Gleaned panzanella

M and D pick berries

Last weekend I went foraging around the city with a few friends. It's amazing how much food is hanging around if you look for it. We gathered acorns, apples and blackberries growing wild at the beach and the last of the raspberries and tomatoes from a friend's garden. Everywhere we went there was that perfect, dappled, fall sort of light that is so pretty you can't quite believe it's real.

S with blackberries

I got a lot of tomatoes from my friend's garden-big chunky, variegated, red-brown and rust coloured-and quite a lot of tiny, pea sized cherry tomatoes from my best tomato plant from the summer. I wanted to make them the center of a salad. 

Everything else in the recipe is just a suggestion. Panzanella is one of the many brilliant Italian ways of making frugal home economics delicious. They do brillant things with stale bread and you should never throw out bread just because it has gone stale. Panzanella is an improvisation, a showcase of leftovers, of whatever vegetables are around and bits of cheese and maybe a crumble of pancetta or nuts. 

Panzanella

1 stale baguette or crusty loaf
as many good tomatoes as you can get your hands on
1 cup shelled edamame or peas, boiled in salted water until tender
2 cups arugula
1/2 english cucumber, sliced
1/2 cup crumbed feta
1 large bunch parsley
2 cloves garlic
olive oil
lemon juice
red wine vinegar


Roughly tear bread and toss with tomatoes, cucumber, edamame, arugula and feta. Drizzle oil and lemon and vinegar over to coat. Finely chop parsley and garlic into a paste and toss that into everything. The bread should be soft and slightly mush into everything and soak up the salad dressing. If the bread is still  a bit hard, add a little more dressing let it sit for a minute to soak it all up. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Pineapple Reborn (Hopefully)

I have become obsessed with plants that can be grown from the remnants and scraps of groceries. I have planted several celery stumps and they are all growing well. I have stuck a few other bits and pieces into the ground with varying results, carrots, bok choy, onions. I am not too worried about whether or not they grow into new plants since I already ate the vegetables, but if I can manage to get another plant out of their remains, that is a bonus.

One of these projects which is a little less practical perhaps, but maybe more exciting, is my new pineapple plant. I twisted the top off a regular, store bought pineapple and peeled off about an inch or two of the bottom leaves. The pineapple roots are already growing, waiting for you to discover them. I had no idea that pineapples had roots lurking under their leaves.

I stuck the roots in a jar of water for a few days and then I potted my pineapple plant in a pot. It is living on my balcony at the moment, but in the winter I will take it inside to the sunroom. Pineapples grown this way take a year or two to produce fruit, and sometimes never produce fruit, so this project is more of a novelty than a serious food production endeavor. 

It was so easy and fun though, I think that I will start a couple more pineapples so that hopefully at least one of them might grow fruit eventually.

Celery Reborn

I read recently that you can regrow celery from the bottom of a bunch of celery. I love any way I can grow food inexpensively or for free. I also read that you can keep doing this over and over, possibly indefinitely. This may be the best thing I have ever heard. Celery is now infinite. Maybe.

I cut the base off the last bunch of celery I bought and set it into a saucer of water, cut side up, for a couple days. I looked into the center of the tightly coiled celery stalks and there was a few small, pale leaves coiled up, new celery already underway. After a couple days sitting in water, these leaves started to grow above the cut stalks.

Then I stuck the celery into one of my pots on our balcony. The leaves are growing more quickly, they seem to enjoy this little burst of heat we are having. I cut this celery base about a week ago and it has been in the soil for maybe four days. It hasn't got any root growth that I can see on the bottom, but it's new leaves look really healthy.

When it gets a few new stalks growing up a bit, I am going to plant it in my front yard garden bed and burry the older, dead parts so just the new growth is showing.

(Not Quite) Spring Garden

   

                            

Despite the fact that it snowed on Sunday, despite the fact that it's so windy and cold right now that I just walked home clutching my hat so it didn't blow away the windows are rattling in their frames, despite the fact that our birdbath is frozen over every morning when I get up, I am already so so excited about gardening. I have started a lot of seedlings in the sunroom, which is a nice cozy thing to have; it's soothing to see the little shoots growing and reminding me each day that spring is coming. But even more than the seedlings, I am excited about what my garden has done on its own, unsupervised. Things I left untended, things I forgot about, things I never knew about, are coming to life. 

I was thrilled to discover that one of my purple sprouting broccoli plants is sprouting some purple brocoli. I went into the garden to pick some kale and there it was-a tiny, tightly coiled little mass  of broccoli flowers at the top, and another, tinier one at each branch all the way down. I hadn't forgotten it exactly; I vaguely remembered planting broccoli there, but it was still such a nice little surprise. 

                             

I really enjoyed seeing the first signs of rhubarb coming back to life, tight pink skin stretched over the packed leaves. The whole thing reminded me of a brain when I first saw it. When I poked around I saw that it has a few new crowns around it. I planted it last year and harvested a little rhubarb, but I'm hoping this year will have a more substantial harvest.