery/jiaozi.fill.jpg

A photo of our Bianco di Maggio Onions:

http://www.mariquita.com/images/photogallery/onions.bianco.jpg

A photo of Steve harvesting the blue potatoes:

http://www.mariquita.com/images/photogallery/potato.purple.steve.jpg

A photo of Italian Parsley bunches:

http://www.mariquita.com/images/photogallery/parsley.jpg

A photo of bok choy at High Ground:

http://www.mariquita.com/images/photogallery/bok.choy.jpg

Featured Website:

http://www.molliekatzen.com

This is Mollie Katzen's website, she's an author of several vegetarian cookbooks in case you've not heard her name. I enjoy her recipes, and also her community bulletin board. Wondering what the best recipe for chai or granola is? This is one place to post and you might even get an answer from Mollie herself. This month her featured food is Strawberries!

RECIPES

Tuscan Rosemary and Pine Nut Bars

from the L.A. Times Food Section 8/11/99

1/4 cup pine nuts, roasted

1/2 Cup butter, cut in 10 pieces

1/2 cup powdered sugar

1 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary

1 cup flour

Melt butter. Remove from heat and stir in sugar, rosemary and pine nuts. Stir in flour to make dough; it will be stiff. Pat dough evenly into ungreased 8-inch square baking pan. Bake at 350 degrees until golden and firm at edges, about 20 minutes. Cool pan on rack about 2 minutes, then use sharp knife to cut bars into 16 squares. Let cool in pan at least 10 minutes before removing with small spatula.

Dal: Classic Lentils as prepared by Momina Hayat Banday, written from Julia's memory

Momina was my good friend I met while we were both living at the Beijing Metallurgy Institute in ‘87-‘88. All the ‘foreigners' lived together, it was in that building that I learned about cooking in Senegal, Japan and Pakistan. The following summer Momina came to visit me in California and we continued to cook together. (See photo, above.) Here's her recipe for dal, the thick lentil soup that is common in at least Pakistan, and I've read it's also common in many parts of India, but maybe not always with so many onions!

Momina always liked to have this simple version available to eat with whatever else we were eating, but this dish can also be fancied up with sliced greens, cilantro, grated carrots, etc.

2 cups masoor dal (red lentils), or brown lentils

2 bunches bianco di maggio onions, tails removed, cleaned, and sliced in thin crescents

1 teaspoon tumeric

1 teaspoon ground cumin

pinch cayenne

S & P

cooking oil

Rinse the lentils, then cover in a large saucepan with 8 cups of water and bring to a boil. Simmer on low for about an hour until soft, partially covered.

Heat the oil over a medium flame, then add the onion pieces with the tumeric and cumin and S & P. (Madhur Jaffrey recommends putting the tumeric in with the boiling dal, and adding the salt to the boiled dal once cooked through, I don't remember the exact order with Momina's recipe.) Cook the onions, stirring often, until onion is well browned but not burned. Add the cayenne, if using. Add the onions to the dal once it's cooked through. Stir and eat with yogurt and or other dishes.

Jiao Zi

These are the famous dumplings of northern China. They are often fried up in Chinese restaurants here, and called ‘pot stickers'. But in the homes of many people in Beijing and I imagine other cities and towns as well, it is traditional to get together and make these dumplings which are then boiled and eaten with chopped raw garlic marinated in dark Chinese vinegar. There are many many recipes and ideas on how to make jiao zi, the folks that I cooked with and learned from in China always told me how everyone makes jiao zi with what ever is in season, hence the recipe below.

The simple instructions to this recipe are:

1. Make the meat filling that looks a little like raw meatloaf mixture.

2.Gather willing hands to help fill the jiaozi skins, which can be made with flour and water at home or purchased at most grocery stores near where the tofu, won ton skins and bean sprouts are sold.

3. Fill the skins and seal with a dab of water.

4. Boil like you would raw tortellini. I've always just tested, I don't have hard numbers on how long to boil. You could look in a Chinese cookbook or google it. (I've now heard at least two other people use that as a verb, and I am my own editor so I'm using it here.)

5. Eat with a sauce made up of dark Chinese vinegar or balsamic, with chopped garlic sitting in the little vinegar bowl. You can add small amounts of soy sauce and sesame oil if desired.

Meat filling ingredients, please change at will to what you have on hand:

Ground beef and pork, 1 pound each

1 tablespoon soy sauce

2 teaspoons salt

2 teaspoons black pepper

1 teaspoon white pepper

2 teaspoons Japanese Mirin or brandy

1 Tablespoon sesame oil

3 medium onions, chopped fine

2 cloves garlic, chopped fine

3 carrots, shredded fine

small amount of shredded bok choy or cabbage, blanched first then chopped

Broccoli Sausage Pasta

1 lb turkey italian sausage

1 lb broccoli

1 box shaped pasta

1 onion

as much garlic as you can stand

Toasted Pine nuts

Parmesan Cheese

Chicken Stock

Red Pepper flakes

Saute onion and garlic in pan until softened. Add sausage and saute until browned. At the same time, blanche the broccoli in boiling water and drain and cook pasta in boiling water until Al dente. Once Broccoli is done add it to the sausage mixture along with crushed red pepper flakes to taste. Add small amount of chicken or vegatable stock to moisten the "sauce". Place a good amount of pasta on plate, add shaved parmesan, add "sauce". Add more parmesan and toasted pine nuts.

NOTE: the email version we send out has many more recipes than this.

Click her to see our recipe index.