The aftermath of the holidays seems to have produced more articles about becoming vegetarian or vegan whether for a day, a week, or a month than I remember seeing. I’ve even contributed to an article or two myself to the subject. And why not? It’s good to try something new.

I often make meals that could be called vegan, but I never think of them that way. It’s just how things turn out. But the idea of making a vegan meal for a dinner party isn’t something I’ve been much inclined to do. Again, sometimes it’s just how things turn out. It’s pretty much what happened when a friend wanted to give her husband a cooking class for Christmas. After reading The China Study the opera singer became a vegetarian. He already loved to cook, but his wife, who is not a vegetarian, thought a little instruction might be a good idea. And since we were friends, we thought we’d conclude with a dinner party.  And why not New Years? It was coming right up, after all.

In our class I wanted to show my student tricks and techniques, specific recipes, winter vegetables, and introduce him to a passel of different oils and vinegars plus herbs, spices, salts— basically, as much as I could cram into a short afternoon.  We cooked a lot of food. It didn’t all go together as a menu – you wouldn’t have a soup and a stew in the same meal— but I wanted to show him how, in a soup, a little miso could provide that umami quality and how, in a stew, he could tease ordinary vegetables into a robust red and gold dish. We had more than one salad, but each one was provided a lesson or two in itself. Except for one dish, not a hint of butter, cream, cheese, honey or eggs appeared in this meal.

The non-vegan element, and it could have been foregone, was baked fresh ricotta cheese with thyme, one of my favorite dishes. We had it with crunchy crackers and olives. Dessert was a matter of arranging Medjool dates, marzipan, Satsuma tangerines, pecans, figs stuffed with almonds and anise on a platter.

When it was finally time to open a bottle of champagne and nibble on salted almonds still warm from the oven, we were ready for dinner, course after course of it. During dinner we drank a spectacularly delicious Marques de Riscal Rioga (2005) that worked well with the food.  It was a bit of a crazy mixed up menu, but I like to think that my friends went home with a lot of new ideas, a few tricks up their sleeves along with a bowl of Romesco sauce.

While cleaning up I noticed the wedge of Manchego cheese and a lovely blue I had intended to put out and that was when I realized we had just enjoyed pretty much a vegan meal, plus it was for company and not only company, but for New Years. And it was just fine. I just wouldn’t call it vegan, or vegetarian or anything but a good dinner, but with some refinement, I’d do it again. For company. After all, it’s good to try something new. The leftovers saw us into the first days of 2012, the recipes were from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone and my upcoming book, Vegetable Literacy, and the vegetables were, with a few exceptions, from the farmers market and my garden. Amazing what we can do these days for produce.

And now it’s time to think about ordering seeds.

New Year’s Crazy Mixed Up Menu

Roasted Salted Almonds

Baked Ricotta with Thyme

Golden & Chioggia Beets with Red Endive, Black Olives, and Pickled Onions

Butternut Squash Soup with Ginger, White Miso and Black Sesame Seeds

Caramelized Fennel with Toasted Fennel Seeds and Fennel Greens

An Ozette Potato, Chickpea and Pepper Stew with Romesco Sauce

Finely Slivered Radicchio with Walnut Vinaigrette

Winter Tidbits of Dates, Tangerines, Marzipan and Nuts

And A Very Happy New Year to All!

Our Christmas gifts were mostly practical ones: pencils, socks, toothbrushes and that sort of thing. But each kid also received favorite edible—olives for one brother, sweet and sour salt plums for the other, chocolate covered cherries for my sister and me. There was always the special item, too —the binoculars, the big Audubon book, something deeply desired but completely unexpected. As for our stockings, our names were not embroidered in glitter or sequins but there was always a tangerine in the toe of each one. Always. And it was always so juicy and good.

Besides the binoculars, what I really remember was my parents wrapping style. We never seemed to have gifts wrapped in normal Christmas paper, but rather, in anything but. One year it was rice paper. Butcher paper was featured another year. When my dad wrapped our gifts in newspaper I felt they were getting maybe too unusual. There were many years when colored tissue concealed our gifts. My parents had been in charge of decoration for a dance at the university and had bought an enormous box of tissue paper to use. A rainbow of gossamer colored sheets remained from their efforts and showed up faithfully under the tree year after year. One year my brother, a budding botanist, got into the act and wrapped all his gifts in the leaves and stems of rather large plants, our houseplants, I believe. This was a hard family to live in if you longed for normal.

The stockings that held the little gifts and practical items were my father’s red hand-knit Norwegian ski socks with reindeer on them. Since he didn’t ski and wasn’t Norwegian, I don’t know why he had them or where they came from, but they were pulled out every Christmas, nailed to a mantel and filled. That is every year except the one my parents decided it might be fun to use my mother’s stockings instead.  The thing about nylons, panty hose and all those feminine leggings is that they stretch. These stretched and stretched and in the end they accommodated the entirety of each child’s Christmas haul. There was nothing under the tree and the vision that greeted us on dawn of that 25^th was bizarre. The stockings trailed down the fireplace and over the floor. They were all angles where the boxes had gone, puffy swells where the sweaters and soft things were. And there, in the toe, was still that tangerine.

I thought all this would end for me when I grew up, but no, it didn’t. The first year I was married, my husband, who is not a big fan of Christmas, but is a fan of tangerines, presented me with a garbage can (for the wrapping) that contained a hose. Actually, it was a terrific hose and twenty years later it still is our best one. I love that kind of a present. For years I’ve said what I really want is a load of compost, but somehow he won’t make that leap. Maybe that’s just too bizarre, or maybe it’s just that there’s nowhere for the tangerine to go.

Regardless of how you wrap your gifts, I wish you all joyful and peaceful holidays with plenty of tangerines, either in socks, stockings, or maybe just in a bowl on the table.

I grew up around olive trees and my brother, Mike, makes olive oil in California. As kids he once convinced me to eat a raw Mission olive, saying it was just like those in the can, only free because you could just pick it. You only fall for that one once because there is nothing more unpleasant than an olive right off the tree. Something has to be done with them. Like turning them into oil.

At the gorgeous Westin resort in Costa Navarino, Greece (the lush green area of Messinia) olive trees are innumerable. About 7,000 of them were transplanted to the resort when a reservoir was dug not far away. (All but 3 survived.) Many of them are fairly young while others are old and venerable.

The variety is Koroneiki, a modest tree that produces very small olives that are harvested green and transformed into a lively, pungent oil. (The city of Kalamata is not far from the resort, so Kalamata olives grow in the area too, but those big meaty fruits are for eating, not pressing into oil.)

My brother grows some Koroneiki olives and presses them as a single varietal. His trees are many but his crop is small. “You think you’re picking a lot, but they’re so small they’re never as many as you want,” he says, something that was corroborated during my recent visit to Costa Navarino..

October is when the harvest starts and I was fortunate to witness its beginning. Rather than picking the olives from the branches, as my brother does, the trees were first pruned of their large branches, then beaten to release the olives onto the nets on the ground.  It takes a strong motion of your whole arm to separate the olives from their branches; they’re too green to come off voluntarily. Although it looks easy, it’s not, and I speak from experience for I gave it try.  Once the trees are well picked, the larger branches are tossed aside, smaller clumps of leaves deftly picked out by the workers, the olives are poured form their net into sacks, then off they go to the mill.

I got to tag along for the next part, their transformation into a golden green elixir. Time is of great importance when it comes to making oil. If the olives aren’t pressed within 24 hours (and preferably sooner), they begin to deteriorate and rancidity sets in, so there’s a definite sense of urgency. As soon as the olives were picked, packed and loaded into a pick-up, we drove through the hilly green countryside up to the mill where they were immediately unloaded, washed, cleansed of any remaining leaves, then crushed to a paste.

In less than an hour, a river of green oil began to gush out of a pipe, an amazing site to see if you’ve only dealt with drizzles from a bottle. Even better was having the chance to taste this just-pressed olive over bread that had been grilled over the coals. This is an experience I hope everyone can experience. It has nothing to do with this business of being served a dish of olive oil with your bread in a restaurant. This is oil in its most pristine form, and from this point on, some say, it’s all down hill. But fortunately it’s a gentle slope. You have about a year to enjoy the oil. It is packed in a can, which makes it safe to carry home. (Helpfully, the oil and other products from Costa Navarino, are now available through Dean and DeLuca.)

This beautiful oil is produced, cooked with, eaten and sold at the resort. Its green and grassy flavors play perfectly with the vegetables that are also grown there. Add to the oil and produce the Greek varietal wines that are offered and I found I was eating in a way where the taste of terroir is absolutely vibrant.  I have excellent Greek cookbooks that I use, vegetables from my garden, access to homegrown Koroneiki olive oil and excellent wines, but they all add up differently somehow, good, but subtly different, the Greek version being possibly more intense, saltier, wilder. This is one reason why it’s so valuable to travel and eat food and drink wine from its place of origin. But I have to admit that today, that authentic experience can be hard to find. Cost is more a determinant than locale, just as it is here, and not everything is as indigenous as we’d like to think. But at Costa Navarino there is an unusual commitment to local foods and traditional ones as well, not only their olive oil, but also their vinegar, sea salt, jewels of spoon sweets, olive oil biscuits, Kalamata olives in a wine syrup and other exceptionally fine foods that show up at the resort in a variety of ways. That you can spend days in blissful comfort gazing at the Ionian sea plus eat well in a resort that presses and uses its own oil is rare indeed, but it certainly makes for a more delicious and interesting world that such an effort has been made at Costa Navarino.

I grew up around olive trees and my brother, Mike, makes olive oil in California. As kids he once convinced me to eat a raw Mission olive, saying it was just like those in the can, only free. You only fall for that one once because there is nothing more unpleasant than olives right off the tree. Something has to be done with them. Like turning them into oil.

Olive trees are innumerable at the gorgeous Westin resort at Costa Navarino,Greece  (www.costanavarino.com) the lush green area of Messinia. About 7,000 of them were transplanted to the resort when a reservoir was dug not far away. (All but 3 survived.) Many of them are fairly young while others are old and venerable.  The variety is Koronecki, a modest tree that produces very small olives that are harvested green and transformed into a lively, pungent oil. (The city of Kalamata is not far from the resort, so Kalamata olives grow in the area too, but those big meaty fruits are for eating, not pressing into oil.)

My brother grows some Koronecki olives and presses them as a single varietal. His trees are many but his crop is small. “You think you’re picking a lot, but they’re so small they’re never as many as you want,” he says, something that was corroborated during my recent visit to Costa Navarino.

October is when the harvest starts and I was fortunate to witness its beginning. Rather than picking the olives from the branches, as my brother does, the trees were first pruned of their large branches, then beaten to release the olives onto the nets on the ground.  It takes a strong motion of your whole arm to separate the olives from their branches; they’re too green to come off voluntarily. Although it looks easy, it’s not, and I speak from experience for I gave it try.  Once the trees are well picked, the larger branches are tossed aside, smaller clumps of leaves deftly picked out by the workers, the olives are poured form their net into sacks, then off they go to the mill.

I got to tag along for the next part, their transformation into a golden green elixir. Time is of great importance when it comes to making oil. If the olives aren’t pressed within 24 hours (and preferably sooner), they begin to deteriorate and rancidity sets in, so there’s a definite sense of urgency. As soon as the olives were picked, packed and loaded into a pick-up, we drove through the hilly green countryside up to the mill where they were immediately unloaded, washed, cleansed of any remaining leaves, then crushed to a paste.

In less than an hour, a river of green oil began to gush out of a pipe, an amazing sight to see if you’ve only dealt with drizzles from a bottle. Even better was having the chance to taste this just-pressed olive over bread that had been grilled over the coals. This is an experience I hope everyone can experience. It has nothing to do with this business of being served a dish of olive oil with your bread in a restaurant. This is oil in its most pristine form, and from this point on, some say, it’s all down hill. But fortunately it’s a gentle slope. You have about a year to enjoy the oil, plus it’s packed in a can, which makes it safe to carry home.

This beautiful oil is produced, cooked with, eaten and sold at the resort. Its green and grassy flavors play perfectly with the vegetables that are also grown there. Add to the oil and produce the Greek varietal wines that are offered and I found I was eating in a way where the taste of terroir is absolutely vibrant.  I have many Greek cookbooks I cook from, access to homegrown Koronecki olive oil and excellent wines, but they all add up differently somehow. This is one reason why it’s so valuable to travel and eat food and drink wine from its place. But even with travel that authentic experience can be hard to find. Cost is more a determinant than locale, just as it is here, and not everything is as indigenous as we’d like to think. But at Costa Navarino there is an unusual commitment to local foods and traditional ones as well, not only their olive oil, but also their vinegar, sea salt, amazing spoon sweets, olive oil biscuits and other exceptional foods. Where else can you go to a resort that presses then uses its own oil, I don’t know, but it certainly makes for a more delicious and interesting world that such an effort has been made at Costa Navarino.

This is the time of year all the health magazines come out with suggestions for lighter pumpkin pies, non-caloric mashed potatoes, creamed onions without the cream and the like.  That’s fine, I guess, but when I was asked to contribute some suggestions for “healthier” holiday recipes for an article, I found I wasn’t so keen on the idea of lightening up my holiday dinner. But I did have another idea about feast days.

I guess I just don’t see Thanksgiving dinner as the cholesterol-laden threat of excess that others do.  In fact, I rather enjoy these meals that are larger than what’s needed to satisfy hunger, the groaning board laden with dishes often contributed by friends who have brought their favorites, dishes that they’ve gone to some extra trouble and care over. A table might showcase a parade of local foods that far outnumber what you’d cook on any other Thursday. Or maybe it’s time for those foods without which Thanksgiving wouldn’t be that. They may be rich, silly, sentimental good or even questionable, but whatever they are, they’re probably dishes we don’t normally make and there’s something about foods that appear only once —maybe twice— a year. They’re special. Since we don’t eat like this all the time can’t we lighten up our fears instead of our food? It’s a holiday, after all!

A number of years ago when we were all new to e-mail, several chef friends and I planned a Christmas dinner we would share in Los Angeles. It turned out to be quite a challenge because one couldn’t imagine Christmas without oysters; another was allergic to them, but had to have Blue Lake beans. Were green beans really in season? “Yes!” said one of the west coasters so, yes, green beans were in.  What about the main course? Turkey? Crown roast? Ham? Did it have to one? Could it be another? What about the vegetarians? Some were flexible, others weren’t. But we all had dishes that were must-haves, and of course, everyone wanted to contribute those favorite Christmas desserts. We ended up with 10 appetizers, an enormous meal, and there were probably a dozen desserts—plus champagne, wine, chocolates, nuts, tangerines, and more.  It was truly excessive but it was much more memorable than a balanced, low-fat meal even though I recall vowing I would never again choose to be this full in my life.

But then, there as a beach right outside our motel, which leads me to my present take on this whole business of turning holiday meals away from excess to moderation. How about adding another element and leaving the food alone?

Our family used to take long walks in the  cold and return hungry and ready for dinner. As long as the oven was actually turned on (a few times it wasn’t) it worked out well. We’d come in cold and hungry to a house that smelled delicious, our anticipation high.  When I spent a Christmas in Norway a few years ago, the succession of big meals (and I do mean big, rich fatty ones) was broken by several hours of cross-country skiing in between. All the huffing and puffing under the light of clear moon in that Norwegian winter dusk was both a pleasure and a life saver. And if hiking and cross country skiing aren’t your activities, there’s always tennis, touch football, volleyball, Ping-Pong. Even raking leaves. Whatever it is, forget the treadmill and do something outdoors, with friends.

Sometime it’s not the meal that’s a problem as the leftovers. While leftovers are of course one of the best things about Thanksgiving, you might consider not making so many candied sweet potatoes and pumpkin pies that you find yourself eating them for a week. Maybe make enough for one extra meal and leave it at that. You probably really don’t need more leftovers than will fit in the fridge. Better to share the wealth or just have less to start with. And if you’re going to have turkey, skip the corn-fed factory-farmed birds for their sakes and yours, and find a local one, maybe a heritage breed. They’re smaller, but far tastier and far better bred.

I will add this thought, though.  If you’ve generally changed how you eat, say you don’t make desserts anymore, cream hardly ever shows up in your kitchen and you barely remember sugar, then some of those old dishes, like real creamed onions and my beloved candied sweet potatoes may not have quite the appeal they used to. I mean, it’s a possibility your tastes have changed and if that’s the case, cook what you like to eat. In any case, cook what you like to eat, banish guilt, and above all, enjoy your Thanksgiving!

Since it’s been chilly in the mornings for a week or more I decided to tackle my severely overgrown beds to make room for some chard, collards, lettuce and other plants I wanted to eat during the winter. With the night temperature only 13 degrees away from freezing I knew this was something I should have done earlier and that I’d better get them in the ground fast. I also had to finish tying up my cardoons and wrapping them in paper for blanching.  It’s more challenging than you might imagine corralling these enormous spiny leaves, getting them all together in a bunch, then getting the twine and some paper secured around them.  The larger plants were so heavy they needed to be further tied to a sturdy stick to remain upright. I don’t know that I’m doing this at the right time or even remotely correctly, but I’m determined to have properly blanched cardoons at least once this winter. After that I’ll plant them as ornamentals for they are exceptionally handsome plants.

The huanzontle, or Red Aztec Spinach, grew tall and extra-voluminous. I didn’t have much success in the cooking department having waited perhaps too long to commit its seed heads to the kitchen. The buds that should have been eaten while green were now a dusky scarlet. I really wanted to free up that bed for other vegetables, but I also wanted to see just how intense the color would get. I ended up with a weak compromise, cutting away some of the heavily seeded branches and using them to cover a bed I had dug a few weeks earlier and planted with all the half-used packages of radish, turnip and bok-choy seeds left from other gardening seasons. I figured the seed heads would protect the ground and the new seedlings, which had in fact come up.  And if any haunzontle sprouts appear next spring I figure I’ll have a second chance at making those huanzontle fritters I like so much.

Until this summer, one of the toughest challenges in gardening was to actually harvest anything that made it to the edible stage.  My confidence wasn’t strong, hands-on knowledge was iffy and it always seemed so remarkable that anything grew at all that I could hardly bring myself to pick it. Instead I watched the gorgeous purple kohlrabi betting bigger and lumpier until they were fibrous and tough beyond redemption. I let the chard go to seed and then tried eating the prunings; I let the lettuce make it’s bitter towers then flower instead of just eating it and planting more.

But since moving my garden into the sunshine and away from competing roots of the apple trees greedy for water, I realize that I no longer have that problem to such a degree, although I was still reluctant to use everything up by eating it.  So not surprisingly I managed to find some gnarly and neglected carrots of such heft that I would have walked right past them if I had seen them at the farmers market. But since they were mine, I looked at them with awe and immediately wanted to rinse of the dirt and barbarically roast them whole.  Some beets too, had gotten away from me. One weighed in at pound and others were close to that. Again, they wouldn’t have been my first choice at the market, but both they and the giant carrots turned out to be sweet and delicious when I cooked them. Those damn Fairy Tale eggplants that I had planted in excess finally had to go even though they were still producing. I’d had enough of fiddling with them, plus they weren’t my favorite variety in the end, so up came two plants and with them, 38 eggplants, many of them now too pale and seedy to be much good. I never dreamed I’d be able to do such a thing—yank up a producing plant, but I did. In it’s place, collards have been planted.

I saw my gardening mistakes from the season: too much of this, not enough of that and no skill at keeping the crops coming. But I saw some surprising success, too.  The black-eyed peas, which have been the most entertaining plant ever, did just as well in their open bed with no drip and only intermittent care as they did in the coddled home of their store-bought soil-filled raised bed and its steady drip system.  Ditto the Rosa Bianca eggplant and the daikon.  The tomatoes really did need more room than I had given them, and they all listed towards westward, as if trying to climb out of their cages to smother whatever was in the next bed. Next year I’ll put them more towards the west end of the lot and give them a lot more room, just the way the gardening books tell you to.  I had planted some chard seeds next to a row of chard that were already about 10-inches tall. (I learned that a single row provided far more than I could possible eat, giving me plenty to share.) These newbies had spent the summer shaded by their big brothers and sisters so they never really grew up, but now I viewed them as bonus cache of transplants.  I moved them to a new bed and put a cover over the hoops in hopes that I’ll have some fresh greens during the winter after all. Cumin and anise were fun to grow, but not a very efficient use of limited space. However the anise is very pretty in bloom.  The vetch seeds have turned out to be really vigorous and hopefully they will do something good for this tired looking dirt, along with the red clover. The amaranth I planted which was supposed to be red, instead made pale green frothy looking seed heads that are towering over the too close tomatoes. I should probably pull it up, but I’m going to wait until it forms seeds, then I’ll use it as mulch for another bed. If new plants come up, fine.  And they should. After all this splendid amaranth appears to be a gigantic version of what’s growing in my garden as weeds. Finally, when I dug up a celery plant, I realized what I really had were four or five celeries (lesson: next year thin more rigorously) that had grown together and produced a massive fusion of the same snaky roots that will be found covering the nearby celeriac. And that, by the way, is really doing really well, but I’ve no room for anything else in the kitchen.  I really am cooking as fast as I can, so the celeriac will have to wait until we cook our way through the eggplants, carrots and beets.

I think I see a root cellar in my future.

Earthquakes. Hurricanes. Too much rain or not enough. Wars and famine.

It was time for some good news.

Last week my husband and I were invited to a dinner party. It was given by Kate, aged l7, who was leaving for college the next day, and she wanted to have a little going away party for herself. Of course we’d come. After all, we’ve known Kate since she was born and her two brothers since they were little kids.

Because it was her dad who actually invited us, we expected the big kind of rambling get together Kate’s parents often hold, where a lot of people who don’t know each other –and some who do – mingle and eat and talk. But no, this was Kate’s deal. Aside from her brothers, her boy friend, and brother’s girlfriend, the rest of us were her parent’s friends. And it turned out that neither Kate’s mom or dad were there —a sick parent need attending and a truck had broken down—which gave us the giddy feeling that there weren’t any adults around despite our ages. When we offered to help, “No thanks! Got it!” was the reply. Kate had dinner under control. Here’s the menu that she cooked.

Margaritas from scratch, no margarita mix in site

Home made guacamole

Grilled asparaguswith a tomatilla salsa

Grilled steak

A big Caesar salad

Polenta with fried onions

A plum galette and lime mousse tarts for dessert

Nothing was from Trader Joes. Nothing was out of package. No parents were there to lend a hand. Kate and her boyfriend, with a brother occasionally pitching in, pulled off a delicious meal without a hitch. Us older types sat around the kitchen table with our margaritas and basked in the situation. We watched the kids cook, ate a wonderful dinner and it was a terrifically fun party with lots of conversation.

I had no idea Kate liked to cook or knew how. When I asked her brothers about this, they thought that kids in Santa Fe generally knew how to cook. They acted as if it weren’t a big deal, but just a natural consequence of growing up here, which I found surprising. Why would that be the case?

One reason brother Andrew sited was a program called Cooking for Kids that has, for over a decade, worked in the Santa Fe schools to give children hands on experiences of cooking food. (I actually taught the younger brother, Will, through this program when he was in the 3^rd grade.)

Then both brothers said that when they finally realized how much it cost to to eat out all the time, they figured that they had to learn how to cook.

But they didn’t mention something that had been going on right under their noses, and it had to do with their parents. Their dad, a furniture designer who works from home, is a very good baker. There’s always fresh bread around or the smell of bread baking. When it’s pizza night at their house, it isn’t delivered, but made at home. as are their other meals. Kate’s parents aren’t foodies, they don’t shop at the farmers market or get excited about smoked salt, but baking bread and cooking from scratch is just something they do.

Kate’s mom commutes to her job so her husband often cooks. But as a naturally social person, she often puts together parties. The parents have always made time for friends and included their kids and those of their friends in their large get-togethers over the years. They’ve also given parties in honor of their children–one graduating high school, another getting that masters degree, a third visiting home from college —and they do so with natural ease and graciousness.  So is it really surprising that Kate would be able to pull off a dinner for 14 with the grace and skill of a practiced hostess—and all this the night before heading east for college?  Not really.

Not to take one single thing away from this young woman whom we love and admire, perhaps it’s true, that what your parents do does make a difference and does count for something. In Kate’s case, a natural ease in the kitchen and equal ease with guests, plus a certain tolerance for chaos, are already fully functioning qualities in her young life, and these skills will only get better as she gets older.  Her familiarity with the kitchen also suggests that programs, like Cooking with Kids, which engage children in cooking and eating on many occasions as they go through school, also make a difference.

It’s been a week now, but I’m still basking in the deep joy of that evening as the guest of a 17-year old whose parents weren’t there, who proved herself a competent cook and a gracious host as well as the lovely person she is.  It definitely cancelled out the bad news. And I didn’t even think to take a picture!

A writer asked me the other day what I was noticing that was different in the farmers’ market this season.  She gave me an example: one chef she had spoken to was thrilled about finding pig’s ears in his farmers market. I can’t say I’m in search of pig’s ears myself, but I have noticed some new items creeping into markets that I’m very happy to see, and that is grain.

In our Santa Fe farmers’ market a baker is selling bags of local wheat milled nearby—nutty whole-wheat flour with flakes of bran throughout. This comes from the effort on the part of the baker and others to revive wheat growing in Northern New Mexico and we’ve been fortunate to have bread made with native wheat for the past few years. But a 5-pound sack?  This is new. We also have corn meal, both blue and yellow, that’s rough and gritty and truly redolent of corn. It makes a terrific cornbread and is more interesting than most of even the good corn meals you can buy.

A few weeks ago in Davis, California, Massa Organics had not only their organic brown rice, but also wheat, wheat berries, and an amazingly sublime jar of almond butter made from their organic almonds. They sell at a number of farmers’ markets in Northern California and I always buy their rice when I have the chance to because it is organic and also because I like the family and appreciate what they’re doing. Does it taste radically different?  It’s good, maybe better than most. The San Francisco Chronicle calls it the nuttiest, sweetest, sexiest brown rice ever.”

I don’t know that I’d go that far, but I do treasure every nutty little grain, sexy or not. As for their almond butter, (now that’s sexy!) you could serve a teaspoon for dessert and probably get away with it. And if you left the jar on the table, it would be gone within the hour. With crunchy bits of almonds laced throughout the creamy almond butter base, Massa’s almond butter goes far beyond any other I’ve tasted for sheer goodness, and I’ve sampled a lot of almond butters. It’s pricey and worth it. (You can order all their products via their website massaorganics.com.)

Near Portland, Oregon, Anthony Boutard grows and sells his frikeh (parched green wheat) at the Hillsdale farmers

market, corn meal and polenta made from Royal Calais Flint Corn, and very good Amish butter popcorn. The kernels look like little pearls. Popcorn isn’t that new to farmers markets –I’ve seen it sold shucked and still on the ears from Chicago to Ithaca – but Anthony also mills some of the Amish butter kernels into an aromatic flour that makes delectable cakes and corn breads.

I have also seen quinoa for sale (and the greens) in Colorado as well as wheat bran, and other wheat flours in markets around the country. The interviewer told me that she saw bags of wheat —Red Fife, I imagined and she thought it was, too—in Seattle recently at the farmers market section of Pike’s Place market.

Those of us who still bake and believe in the goodness of well-grown whole grains find the appearance of locally grown grains in our markets a boon.  They truly are a pleasure to bake with. They are more flavorful than most and are not bromated or fumigated, which means the grains and flours are alive and prone to provide a home for moths unless kept in the freezer. So if you find grains and flours in your market, stash them away in the cold, but try not to forget about them.

I’d love to know what you readers have seen in your farmers markets that depart from the usual good vegetables, meats and eggs, and of course, fruits that are actually ripe and truly delicious. Drop a line and let me know if you can —and many thanks if you do!

People sometimes speak the interference a woman’s perfume can run with the flavors of food, and then there’s the matter of cigarette and cigar smoke concealing the tastes and aroma of a meal. But what about flowers? While they most certainly grace a dinner table, they can be distracting to the point of taking over—and not just because of their fragrance.

My brother grows flowers. One spring he gave my mother a dozen peonies to take to a Seder. Now peonies are picked when the buds are so small you might well doubt that they will open to their full potential. But they do—and fairly quickly once they’ve reached a certain point. My mother was a doubter and she tossed the peonies in the sink— an inadequate gift.  But at the last minute she had a change of heart, gathered them up and brought them to her host who set them on the table. Just as my brother knew would happen, they opened during the long course of the Seder. Between readings and sips of wine, the guests were unable to ignore the peonies, and they talked about them as the meal progressed and the crimson petals unfolded in the candlelight. Their scent, which is clean and elemental, does not interfere with food, but you cannot turn away from their bloom, which is so glorious with its rich layers of satin petals that they can distract one from the matters at hand, which are many during a Seder.

Twice I’ve been at dinners that were overtaken by another opening flower, a night blooming cereus.  On the first occasion we were the guests of a couple we were meeting for the first time, friends of friends, earthy, sophisticated farmers whose kitchen served in part as a greenhouse.  Before sitting down to dinner, Anthony pointed out an awkward looking plant and an odd, egg-shaped bud in the corner of the room. It had been swelling for over a week and was about to open. He promised it would be quite a treat.

Petals lay close to its body, like narrow strips of paper and about as impressive. There was a small opening about the size of pea at the distal end from which leaked a musky, tropical scent. As the bud slowly opened, the scent grew heavier and sweeter and it spilled into the room with increasing force. The petals began to lift and widen, the opening grew larger and larger.  And here we were, four strangers getting to know one another over a meal, but it was as if a dazzling slut had wandered into the room and sidled up to chat. It was impossible to ignore her company.

Anthony had cooked an unusual fava bean, harvested from a particularly rowdy row of miscellaneous vegetables, which he first toasted, then braised. Carol made a luscious slump, dumplings covering the fat Chester blackberries we’d been eating from the vine only hours earlier. There was more, too. The flower’s perfume and the beans fiercely fought ffor attention, but the beans soon lost. The dinner conversation was jerky for it was interrupted each time one of us would glance over towards the flower and exclaim how much more open it was now! By the last glass of wine, the bloom was a starburst. Except for the beans and the slump, I can’t recall a thing we ate, but it must have been something good for Anthony is an exceptional grower of the most interesting edibles. It’s just that the flower took over.

A few months later we had a similar experience with a night blooming cereus and again, with a person we didn’t know, a prospective Greek teacher. This time, the plant was located in our bathroom. There were several plump buds and we were pretty sure this would be their night. We had tended these plants for many years, but this was the first time we had ever had the promise of a blossom. We were excited, although we knew from out experience with Anthony and Carol that the flower would be sure to disturb any conversation. But dinner was already in motion and you can’t tell a flower to bloom another time.

We sat down and just as before, the petals slowly lifted and peeled back while we ate and drank and tried to study the Greek alphabet. Although the plant was two rooms away, that tropical perfume was drifting into the kitchen in waves.  Every ten minutes or so one of us, including our guest, felt compelled to get up and check the flowers’ progress. It was during dessert, when the blooms went unwatched, that they opened fully. At that point we simply put down our forks, got up and all went into the bathroom and admired them.

The bathroom, you’ll have to admit, is an odd place to congregate with people you don’t know, but it didn’t matter. We were all smitten. And what was for dinner? I’ve no idea. The flower completely trumped whatever food we had enjoyed.