[ Lost in the Landscape ]

fun with beets

I don’t usu­ally post a pile of recipes here, but Fri­day night I was faced with a nice bunch of golden beets that needed to be used. I made a loaf with the beet greens and then grated and sauteed the beets with a parsnip.

The mother recipes I began with were out of Jean­nette Ferrary’s and Louise Fiszer’s The California-American Cook­book: Inno­va­tions on Amer­i­can Regional Dishes. But since I was miss­ing some ingre­di­ents and had some oth­ers on hand, the final prepa­ra­tions ended pretty dif­fer­ent from the orig­i­nals. Both seemed like good ways to honor ingre­di­ents that are now in season.

John usu­ally only grudg­ingly accepts beets at the table. How­ever, he thought both of these were keep­ers, so I thought I’d bet­ter write them down before I for­get what I did.

If this were a proper food blog, I’d have way­laid the plates on the way to the table before serv­ing them. But the food was long gone before I had a chance to think of that. Maybe I should have posted pho­tos of the dirty dishes after all the beet con­coc­tions had been devoured…

Loaf of Beet Greens

• Olive oil
• Beet greens, tops of 1 large bunch (ca. 3 large beets), includ­ing stems, chopped
• 1 clove gar­lic, minced
• 1 medium onion, chopped fine
• 1 ser­rano chili, seeded, mem­branes removed, slivered
• 3 eggs
• 1/2 cup shred­ded cheese (I used Trader Joes’ Quat­tro Formaggi)
• 1/4 pound good firm tofu, cut in 3/8 inch cubes
• salt
• pep­per
• small sprin­kling of nutmeg

Pre­heat oven to 350. Saute beets, onion, gar­lic and chili in oil until wilted, ca. 5–8 min­utes. Salt and pep­per to taste. Remove from heat.

Mix eggs, cheese, tofu and nut­meg in bowl, and then stir into beet green mixture.

Pour into greased loaf pan and bake 25 min­utes. Allow to set 10 min­utes before serving.

Serves 4

Root Veg­eta­bles in Tequila Lime Butter

• 3 table­spoons butter
• 3 large beets, golden beets pre­ferred, ends removed, peeled and grated
• 1 medium parsnip, peeled and grated
• zest of 1 lime
• juice of 1/2 lime
• 1 table­spoon sugar
• 1 1/2 table­spoons tequila
• salt
• pep­per
• 2 table­spoons minced cilantro to gar­nish (optional)

In a bowl mix together lime juice, zest and sugar. In a saucepan saute beets in melted but­ter over high heat for 3 min­utes. Add salt and pep­per. Add tequila, and then lime mix­ture, and cook for 3 more min­utes. Serve gar­nished with cilantro.

Serves 3–4

January 27 2009 | Categories: rambles | Tags: beet greens • beets • parsnips • recipes • root vegetables | 3 Comments »

more ancestral vegetables

One of the things I like to do in art muse­ums is to look at the fruits, flow­ers and veg­eta­bles in still life paint­ings from a cou­ple or more cen­turies back. Often I rec­og­nize exactly what the plant life is, but other times I see things that look like no plants I’ve seen or food I’ve eaten.

When I was clean­ing off my desk at work the other day I ran across an exhi­bi­tion brochure of Span­ish still lifes that one of my cowork­ers had picked up on her last trip to Barcelona. The show fea­tured work by the like of Goya, Zurabán, and Juan Fer­nán­dez “El Labrador.” The paint­ing in the brochure that caught my eye was by Jaun Sánchez Cotán, a painter who cre­ated one of my favorite series of still life works.

Jaun Sánchez Cotán. Still Life of Game, Veg­eta­bles, and Fuit, 1602. Oil on can­vas. Prado Museum.

In the paint­ing, in addi­tion to the game, there are lemons and apples that look absolutely rec­og­niz­able, like what you’d find at a farmer’s mar­ket today, though the apples–a beau­ti­ful gold with a rosy-red blush–look smaller than the mod­ern hybrids today. The root veg­eta­bles look like parsnips, and some­thing else a bit whiter, like today’s daikon radishes. But I doubt daikon would have been a hot seller in 1600s Spain.

The stick to the left with stuff attached to it–What are those? Squab? I can’t make it out clearly in a lit­tle two-by-three-inch brochure repro­duc­tion. But it’s the mas­sive, grace­fully curved veg­gie to the right that dom­i­nates the paint­ing and steals the show. It’s to my eyes a car­doon, an edi­ble this­tle very sim­i­lar to arti­chokes, though not a vari­ety you see in stores much these days.

There’s a good descrip­tion of car­doon in the Anioleka Veg­etable Seeds Co. listing:

For culi­nary use, unlike the arti­choke where the flower heads are eaten, with Car­doon, it is the thick leaf bases, hearts and roots which are uti­lized for food and har­vested in the early spring to early sum­mer months. Car­doon can be used in soups, stews and sal­ads and has a slightly spicy, celery-like fla­vor sim­il­iar to Arti­choke hearts.

Much of Cardoon’s lack of pop­u­lar­ity is due to the fact that like the arti­choke, a tremen­dous amount of space is required to grow them. Car­doon can grow up to 7 feet in height and is very eva­sive [i.e., inva­sive] in most cli­mates. Care should be taken to remove the flower heads of the plant before they pro­duce seeds, for Car­doon can agres­sively nat­u­ral­ize through­out your property.

In addi­tion to nat­u­ral­iz­ing through­out your prop­erty, this plant can take do lots of dam­age to your local ecosys­tem. You run across large stands of arti­choke this­tle in the local South­ern Cal­i­for­nia canyons, and I wouldn’t be sur­prised if they were actu­ally car­doons loosed from gar­dens or agri­cul­ture. Go ahead and grow them, but grow them responsibly.

But back to the Sánchez Cotán paint­ing. All the beau­ti­fully ren­dered fruits and veg­gies and game occupy this dra­matic space that looks some­thing like a black cup­board or win­dowsill, but also some­thing that looks like a dark infi­nite void. Because of this amaz­ing space and ambi­gu­ity it looks decid­edly mod­ern and fresh to my eyes. And the vibra­tion back and forth of the once-live sub­jects with the dark dark dark­ness con­jures up notions of life and death, and the fragility of existence–all that with­out the cheap the­atrics of skulls that often appear in paint­ings like this. This is van­i­tas paint­ing at its best.

The painter uses this back­ground in sev­eral other works, includ­ing my absolute favorite one of the series, a paint­ing that so hap­pens to be in the col­lec­tion of my local art museum:

Jaun Sánchez Cotán. Quince, Cab­bage, Melon and Cucum­ber, 1602. Oil on can­vas. San Diego Museum of Art.

I can’t tell you how much I love this paint­ing. A good forty per­cent of the sur­face is black. Absolute, utter black. The fruits and veg­eta­bles begin in the light, and draw your eye as you fol­low along the grace­ful curve from the lively quince, to the extrav­a­gantly ruf­fled cab­bage, to the sen­sual melon sliced open with a slice taken out for you to savor with your eyes, and finally to the final veg­etable, a cucum­ber that curves gen­tly but insis­tently towards the back, towards the envelop­ing black­ness, a black­ness that makes itself felt every bit as much as any of the fruits and vegetables.

Quinces and cab­bages today look pretty much like what’s in the paint­ing. There are so many mel­ons out there that it’s hard to keep track, but it looks like an ances­tor to the French heir­loom sold today as Charentais. And the green, lumpy cucumber–It’s totally rec­og­niz­able, though it looks closer to gherkins or the Asian vari­eties than the smooth, plastic-surfaced cukes that you see in the stores most of the time.

Inter­est­ing veg­eta­bles, for sure, and what an amaz­ing painting!

May 10 2008 | Categories: art | Tags: apples • cabbages • cardoons • cucumbers • heirloom vegetables • Juan Sanchez Cotan • lemons • melons • parsnips • quinces • still life paintings • still lifes | 1 Comment »