Vegetables Archives – A Gardener's Table

Walking Onions─to Pickle, to Plant, to Share

My walking onions are ready to walk! Over the summer, floral umbrellas formed at the tops of the hollow stalks, and soon bouquets of bulbils replaced the little flowers. Bulbils is a technical term for airborne mini-bulbs. The bulbils sprouted their own green stalks, which were soon topped by smaller bulbils, which in turn sprouted their own green stalks. Still smaller bulbils formed at the very top—though the stalks were no longer erect but curving in every direction. Now the bulbils of all sizes are not only sprouting but are forming rootlets. When the main stalk of the plant falls dead to the ground, as each soon will, the bulbils will grow fast from both bottom and top, rooting themselves deeply and sending up tall green stalks. If the winter isn’t too cold, we’ll be eating those green onions till next summer.

I had to search a bit last week to find bulbils that hadn’t yet sprouted. These I would pickle like pearl onions. Although I’ve used walking onions for decades in the same way as scallions (the greens) and shallots (the base), I’d never yet pickled the bulbils, which had tended to be small and so a pain to peel. But this year I had big bulbils, as big as an inch in diameter. I’d found their predecessors two years ago in an abandoned plot in the community garden, and I’d brought a couple of them home. The plants kept their big-bulbil habit. They would replace the walking onions I’d grown for two decades, with their much smaller bulbils.

Walking onions with flowers and secondary sprouts — Walking onions in June

As I explain in The Curious Kitchen Gardener, the walking onion is a sterile cross of the shallot and the bunching onion. It produces no seed and so never changes over time; plants you see today are genetically the same as the original cross, which could have happened hundreds of years ago. My new walking onion variety had apparently been selected not for its greens or bulbs but for the size of its bulbils.

A dish of walking-onion bulbils — Walking onion bulbils

I don’t know where my fellow gardener got her original bulbils, but I suspect they derived, ultimately, from the work of F. F. Merceron, a plant breeder in mid-nineteenth-century Pennsylvania. Merceron developed top-setting onions with bulbils in three colors: red, yellow, and white. The stalks of his walking onions were said to have grown as tall as five feet, and he promoted the bulbils for pickling. Named for Merceron’s home town, the Catawissa onions were a hit at the 1899 Paris Exhibition. My new walking onions, with their big bulbils, may have originated as Merceron’s Red Catawissa.

Pickled Walking-Onion Bulbils

Following French tradition, I’ve flavored my bulbils with tarragon. You might instead use thyme, savory, or dill, mustard or coriander or fennel seeds, or even sliced gingerroot. Rice vinegar or white wine vinegar will work as well as cider vinegar.

12 ounces walking-onion bulbils
1 cup cider vinegar
¼ cup water
1 teaspoon pickling salt
2 tablespoons sugar
1 small Mediterranean bay leaf
3 whole black peppercorns
¼ teaspoon chile flakes
1 sprig tarragon

Bring a pot of water to a boil, and blanch the bulbils for 30 seconds. Immediately drop the bulbils into ice-cold water. After 30 seconds, drain them, peel them, and trim off their ends.

In a saucepan, combine the vinegar, water, salt, and sugar. Bring the mixture to a boil.

While the liquid is heating, put the bay leaf, peppercorns, chile flakes, tarragon and bulbils into a pint jar.

When the pickling liquid comes to a boil, pour it into the jar. It should cover the bulbils completely. If you want to store your pickled bulbils in the pantry instead of the fridge, use a mason jar and two-piece cap, leave ½ inch headspace, and process the jar in a boiling-water bath for 10 minutes.

My jar of pickled walking-onion bulbils now awaits Thanksgiving, Christmas, or some other upcoming feast. I’ve shared smaller bulbils with the crowd at our local Tomato Fest, and I’ll share more with the garden club. Now it’s time to pluck those big sprouted bulbils and set them exactly where I want them to grow. If I don’t do this, they will take a walk—or, rather, a ride, falling with their stems to the ground—and take root wherever nature drops them.

Easy Ajvar, a Pepper-and-Eggplant Preserve from the Balkans

Whenever I shop at Russian, Romanian, Bulgarian, and even Lebanese ethnic markets, I look for the ajvar, a jarred pepper-and-eggplant condiment from the Balkan region. Most of these stores stock multiple brands and many varieties—smooth or chunky, piquant or not, with varying proportions of pepper and eggplant, and sometimes with added tomato. Traditionally, people from the lands of the former Yugoslavia make avjar each autumn, by roasting peppers and eggplants over an open fire, peeling them, grinding or chopping them, and then cooking down the mixture with garlic, oil, and salt before ladling it into jars. Ajvar preserves the seasonal bounty for eating throughout the winter.

Last week I found, under a pile of papers on my desk, a recipe I developed last year for a lazy woman’s ajvar. The discovery came at the perfect time, when I was bringing in armfuls of eggplants and more and more ripe peppers. With this recipe I wouldn’t have to make and tend a wood fire or even blacken fruits over a stovetop burner. I would roast both the peppers and the eggplants in the oven. Would I miss the flavor of wood smoke in my ajvar? No, because I would cheat, by adding just a little smoked paprika to the mix.

Roasting peppers not only intensifies their flavor but also makes it easy to remove thick skins. For ajvar, the people of the Balkans favor the roga (“horn”) pepper, a large, thick-skinned, elongated variety that resembles one I’ve developed in my own garden (I call it, imaginatively, Big-Long-Wide). Pimiento and ripe Anaheim peppers are good substitutes. The bigger the pepper, the easier it is to peel. But last week I used whatever sweet peppers happened to be ripe in my garden, including small ones. Rubbing the peppers with a bit of oil made them easier to peel after roasting.

Most of the peppers I used were yellow, and some were black rather than red. No matter—you can see from the picture above that my ajvar developed an appealing rust-red color.

The eggplants for this recipe can be of any kind. Mine weren’t of the globe type but were long and narrow or medium-wide and teardrop-shaped. Because all of them were relatively slender, they roasted completely in the same amount of time as the peppers. Globe eggplants such as Black Beauty would need to cook longer.

Although olives are a major product of the Balkan region, many areas are too cold for olive trees and so rely on sunflowers for oil. Unrefined sunflower oil has a strong flavor that may grow on you. You can find it in markets that sell eastern European foods. Make sure that what you buy is unrefined; refined oil is flavorless.

Ajvar is traditionally sealed in jars without further processing. The USDA, of course, would frown on that method but has not provided us with processing guidelines for a low-acid product like ajvar. So I freeze mine—if my husband and I don’t eat it right away.

Lazy Woman’s Ajvar

2 ½ pounds sweet peppers, such as pimiento or ripe Anaheim (the bigger, the better)
¼ cup olive oil or unrefined sunflower oil, plus a little for rubbing on the peppers
1 ¼ pounds eggplants, each stabbed with a fork in several places
1 medium head garlic, cloves separated and peeled
About 1 ½ teaspoons salt
About 1 tablespoon vinegar
About 2 pinches smoked paprika (such as pimentón de la Vera)

Heat the oven to 500 degrees F.

Line a roasting pan with foil. Rub each pepper with a little oil. Lay the peppers and eggplants in the pan. Roast the peppers for about 45 minutes, turning them occasionally, until the skins are shriveled and somewhat blackened and the flesh is tender. Transfer the peppers to a bowl, and cover it with a lid or plastic wrap.

The eggplants are ready when their flesh is completely softened. Cook them longer than the peppers if needed.

When the vegetables are cool enough to handle, cut open the eggplants and scrape the flesh into a bowl. Peel the peppers, discard their cores, and scrape out loose seeds with a spoon. Add the peppers to the bowl. With your hands or a slotted spoon, lift the peppers and eggplants into the bowl of a food processor. Strain the juice remaining into the processor bowl, discarding any seeds and bits of skin. Add the garlic. Process the mixture until smooth.

In a wide, heavy pan (I use an 11-inch cast-iron skillet), warm the oil. Add the vegetable purée, and simmer it over low heat, stirring often, for about 15 minutes. Toward the end of the cooking, add the salt, vinegar, and smoked paprika to taste. The ajvar is ready when it is quite thick.

Spoon the ajvar into glass or plastic containers, and refrigerate or freeze them. The ajvar will keep in the refrigerator for about a week.

Makes about 1 ½ pints

Pink Cauliflower and Black Republicans

Those of you in the Portland area might catch my talk on Thursday, June 11, at 7:00 p.m. at the Museum of the Oregon Territory. I’ll be discussing my book First Fruits: The Lewellings and the Birth of the Pacific Coast Fruit Industry. The museum is just a few miles up the Willamette River from where Henderson Lewelling planted his first orchard and where his brother Seth spent 46 years as a nurseryman, orchardist, and plant breeder. I hope a Lewelling descendant or two will attend!

I’ll be giving a similar talk on Saturday, June 13, at the Eugene Hotel, 222 East Broadway in Eugene, at 4:00 p.m. This time the host will be the Lane County Historical Museum, and entrance is free of charge.

If you can’t attend either of these events, you might listen to my interview with Feliks Banel, of the “Cascade of History” radio show.

After I finished writing First Fruits, I spent another year researching Seth Lewelling’s political views and activities. Anyone interested in Oregon’s racial politics before and after the Civil War will want to read my article “A Black Republican? Seth Lewelling and His Cherries,” available on the Academia.edu website.

Finally, here’s a recipe for you. I took the picture last January, but you might make the pickle now or in the coming weeks, since fresh local cauliflower is just coming into the market in the Pacific Northwest.

Pink pickled cauliflower is an eastern Mediterranean treat that can be made either with vinegar or through fermentation. Here I use the brine-pickling method. Beet or red cabbage turns the cauliflower pink. I love the firm texture and lurid color of the fermented florets.

Brine-Pickled Pink Cauliflower

1 pound cauliflower florets
½ teaspoon whole caraway, dill, or fennel seeds, or a combination
4 garlic cloves, peeled
1 Mediterranean bay leaf
1 small raw red beet, or a piece of a larger beet, cut into chunks
2 small dried hot peppers, slit lengthwise
2 ½ tablespoons pickling salt
1 quart water

In a 2-quart jar, mix the cauliflower, spices, garlic, bay, beet, and hot peppers. Dissolve the pickling salt in the water, and pour the liquid over the cauliflower. Weight the cauliflower (you might use a freezer-weight plastic bag filled with additional brine), cover the jar loosely, and let it stand at room temperature.

The cauliflower will need 5 to 7 days to sour. When the flavor suits you, the pickle is ready to eat. If you won’t serve it immediately, tightly cap the jar, and store it in the refrigerator.

Whence the Whipple?

The Whipple is a dry bush bean that’s pretty to look at—it’s maroon mottled with white—and said to be richly flavored. The bean is getting a lot of attention here in Oregon because it’s particularly well suited to our climate; it tolerates summer drought well and it dries down early, in time for harvest before the fall rains might cause it to rot. The Whipple was “a stand-out performer” in the Dry Farming Collaborative’s trials, held from 2017 through 2020. It’s such a tasty bean that it’s been added to the Rancho Gordo collection. So I’ve had it on my list to try in my own garden.

But I’ve been hearing crazy stories about this bean—that a pioneer family brought it over the Oregon Trail, and, contrarily, that it’s a favorite Southern heirloom. When my husband repeated the assertion, by a friend who grows the bean, that Martin Luther King loved to eat the Whipple whenever he was home in Atlanta, I had to find out the truth.

The woman who named the bean was pretty easy to find. On a short video available on the Internet, she has told the basic story of discovering and naming the Whipple bean. Though she is unnamed in the video, she is Marjory House, a longtime biodynamic farmer who lives near Cottage Grove, Oregon. She kindly told me the full tale of the Whipple bean as far as she has uncovered it.

Lee and Dana Whipple came to Oregon in the 1970s from Elgin, Illinois, where Lee had been a pastor for the Church of the Brethren, a pacifist Anabaptist denomination that holds the New Testament as its only creed. With other church members, Lee and Dana belonged to a family cooperative, through which they shared the work of raising their kids. During the Whipples’ time in Illinois, Martin Luther King Jr. came to Chicago to lead the Chicago Freedom Movement, which aimed to end slums and discrimination in housing. He arrived in January 1966 and stayed for a year. During this time, Dana told Marjory, Lee served as King’s secretary. But King never tasted the Whipple bean—at least not as far as Marjory knows.

Marjory met Dana Whipple in 1999, the year after Lee died. That’s when Marjory, then a fledgling farmer, arrived in Yoncalla to care for Dana and her farm. Dana was in her eighties, as were all the immediate neighbors, all of them Brethren. The Whipples and the other Brethren had come to the Umpqua Valley together to continue their cooperative arrangements (one, for example, designed houses for the rest). Lee founded a new Church of the Brethren congregation, in Springfield, served as a guest minister elsewhere, and traveled around the area talking to schoolchildren about Martin Luther King and the struggle against racism. Lee and Dana also kept a large garden, a vineyard (for juice, not wine), and an orchard. They devoted a whole room in their house to saving seeds.

Marjory found a bag of the speckled beans in a drawer in the seed room. She asked Dana about them. Dana didn’t have a name for them, but she said that she and Lee had grown them for about fifteen years. She said they were a prolific bush variety, “some type of cranberry bean.” This could be true; cranberry bean is a general term for beans first bred in Colombia as the cargamanto. But Marjory couldn’t find a cranberry bean that looked quite like this bean. So Marjory called it the Whipple.

A slight problem arose with the name: Douglas County had another Whipple family, whose ancestors had been much earlier Oregon homesteaders. Those Whipples came to Oregon in 1852 and 1853. Hence the notion that the Whipple bean came west on the Oregon Trail.

When Dana’s kids moved her to California, Marjory kept the bean seeds, and she grew them summer after summer. Each year, she shared some of the seeds with friends and at seed swaps. One year, about 2010, she planted all her remaining Whipple bean seeds at a new farm. Deer ate all the plants to the ground. Marjory was devastated, but the next year, at the Agrarian Sharing Network’s Spring Propagation Fair, Marjory found a big bag of Whipple beans. She’d given seeds to one person who had given them to another, and that person had saved plenty. Marjory got her beans back.

Without Marjory, the Whipple bean might never have been planted after 1999. Thanks to her and other seed savers, the beans are now popular among both gardeners and cooks in Oregon and beyond. For gardeners, the bean seeds are available from Adaptive Seeds and Siskiyou Seeds. For cooks, Rancho Gordo supplies the beans in 1-pound bags–when the beans are in stock, which they aren’t at this writing.

So you may have to grow your own. If you do, be sure to share some with other gardeners. And when you tell the story of the bean, get it right.

I would love to hear from people who have grown this bean, especially those who live outside of Oregon. How well has it performed for you?

Goodbye, 2025

Thank goodness the winter calm has given me a chance to finally post some news. Following are highlights from my garden this past fall and early winter.

My Christmas Eve tomato harvest. These are Sungolds, the extra-sweet hybrid tomato with a flavor reminiscent of tropical fruits. The plant was still producing in late December because we hadn’t yet had a killing frost (our average first-frost date used to be October 15, but now if you ask me the date I can only shake my head). The fruits I was picking were delicious—sweet, tart, and not at all bland or mealy—until December 30, when frost hit. I’d long since pulled out all my other tomato vines, weeks after they had stopped producing fruit and had turned black and rotten. Cool, rainy weather, not frost, sickened and killed those vines. The most extraordinary thing about the Sungold is its resistance to disease. I hope I always have it in my summer garden, even though I have to pay for the seeds.

Most generous fall crop. This is Florida Broadleaf mustard, said to be a Southern heirloom. I picked up the seeds at a swap and planted them, the first time, in ignorance. What a glorious surprise! The plants grow 3 feet fall before they begin to go to seed. Even the big leaves are tender and mild enough to eat raw in salads. Of course, this mustard is also good cooked; we had it today in black-bean soup. I should never plant more than four or five of the seeds, because we always have too much mustard. Before harvesting for dinner, I must ask, one leaf or two? I suppose the leaves might work pretty well in place of an umbrella. Though I don’t expect the plants to survive the winter, they have already withstood a frost with only slight damage.

Make my potatoes purple. Purple Peruvian potatoes are overtaking my garden, overwhelming even the Makah Ozettes, which the purples strongly resemble. Both these varieties produce big fingerlings with many, evenly distributed eyes and dense, mealy flesh. Both resist scab and other disease. In both Ozettes and Purple Peruvians, missed tubers easily survive the winter and start growing again in spring—or in fall, in the absence of freezing weather. Whereas the Ozettes have tan skins and white flesh, the purples are purple inside and out.

My favorite use for Purple Peruvians is mashing. Peeling them, though, is a lot of work, so I use my mother’s old ricer (that’s what she called it, even though she used it only for deseeding blackberries for jam). A food mill also does the job but cuts up much of the skins into tiny bits, which end up in the purée. As with Makah Ozettes, mashing Purple Peruvians requires more liquid and less potato than you would expect. Use all the water left in the pan from boiling the potatoes, and add plenty of hot milk and cream. Wait a minute or two, and check the thickness. You will probably need to add still more liquid.

I asked Bill Whitson, the plant breeder behind Cultivariable, to tell me the origins of the Purple Peruvian. Like the Ozette, the potato is genetically Chilean, not Peruvian. “It was most likely introduced to the USA from Europe (where it is known as Vitelotte Noire) in the nineteenth or early twentieth century,” Bill told me. “It is probably an heirloom variety from Chile.” For more about this potato, see Bill’s article “A Blue Potato by Any Other Name.”

Maxima pumpkin for Halloween. Jack o’ lantern pumpkins are normally Cucurbita pepo, with slender, hard stems, big seed cavities, and, usually, stringy flesh lacking in sweetness. But when you have an overabundance of Cucurbita maxima–the species that includes Sweet Meat, Buttercup, and Hubbard squashes—why should you spend money on a pumpkin fit only for pigs? A Maxima pumpkin carved into a jack o’ lantern doesn’t have to go to waste. You glean most of the flesh by scraping the inside, for a thinner wall and better lighting once you place a candle inside. You glean the rest of the flesh the day after Halloween, when you remove the candle and any wax drippings, cut the pumpkin into several pieces, and put them on a pan for baking. I think I steamed the scrapings. You might instead cook the scrapings in a pot with a little water.

Don’t ask me exactly what variety you see here. It was probably a cross that sprouted on its own. But the fruit was sweet, creamy, and delicious, and it made excellent soup for All Saints’ Day.

Happy new year to all!

One Pretty Pumpkin, Warts and All

The big, warty salmon-pink pumpkin surprised me when it appeared in my community garden plot this year. I couldn’t remember planting the seed. I must have, though, because rolling around my brain was the variety name—Galeux d’Eysines, or Scabby from Eysines. I found the fruit stunningly beautiful, and I was happy it was growing where so many people could admire it.

This Cucurbita maxima variety was developed in Eysines, a farming community near Bordeaux, in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. It apparently wasn’t introduced to the United States until 1996, when Amy Goldman found it at a potiron fair in Tranzault, a tiny town in the center of France (Amy loves squashes so much that she wrote a book about them and sculpts them besides).

Some Americans are now calling Galeux d’Eysines the peanut pumpkin, not only because peanut pumpkin is easier to pronounce but because the warts on this squash are, in their size, color, and ridges, reminiscent of dried peanut shells.

Although Galeux d’Eysines may be the world’s wartiest squash, many squashes are warty. I can’t tell you why. Gardeners like to say that the warts emerge from an excessive buildup of sugar in the flesh. But I can find no scientific verification of this notion, and, in fact, when I tasted the insides of a Galeux d’Eysines wart I didn’t taste any sweetness at all.

Now I remember where I got the seed I planted last spring. Three years ago I bought a Galeux d’Eysines squash at a market. Because seed catalogs raved about the flavor—“one of the tastiest squashes I have tried” (Baker Creek), “silky smooth, fiber-free” (Everwilde Farms)—I was disappointed to find mine watery and insipid. I wondered if perhaps I’d cut into it too early or too late, since some squashes improve with keeping and others deteriorate quickly. I saved a few seeds so I could sample another fruit or two later.

This year, my vine produced two fruits—the usual yield, according to the catalogs. The bigger fruit, pictured here, weighed more than 20 pounds. Its flesh was a beautiful bright orange, its seed cavity small, and its seeds rather few (and too big and tough to eat). I cut the squash in half, roasted one half, and gave the other half to a neighbor.

Again, I was disappointed: The flesh was watery, only mildly sweet, and somewhat stringy. It became silky-smooth only after I put it through the food mill.

Still, with the milled flesh I made a delicious curried squash soup with coconut milk. My neighbor was happy with her similar-looking soup. If you like puréed soup, this may be the squash for you.

But its use is limited. To make it into pie you have to drain off some of the water. If you want to stir-fry it, well, forget it.

The greatest virtue of the Galeux d’Eysines, I concluded, is its appearance. My bigger fruit made a lovely porch ornament all through October and November. If I had plenty of garden space, I would grow Galeux d’Eysines every year, just for the pleasure of looking at it. But for me it could never replace denser, sweeter squash varieties like butternut, red kuri, and Sweet Meat. With plenty of those fruits, come winter, I wouldn’t feel guilty about throwing Galeux d’Eysines to the pigs—if I had pigs. Thank goodness that at least I have neighbors.

Gathering the Garlic

Every year the garlic harvest seems to come a little earlier than the last. This year I harvested on June 14, despite on-and-off rain. I couldn’t wait any longer; on some heads the cloves were already pushing outward, which will lead to early sprouting, and rust spots were beginning to appear on some leaves. The rain was likely to continue for at least another day. Here in western Oregon June is normally a nearly dry month, with an average of only an inch and a half of rain. But what’s normal anymore? Last year I harvested during a downpour.

I worked as fast as I could, using only my hands to lift the heads—the soil is that light. Light soil makes for clean garlic, provided that the soil is dry, as it should be by harvest time. But this time my garlic heads were covered in mud. I washed them in a bucket so I could pour the dirt soup back into the bed, and then I gave the heads a final rinse with a garden hose. You have to clean the base of each head thoroughly if you plan to keep the pretty rootlets but don’t want to contaminate your kitchen workspace with soil (which could lead to a risk of botulism, depending on how you store the food you’re preparing). Thankfully, the rain stopped long enough for the clean garlic to dry in the sun for an hour or two before I had to hurry to carry it indoors.

Now the garlic is drying further on the pool table in the basement. This isn’t the ideal place to dry garlic; last year I lost some of the heads to rot. But I’ll keep the windows open and turn the garlic twice a day, and in a few weeks I’ll make some beautiful braids. I think we’re set for garlic for the coming year.

Finishing the garlic harvest always seems like cause for celebration. The best way to celebrate is with an aioli platter—bread and boiled eggs, potatoes, and other vegetables with a bowl of aioli (a Provençal word; it’s alioli in Spain), mayonnaise’s simple—and, I think—superior, garlicky ancestor.

Most Americans make aioli or mayonnaise with flavorless vegetable oil, but I like to use extra-virgin olive oil or even roasted hazelnut oil. The latter is unusual but irresistible. I use a whole egg instead of the traditional yolk so that I can make the aioli quickly with a hand blender. Alternatively, you could use two yolks. If you have no hand blender, use just one yolk and add the oil drop by drop, beating constantly with a whisk.

If you’re worried about the risk of salmonella from eating raw eggs, use a pasteurized egg.

Aioli

Vary the number of garlic cloves depending on their size and pungency. Fresh-dug garlic is sometimes really hot!

1 whole egg
1 to 3 peeled garlic cloves, chopped
¼ to ½ teaspoon fine salt, to taste
2/3 to ¾ cup roasted hazelnut oil or extra-virgin olive oil

Put the egg, garlic, and salt into a tall and narrow container. Begin blending on high with a hand blender. Pour in the oil gradually, and keep blending until the mixture is uniform and quite thick. Chill the aioli until you’re ready to eat.

Red Orach Leaves as Salad-Roll Wrappers

Every year red orach comes up here and there in my garden, and usually it goes right to seed, sending up a stalk at least three feet tall that bears opposite pairs of two- to three-inch heart-shaped leaves. I could pinch back the top of each plant to encourage it to bush out, but I haven’t bothered. The small leaves are never bitter or tough, and they are perfect for adding whole to green salads.

Orach—the word almost rhymes with borage–is Atriplex hortensis, an ancient Eurasian herb in the amaranth family that comes in green, red, and “white,” or bright yellow-green. The plant is related to spinach and chard and tastes like both, only much milder, with barely a touch of sourness. Given plenty of water, the plant can grow as tall as six feet. I’ve never managed to grow orach neatly in rows, but I always let at least one plant self-sow. The seeds, in their flat, papery husks, apparently spread themselves among the garden beds, and just enough of them manage to sprout. I welcome the spot of red color—the only color I’ve grown—wherever it appears, especially when the wind comes up and exposes the leaves’ fuchsia undersides.

Something different about the weather this year has slowed the orach’s race to seed production, and now I appreciate the plant more than ever. It has formed lettuce-like heads with big leaves, about five inches across. Yesterday, as I considered what to make for dinner, I knew these big leaves were probably the only ones I would get; the plants were already beginning to bolt. So, dinner had to include orach salad rolls.

I picked eight big orach leaves, trimmed out the lower part of the midribs, and rolled each leaf around bean-thread noodles, pickled threads of carrot, mint leaves, and salad shrimp. This was much easier than making salad rolls with rice-paper wrappers; the leaves proved to be at once sturdy and flexible. For accompaniment, I made a sweet peanut-chile sauce.

I didn’t check my watch, but I’ll bet that Robert and I ate the whole stack of salad rolls in less than three minutes.

RED ORACH SALAD ROLLS
Serves 4 normal people

Quick Carrot Pickle
2 tablespoons rice vinegar
1½ teaspoon sugar
¼ teaspoon fine salt
1 medium-large carrot

Sweet Peanut-Chile Sauce
1 tablespoon peanut butter
3 tablespoons Thai sweet chile sauce
About 1 tablespoon rice vinegar
About ¼ teaspoon fine salt

Two bunches bean-thread noodles
8 large orach leaves
Handful fresh mint leaves (I used a Vietnamese variety, but spearmint is good)
½ cup (cooked and peeled) salad shrimp

Carrot Pickle: In a wide bowl, stir together the rice vinegar, sugar, and salt. Cut the carrot into thin sticks. You can do this by slicing it diagonally and then cutting the slices thin lengthwise, but the tool shown here makes the job quicker. Toss the carrot in the seasoned vinegar. The sticks will quickly lose their stiffness.

Sweet Peanut-Chile Sauce: Put the peanut butter into a small serving bowl. With a fork, mix in the Thai sweet chile sauce. Loosen the sauce with rice vinegar, and season the sauce with salt.

In a large saucepan, heat water to a boil. Cook the bean-thread noodles briefly, until they are tender, separating them with chopsticks or another tool as they begin to soften. Drain the noodles, and rinse them well with cold water.

Cut out about 1 inch of the lower, thicker midrib from each orach leaf. Lay the leaves, one at a time, upside-down on your work surface. Top each leaf with a portion of the noodles, carrot, mint, and shrimp, and roll the leaf from the base to the tip. Place the roll seam-side down on a plate. Make the rest of the rolls the same way.

For garnish, borage blossoms provide an interesting color contrast.

More Fun with Jerusalem Artichokes

Once again, about a week ago, I dug into the roots of my Jerusalem artichokes, isolated in a corner of the yard where they get no water that doesn’t fall from the sky, and confined by the landscape fabric I spread to keep the Bermuda grass from invading from two neighbors’ yards.

Once again I found a bounty. I loaded the roots into a galvanized washtub and hosed them clean. And then I wondered how Robert and I would eat them all—and how we could do it while avoiding “a filthy loathsome stinking wind,” as John Goodyer described the roots’ aftereffects in 1621.¹

The same day I roasted some of the roots—in the way you would usually roast vegetables, but slower, at 350 degrees F for two hours. The long cooking, I figured, might make the inulin-rich roots more digestible. It did not—but what a delicious dish! The chunks turned out crunchy on the outside and soft and candy-sweet on the inside. Robert thought they would make an excellent side for roast beef.²

Most of the roots were still sitting in colanders on the kitchen counter when my digestion returned to normal.³ Again they tempted me. I remembered how tasty baked artichoke chips were, the last time I made them. No doubt artichoke chips would be even tastier fried. They would be less trouble to cook that way, and I could quickly use up a large quantity of roots. In the end I was glad I’d cooked a lot, because the chips shrank substantially; they lost two-thirds of their weight. They turned out curled and brown, a sweet, salty, crisp, greasy delight. They still have gassy powers, but we haven’t suffered much as long as we’ve restricted ourselves to a handful a day. (This takes discipline. The chips are addictive!)

Advocates of vinegar pickling Jerusalem artichokes insist that they won’t cause gas if they’re first boiled and then soaked in vinegar. I suspect the vinegar works simply by slowing consumption. Boiling, however, actually reduces the inulin in the roots; Harold McGee, in The Curious Cook (1990), also advises this method. In fact, inulin is highly soluble in water. It must be the inulin that makes the bubbles appear strangely large when you boil Jerusalem artichokes; the stuff apparently acts as a surfactant. McGee boiled his Jerusalem artichokes for fifteen minutes and figured he had drawn out 40 to 50 percent of the “indigestibles”—the powdery residue left in the pan after he had boiled off the water.

Unfortunately, I don’t like the taste of boiled Jerusalem artichokes. The roots are much tastier raw, roasted, or fried. Judiciously combined with other vegetables, though, Jerusalem artichokes can add appeal. So I boiled some of the roots to mix with mashed potatoes. I routinely boil potatoes as my mother and grandmother did, with only a little water, so the pan ends up dry when the potatoes are ready and no nutrients are lost in the water. To reduce the inulin in the Jerusalem artichokes, though, I gave them a different treatment: I put them into a separate pan, covered them with water, boiled them for about fifteen minutes, and then discarded all the water. The artichokes don’t soften as potatoes do, but if you peel them before or after boiling them (peeling them first is more trouble but may help them shed more inulin) you can force them through a ricer like the one shown here.³Without drawing too much attention to themselves, the Jerusalem artichokes nicely sweetened the starchy, dry Makah Ozette potatoes.⁴(The Jerusalem artichoke announced its presence more aggressively, but tolerably, some hours later.)

I boiled more Jerusalem artichokes to make a purée to store in the freezer. This time I used a blender, and blended the roots with fresh water instead of the water from the pan. I hope the purée will combine well in a potage with leeks, celery, and other vegetables as well as potatoes.

Here are my recipes for the roasted roots and fried chips. I hope you enjoy them—in moderation, of course!

Fried Jerusalem Artichoke Chips

6 cups cold water
3 tablespoons fine salt
3 pounds Jerusalem artichokes (not peeled)

Put the water into a bowl, and stir in the salt. Slice the Jerusalem artichokes 2 millimeters thick (use a mandoline, if you have one). Drop the slices into the brine as you work. Let the slices soak in the brine for about 4 hours.

Drain the Jerusalem artichoke slices in a colander, and then fry them in batches in oil heated to 350 degrees F. Move them around in the oil every now and then so they cook evenly. When they are shrunken, curled, and lightly browned, they are ready. This should take about 4 minutes. Drain them on paper towels, paper bags, or newspaper.

Roasted Jerusalem Artichokes

1½ pounds Jerusalem artichokes, cut into chunks (not peeled)
1 large sprig fresh rosemary (optional)
2 tablespoons olive oil
½ teaspoon kosher salt
A few grindings black pepper

Heat the oven to 350 degrees F. Put the Jerusalem artichokes into a baking dish with the rosemary, if you’re using it. Pour over the olive oil, and toss. Sprinkle over the salt and pepper. Bake the artichokes for about 2 hours, until they are brown on the outside and tender on the inside.

1. John Gerard’s Herball. Actually, Goodyer exaggerated. The “wind” is not filthy or stinking, just noisy and somewhat painful.

2. Harold McGee, in The Curious Cook, advises steaming Jerusalem artichokes in an oven at 200 degrees F for 24 hours to break down the inulin into fructose. To me that would seem an extravagant use of fuel, and anyhow his artichokes turned out black.

3. This is not the best way to store Jerusalem artichokes. They should at least be refrigerated; it’s best, in fact, to store them at just above freezing. They also need high humidity during storage. Some people pack them in moist sand or soil in a box or bucket set in a cool place. Alternatively, you can simply leave them in the ground, and dig them out only as you need them, until approximately the end of March.

4. This ricer seems made for Makah Ozette potatoes. Because of their many, deep-set eyes, peeling Ozettes before cooking them wastes too much potato flesh. Peeling them after cooking is too difficult, and burned fingers can ruin your mood. Not peeling the potatoes at all makes for an ugly, uneven mash. But with a ricer you end up with a perfectly smooth mash. The clean skins are left behind, flattened against the screen of the ricer.

The Multiple Lives of a Jack o’Lantern

Because yesterday afternoon was warm and sunny, Robert carved the jack o’lanterns on the deck while I cut back the caneberries. “Do you want to use any of this flesh?” he yelled. He likes to scrape the walls of the pumpkins so thin that the candlelight glows through them.

“Taste it!”

“Raw pumpkin?”

Taste it!”

It was sweet, delicious. I’d suspected would be, when I bought it at the produce market up the highway. This pumpkin was a deeper orange than the others, and heavier for its size. The cashier told me it weighed more than the much larger pumpkin I’d brought from the bin a minute earlier. This one might be tastier, too, I told her.

“You eat Halloween pumpkins?”

Usually, I explained, I put them into the compost or bury them in a raised bed. But if they are sweet and dense and not stringy, certainly I eat them. I didn’t mention the seeds, which we would roast and eat regardless, or the high price I’d be paying for compost-to-be if we didn’t eat any part of the pumpkins.

The trick-or-treating started out slow. Families in costume walked slowly by the house, gazing at the lit jack o’lanterns but not coming up the walk. During a pandemic, it’s hard to know if you’re being too presumptuous in knocking on a stranger’s door. So I made a sign—“Trick-or-Treaters Welcome”—and stuck it on a brick porch post. And the kids started coming. Each time they did, I pulled on my plague mask, a black cotton bird’s beak stuffed with tissue paper (herbs would make me sneeze), to which I’d affixed goggles cut from black felt. While Robert pulled open the door, I extended the broomstick to which he had hung a basket, now filled with candy.

Between trick-or-treating groups, we munched roasted pumpkin seeds and I checked the big pot full of pumpkin flesh on the stove. I let the cooking finish with the lid off, so excess water would steam away.

This morning I pressed the cooked pumpkin through the food mill, but that turned out to be an unnecessary step: The flesh was string-free. But now it was a fine purée, ready for a pie—except that it was still pretty watery. I could freeze it as it was and use it for soup, but I had pie on my mind. So I dumped the purée into a fine strainer, and waited a few minutes before packing the purée into freezer containers. I was about to pour the pumpkin water into the compost, but then I tasted it. It wasn’t just water. It was orange and sweet and tasty. It went into the fridge to await its future in a soup or stew.

Robert brought in the little jack o’lantern and took over at the butcher block. He is cutting away the peel, slicing the flesh into chunks, and filling the big pot again. We will have plenty of pumpkin for pie—not butternut or kabocha but genuine jack o’lantern pumpkin, pumpkin that did its duty on an old-fashioned Halloween night.