Vegetables

Autumn

Vegetables
Sep 26, 2016
1 Comments

Last week the blog was heavy on the (written) info, this week I’ll focus more on photographs that capture this time of the year. I finally got the green light to be out and about again with the camera, and it has been beyond pleasurable. The weather, of course, helps, as does the fact that this is such a visually rich time of year. It used to be my favorite season – I think with approaching old age spring has become the favorite, more so, with its promise of renewal. But for my eyes, fall rules!

Here are some pumpkins I saw yesterday, just in time for the presidential debate with the cheeto-McCheato. A satire from Vanity Fair provides alternative names.

Below is a recipe for the most delicious seasonal soup. Says the woman who dislikes to cook, but really loves her soups.

http://www.rednailsgreenveggies.com/beet-butternut-squash-apple-soup/

Dessert

Vegetables
Aug 14, 2016
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In 1975 I backpacked for 6 months through pretty much all of South America. Some of the best months of my life, full of adventure, learning, awe at landscapes and the endurance of the endogenous people. One of the few drawbacks: this sugar addict had little to no access to the customary amounts of Bonbons. We shall remain silent about which amount that would be.

I arrived in Argentina during the times of the emerging military Junta, the triple A – Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance – formed by the military, security forces and right-wing death squads, who killed and disappeared ten thousands of people until 1983. If you were a political dissident, associated with socialism, or otherwise suspect your life was in danger. A German friend of mine who worked for the UN development office had spent some days in jail in Buenos Aires for suspicion of leftist activities and it took her years to deal with the fear that installed.

In any case, the reason all this comes up is the fact that I spent some days in Bariloche, in the Lake district after crossing the border from Southern Chile – and the hostel served rose-hip marmalade with their breakfast bread. I probably licked out the pot after devouring it in its totality, sugar deprived as I was. Rose hips, then, come to mind when I think about sweets, as do black and red currants, also prime material for jams.

Let’s top this week of vegetables with some fruit! My favorite remains: the apple.

Paul Cezanne Still Life with Apples

Eintopf

Vegetables
Aug 13, 2016
3 Comments

Literally translated, the German word Eintopf means one pot. It usually refers to a thick soup made in a single pot out of whatever the garden and pantry has to offer. All kinds of vegetables and a starch go into it, meat optional, rare during my childhood. It was a thick, mushy soup we had to eat. And eat. And eat. Often such a large pot was cooked that it lasted for days (and probably every single potential vitamin in it killed.) These days I think back with longing for that kind of comfort food. I guess I could make it for myself, but then again you don’t find me in the kitchen…..

German markets offer readily assembled bunches of Suppengrün, consisting of celery, carrots, parsley, one stalk of leaks, and depending on the season a root vegetable or cauliflower. You add to that potatoes, or beans, mushrooms, onion and sometimes rice. Take your pick!

Kohlrabi was a favorite in our house, it sweetened the taste of the soup. And beets – they were cheap and lasted long through the winter.

Still Life of Vegetables for the Soup, Chardin (1732) Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose….

Plump thing with a navel

Vegetables
Aug 12, 2016
5 Comments

Xitomatl is the Aztec name for tomatoes, who originated, it is believed, in Peru. The translation can be found in today’s title. And if you still wonder whether they are vegetable or fruit, all I can say it depends who you ask. Botanists will tell you they are a fruit, since they are sacs containing seeds.

A legal scholar, on the other hand, will point you to Nix vs. Hedden (1893) http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/149/304.html a Supreme Court decision that classified the plump things with navels as vegetables. (As so often, the case was ultimately about money – avoiding tariffs on imported vegetables.) The court ruled according to function: we eat tomatoes in salads, soups and main courses, NOT dessert…… (if it is a really clever legal scholar s/he will hasten to point you to Robertson vs Salomon (1883) as well. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/130/412/case.html Here the Court decided beans were not vegetables but seeds. Oh the glory of our Supremes….

The only things Americans eat more of than tomatoes are potatoes, lettuce and onions. However, 3/4 of our tomato consumption happens in processed form, ketch-up or salsa and sauces. I happen to be one of those who like to slather ketch-up on her spaghetti. However, I can only do that when I eat alone, or the screams of disgust and protest by my loved ones would result in premature deafness. Mostly I like to photograph tomatoes, all kinds and all stages.

Luis Melendes, Still Life with Tomatoes, 1780

The GMO Controversy

· The Myth of Frankenfood ·

Biology, Vegetables
Aug 11, 2016
5 Comments

And you thought you’d be safe from politics for a bit. We have to tackle the question of genetically modified organisms, though, when we think about our agrarian food supply, don’t we? There are so many myths floating around and, admittedly, it is such a complex topic that it is hard to figure out what to think.

The most informative, reasoned, understandable treatment of the issue that I have found can be read here:

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/the-gmo-controversy/

It does not touch the question of whether or not GMO foods should be labeled. I am all in favor of that since I think it is important to make informed decisions – even if the organic food folks are now a bit worried that people who read “NO GMO” labels of non-organic food will feel they are making a healthy decision and need not spend more to buy organic. I don’t care if the GMO industry wants no labels because an ignorant public has bought into fear mongering – that’s their problem.

There seems to be no evidence whatsoever at this point that GMO engineered food is bad for you or for the animals fed with it. People have crossbred for centuries, and now they are doing it more efficiently and with required hoops of testing. What is the net environmental impact, you might ask? Do herbicide resistant crops increase the use of herbicides? Yes they do, but they also reduce the need for tilling the soil, which is bad for it and releases CO2 into the environment. It becomes a question of agricultural diversification – if you plant a mix of GMO and non-GMO crops you are ahead in terms of producing more food and doing so economically, without hurting the environment. The same is true for insecticide engineered crops: they reduce the need to spray those poisons, but they might increase the number of resistant bugs. Note that BT, the insecticide from a bacterium that has been added, is widely used by organic farmers in its original form since it is deemed environmentally safe. Again, sustainable strategies would call for a mix of both kinds of crops.

In addition to increasing our chances of feeding a starving population in the future, GMO crops could already have a major impact. Take Golden Rice, for example, rice with inserted beta-carotene. It would solve the Vitamin A deficiency problem for millions of children, who go blind or die from not having enough of it. Nitrogen fixation is another plus of the GM technology – plants get it from the soil, depleting it and requiring expensive and environmentally burdening fertilization. If corn and wheat could fix their own nitrogen there could be a huge increase in staple foods for a hungry world. Why, then, are we so very much opposed?

And here a beauty from van Gogh’s wheat field series:

Cabbage

Vegetables
Aug 10, 2016
4 Comments

One of the Brexit goals was the desire to escape the idiocy of European Union regulations – 26,911 words on the sale of cabbage, for example. Like so many “facts” used in this year’s campaigns, this one was fiction as well. The EU rules of marketing of farm products are 263 words long. Note that the binding British rules are stated in the Assured Produce Standards, sometimes known as the Red Tractor Assurance. Richardson is the author of the organisation’s protocol for cabbage which, he says, has 23,510 words.

Of the 400 or so varieties of cabbage many were originally used as herbal medicines rather than foods. Use is documented in ancient Egypt as well as China (in fact the latter invented Sauerkraut by putting cabbage leaves in rice wine). Pharmacological research today has found cabbage to be the vegetable with the highest number of bioactive substances – containing antioxidants (flavonoids), iron, phosphor and calcium, all boosting the immune system. It is an anti-carcinogen with its high content of sulforaphane and phenol-acids. And cabbage does not just do its magic in raw form – when you cook it, its contents are converted into pure Vitamin C.

The smell of boiled cabbage has been historically associated with the dwellings of the poor. Descriptions can be found in many continental novels, probably American ones as well. But I want to quote a different view – from the 1925 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Edna Ferber, So Big, which deconstructs the myth of the American Dream. Her writing was seen as propaganda: a warning not to sacrifice art on the altar of capitalism. Her take on cabbage (as expressed by one of her main characters, a tough farm woman): “But always, to her, red and green cabbages were to be jade and burgundy, chrysoprase and porphyry. Life has no weapons against a woman like that.”

The German name for Bruxelles Sprouts, by the way, is rose cabbage. It is one of those interesting meals that I hated as a child and now love – just like red beets. Probably the difference between being boiled to death in 1955 and served at Paley’s in 2015….

Van Gogh’s Still Life with Cabbage and Clogs.

Artichokes

Vegetables
Aug 9, 2016
2 Comments

Prickly about having to eat your vegetables? Might as well start with the thistle family – and a vegetable that really looks more like a flower. Artichokes (Cynara Scolymus) are one of the oldest foods around, originating in Africa and later around the Mediterranean. Greek legend has it that Zeus took to a beautiful mortal named Cynara, and transformed her into a Goddess. She longed to return home to our world and when she managed to sneak away she contracted his wrath: he turned her into an artichoke.

Early cultivation happened in North Africa in 800 A.D., and the Saracens introduced artichokes to Italy. The Arabic al-qarshuf — meaning “thistle” — became articiocco in Italian and eventually “artichoke” in English.

There was the mobster “Artichoke King”, so called because he dominated the produce rackets in NY. Some nifty historical photography here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYh8iWZeIDY

And of course we have an “Artichoke Queen” – the first, in 1948, no other than Marilyn Monroe (and I will remain silent on the rumors about aphrodisiacal effects of the plant.) http://montereypeninsula.blogspot.com/2008/11/marilyn-monroe-artichoke-queen.html. Personally I think trying to get food out of those leaves is just an excuse to eat a lot of butter.

Not the opinion of a former president’s wife, ruling the kitchen at Mount Vernon, however:

From Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery:

To Make an Harty Choak Pie

Take 12 harty choak bottoms yt are good & large, after you have boyled them, take them cleere from ye leaves & cores, season them with a little pepper & salt & lay them on a coffin of paste, with a pound of butter & ye marrow of 2 bones in bigg pieces, then close it up to set in ye oven, then put halfe a pound of sugar to halfe a pinte of verges [a sauce made with green herbs] & some powder of cinnamon and ginger – boyle these together & when ye pie is halfe baked put the liquor in & set it in ye oven againe till it be quite bak’d.

Here are two Dutch painters on the subject, 17th century Clara Peeters of Harlem (Breakfast Still Life) and contemporary Roman Reisinger (2006)

Gemüse

Vegetables
Aug 8, 2016
1 Comments

In 1993 we spent a sabbatical in Cambridge, England. That is D. spent it in some hallowed university hall. I spent it on a bike. One of those with a wire seat in front for the two year-old and a wire basket in back for the groceries. If I was lucky the six year-old biked next to me, if not he was half a mile in front of me in left hand traffic. Anything, in all weathers, to get out of the damp, cold, run-down rental apartment that made up for lack in amenities with the number of creepy crawlers populating the kitchen floor. The only thing in favor of the place was the fact that we found some serious money behind the couch cushions when searching for yet another lost Ernie or Bert puppet. Without blinking we took the money and bought a new mattress for the bedroom, getting rid of the old one – and I mean old, at least 500 years.

Our biking took us reliably to the play ground, to a pond with a black swan that endlessly fascinated the kids, and to the botanical garden. At that time it was not a great one, but a decent one. A number of aromatic plants had been planted on benches and walkways, mimicking the times when monks took an annual bath and otherwise hoped to conquer the stench by sitting on mint or thyme that released perfumes into their robes. That took care of the toddler who happily rolled around in them.

The grade schooler and I pretended to deal with some serious education – we walked long borders that had been designed to show each plant imported from afar to England according to its time of arrival – a mostly herbaceous border of true historical interest (and really fun to learn about, as it turned out). In any case, there were a lot of vegetables among the plants, which finally brings me to this week’s theme: vegetables and fruit. The German name is derived from the noun for mash or porridge (Mus) from agricultural crops. We’ve come a long way from there!

“The Vegetable Stall” by Quiringh van Brekelenkam (1665)

YDP – your daily picture

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YDP – your daily picture

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

YDP – your daily picture

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Autumn

Dessert

Eintopf

Plump thing with a navel

The GMO Controversy

· The Myth of Frankenfood ·

Cabbage

Artichokes

Gemüse