Like the planting calendars my friends shared with me, my planting calendar is a product of record keeping. As each new planting year begins, I look back at when I’ve planted in past years.  Each year is a little different, influenced by the weather pattern that year but also by travel plans.  There’s a pretty big window for planting many of the vegetables I like and looking back on planting records, I see that I’ve taken advantage of those windows.  A reassuring guide to planting times is this chart on West Coast Seeds website: http://www.westcoastseeds.com/admin/files/2011PlantingChart.pdf

Last year and the year before, I planted seeds of onions, shallots, sugar snap peas, lettuce, radicchio, fennel, broccoli, and cauliflower indoors in flats in mid-February.  This year I’m delaying any planting until the end of February because I’m traveling a lot this month.  Happily, I can look farther back in my planting records and see that there were years when I planted these crops as late as early March and still had a good growing season.

A week from today I’ll be home for a long stretch and can plant in flats indoors my list of cool weather crops as well as tomatoes.  And with the extra day of this leap year, I’ll be able to record February 29^th as the first planting date for 2012!

A friend has just given me some Meyer lemons from a backyard tree in Berkeley, CA, a treat we look forward to when Mary comes back from visiting her mom there. Meyer lemon vinaigrette on lightly roasted Brussels sprouts sounded perfect.  I pulled the outer leaves from the sprouts, quartered them because they were quite large, tossed them in a little olive oil, spread them out on a sheet pan and put them in a 400-degree oven.  They were crisp/soft in five or six minutes.

While they were roasting, I removed the zest from a lemon, squeezed out the juice and added it to the zest, added about a tablespoon of diced shallot, a dash of salt and some grinds of pepper and whisked in enough olive oil to make a thick dressing.  While the sprouts were still warm, I poured the dressing over them.  They were delicious warm and I knew they would be just as good at room temperature.

And the leeks?  Since the oven was already hot, roasting the leeks made sense too.  I cut them in half, arranged them on a sheet pan, oiled them lightly and roasted them at about 375 until they were soft, about half an hour.  Even the darker green upper shafts softened and released delicious leek flavor.  Their mild onion sweetness was a perfect pairing for the lemony, earthy Brussels sprouts.  Together, they looked and tasted like spring.  What a gift from these hardy, long-season winter vegetables.

Leeks and Brussels sprouts begin their long growing season just as spring is ending in late May and early June.  As I wrote in an earlier post, I start leeks in late May and they are ready to harvest in October: http://lopezislandkitchengardens.wordpress.com/2011/08/05/growing-leeks/.

I start Brussels sprouts around the first week of June, planting the seed indoors in pots, hardening them off about a month later and setting them out in the garden two feet apart in two rows thirty inches apart. I cover them with Reemay for several weeks to prevent maggot flies from laying eggs at the base of the plants.  I also mulch them heavily once the plants are established and water them regularly. They grow steadily until fall when I begin harvesting them after the first frost.  They survive winter temperatures in the high teens, but when it’s that cold I often cover them with a tarp, probably more for my sense of security than the plant’s needs.  Varieties that have grown well in my garden are Vancouver, Diablo, Gustus and, a new addition for this year that I’ll repeat, Nautic, pictured in the photo below.

Aphids can attack Brussels sprouts plants, working their way into the sprouts, but they haven’t been a problem in my garden, perhaps because I plant Brussels sprouts relatively late, following a suggestion I read in a West Coast Seed catalog years ago.

One additional step I’ve tried this year is “topping” them, cutting out the growing tip of the plant at the end of the summer.  Many seed catalogs suggest doing this in order to direct all the plant energy to filling out the sprouts already formed along the stock but I had never gotten around to it.  This year, I topped some and left others for comparison.  The topped plants definitely formed bigger sprouts all the way up the stalk to the truncated top.  Those plants that weren’t topped have continued to produce tasty, slightly flattened sprouts up to the growing tip as in the photo above.  This coming year, I’ll probably top most but not all of the plants.

It’s still several months before I’ll be planting the next year’s crops of leeks and Brussels sprouts.  In the meantime, I’ll enjoy these winter vegetables disguised as spring vegetables or back in their winter roles if winter returns.

Last Saturday my friend Carol and I went to the 3^rd Annual Heritage Seed Exchange on Orcas Island.  As the poster says, and as Ginger Moore, one of the volunteer organizers told me, everyone was welcome, with or without seeds to share or experience saving seeds.  I was bringing some bean seeds I’d saved and Carol had some unusual herbs and tubers she had potted up. We had high hopes for what we might find in exchange.  On the boat over, we met up with Jeanie and Nancy, two other Lopez seed lovers who shared our anticipation.

In the West Sound Community Hall, long tables were covered with seed packets organized by the degree of experience needed to save each seed variety. Each table also had a sign-in sheet so that people who brought seeds to share could leave the names of the seeds they brought and their name, phone or email so that people who took the seeds could reach them if they needed more information.

In her introductory remarks, Heritage Seed Exchange organizer and Orcas seed saver Ronda Jones emphasized the importance of saving seeds as a way to maintain local stocks of seeds and to counter the consolidation of seed companies and their frightening pattern of dropping old varieties and promoting genetically modified seeds.  She reminded us to plan to save seeds of those we take and plant and bring some to the exchange next year.

Going first to the bean table, Carol and I were delighted to find locally grown seeds of Bonds Orcas white runner bean, a bean we suspect is related to one of my favorite beans, a white runner my late neighbor Frances Kring gave me years ago, telling me that all old-timers grew it.  We also found seeds of a Sicilian Fava bean that Ronda Jones grew from seeds given to her by a friend in Italy.  These are a purple fava and Ronda told me I’d like them even better than the green Broad Windsor.  I can’t wait to try them.  At another table, I found parsnip seeds, described as a fifth generation Orcas seed.  I’m a big parsnip fan so this was another great find.

In addition to locally grown seeds, there were open-pollinated and heirloom seeds donated by the Heritage Seed Exchange sponsors Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company, Seed Savers Exchange and Southern Exposure Seed Exchange and seeds from Territorial Seeds and Greenheart Gardens, a Lopez Island Seed Company.  The Organic Seed Alliance (http://www.seedalliance.org/Home/), based in Port Townsend, also had a table displaying their literature.

This Orcas Island Heritage Seed Exchange is just one of several local opportunities to share seeds and seed saving experiences with other gardeners.  On Sunday, February 12 in Anacortes, the group Eat Your Yard is offering a seed exchange at the Senior Activities Center at 3:00: http://www.goanacortes.com/calendar/event/3474/.

On Lopez Island, the grand opening of the Lopez Community Land Trust Seed Library will take place February 25th as part of the 2012 Food Charette. “This seed library is committed to providing our community with island appropriate open source seeds, fostering community resilience, self-reliance and a culture of sharing.” (http://www.lopezclt.org/seed-library-2/)  As part of their work, the Seed Library has also offered a workshop on how to save seeds.

I’m not a very experienced seed saver, confident only with those seeds that are easy to save, like beans and peppers, but I’m inspired to gain more experience.  Suzanne Ashworth’s book Seed to Seed: Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners is where I’m going to start.

Some names are new to me, varieties I’m trying this year for the first time.  Others are familiar from last year, ordered again because they were great.  And finally there are old favorites I reorder every few years.  In the quiet of my study, as I organize seed packets by planting date, it’s lovely to imagine the garden time and the meals that lie ahead.

In less than a month I’ll be planting Red Round turnip, a colorful new companion to white Oasis that I’ve planted for the past few years and loved.  And I’m adding new radishes—multi-colored Easter Egg, red and white French Breakfast and green-outside-red-inside Red Meat, aka Watermelon Radish—to my standard Cherry Bells.  Radishes tasted really good last year and I’m looking forward to eating more this year.

I’m planting kohlrabi for the first time in years, Kolibri and Early White Vienna, just a short row it see how it tastes.

Indoors over the next few months I’ll start some new varieties of tomato, eggplant, winter squash and pumpkin. In my ongoing search for the perfect cherry tomato, I’m trying Gardener’s Delight, parent of Sweet 100, an old favorite.  And in the search for a wonderful paste tomato, I’m trying Vilms, reputed to have excellent flavor and roasting potential.  For a new eggplant, I ordered Galine, an early, purple bell-shaped variety to join favorites Diamond and Rosa Bianca. Eastern Rise and Nutty Delica are two new winter squash varieties to plant with my favorites Buttercup, Sibley and Delicata.  And for something completely new, I’m trying Kakai pumpkin for its hull-less seeds and the promise of roasted pepitas.

Outdoors when real spring comes to stay, I’m planting a new corn variety, Spring Treat, to compare to my standard Seneca Horizon and, showing remarkable restraint, I ordered only one new bean this year: Silver Cloud Cannellini, advertised as an “absolutely superb shell bean.”

For the winter garden, I’m trying a Canadian rutabaga variety, Laurentian, and a wild arugula, Sylvetta.

Among last year’s new varieties that I’m repeating this year are Lancer and Javelin parsnips, winners for quick and even germination and rich sweetness.  Another new variety I tried last year and will plant again is Nautic Brussels Sprouts, cold hardy and delicious.  And Rattlesnake pole bean and Drabo dry bush bean were tasty additions to last year’s beans and two to plant again.

Finally, old favorites that I reordered this year are the original Sugarsnap snap pea for its perfect pea flavor; Mokum carrots, crisp and sweet at all sizes; Purplette onion for spring onion roasting and Copra and Redwing onions for winter storage; King Sieg and Bleu de Solaize leeks for their winter hardiness; Gourmet pepper for a sweet and spicy orange bell; Brandywine tomato for classic tomato flavor; and Indigo radicchio, pleasantly bitter grilled or sliced raw.

For all my other favorite vegetables, I have enough seeds left from past year’s orders or seeds I’ve saved, so I’m set for now.  Then again, it’s still early in the seed-buying season and there are more catalogs, websites, and friends’ recommendations to tempt me.

Growing a winter kitchen garden in our marine northwest climate is a gamble, but it’s one I’m willing to take because the odds are pretty good that the season’s days and nights will be temperate more often than they will be bitter cold. Still, I don’t want to risk losing when nature deals out temperatures in the low twenties or teens so I do what I can to beat the cold. I pile extra hay onto the already mulched beds of winter vegetables and cover it with lumber wrap*, weighting down the wrap at the edges with rocks.

I sound pretty confident, but actually each time I’m faced with serious cold I’m totally anxious, uncertain whether the extra hay mulch and the sheets of lumber wrap will work this time. Could I have added a little more mulch?  What if it gets really windy and the lumber wrap blows off despite all the rocks I’ve piled on the edges? Gambling is stressful.

But sometimes nature deals me snow along with cold. While lumber wrap and hay alone do work, a blanket of snow insulation on top of what I’ve already spread out really increases the odds in my favor.

For the past several days, I’ve looked out on the winter kitchen garden covered by this latest storm’s snow. The beds planted with winter vegetables reveal lumpy clues to what I’m betting is still alive.  Blanketed in snow, lumber wrap and hay, Brussels sprouts and kale still stand tall; turnips, rutabaga, beets, celery root and leeks rise unevenly; parsnips and carrots lie flat.  The cold frame and cloches are mostly snow covered, with just a bit of snow slipping from their peaks.

It’s tempting open the cold frame or to dig down through the snow, lift an edge of lumber wrap and get a reassuring glimpse of healthy green but until temperatures rise above the low twenties I’ll resist disturbing the snow blanket.  Instead, I’ll watch the thermometer and the forecast.  Temperatures edging up toward the high twenties will mean I can start harvesting again.  And temperatures above freezing mean this week’s snow could be gone in two or three more days.

This morning, the thermometer read 32 so I headed out to the garden.  The snow had gone from light and fluffy to heavy and wet. It took a while to remove enough of it that I could lift the wrap and free the plants.  They were a little beaten down from the weight of the snow but they were green and have already bounced back.  Once more, the gamble has been worth it.

* Lumber wrap is the woven plastic material that lumber companies use to wrap lumber for shipping and storage.  Over the years, I’ve saved lengths of it from various building projects.

Seeing celery root for the first time in a winter vegetable garden, it’s easy to imagine that the leafy green, stalk-like tops are the edible parts.  They do look a lot like celery, but in fact they are tough and bitter.  The part to eat is the gnarly-looking, softball-sized bulb that sits beneath the stalks and above the soil line.

Loosen and pull it from the ground and there’s another surprise.  Celery root is not a single root like carrots, parsnips or turnips.  Instead, a wild tangle of inedible roots covers the bottom of the bulb.  To get to the tasty bulb, you need to cut away both the celery-like top (no more celery) and root-covered bottom (no more roots).  Its other name, celeriac, is much less misleading.

I discovered celery root/celeraic in books on winter gardening when I moved to the northwest thirty years ago. Once I became aware of it, I started noticing intriguing recipes for it in cookbooks and magazines, inspiration for putting some effort into figuring out how to grow this odd-looking but delicious winter vegetable.

Over the years, I’ve learned that celery root is not difficult to grow here in the marine northwest but it does take a long time to mature.  I start seeds indoors around the end of March and set seedlings out in the garden in mid-May.  By late September the bulbs are mature, weighing one to two pounds trimmed, but I usually wait until we’ve had a frost or two to harvest it because celery root is one of the many winter vegetables that is sweeter after a frost.

The seeds are a bit smaller than carrot seeds and germinate slowly and unevenly over several weeks.  I start them in 2” pots filled with fine potting soil, planting two or three seeds per pot, covering them lightly, setting the pots on a heat mat and keeping the soil moist.  My goal is to have forty plants to set out so I plant that many pots and thin to the strongest plant in each pot.  When they are about three inches tall, I harden them off and set them out in the garden eight inches apart in rows one foot apart.  I’ve learned that the plants won’t thrive if nighttime temperatures stay cool so I usually cover the new transplants with Reemay for the first month or so.

The transplants grow slowly but steadily over the summer.  I mulch them once they are established and then the only thing I need to do until fall harvest is to keep them well watered.  Some sources I’ve read suggest that if they dry out or are watered unevenly, they can become bitter.  Aside from this watering requirement, they are like so many winter vegetables: trouble and pest-free.

I prefer to leave them in the ground rather than pick and store them all so in late fall I mulch them very heavily, piling old hay up over the bulbs and around the stems.  If temperatures in the low twenties are forecast, I’ll cover them with lumber wrap and if temperatures in the teens are forecast I’ll pile more hay over the lumber wrap.  This cold protection is a bit of a fuss but it’s worth it to have this tasty vegetable in the kitchen garden all winter long.

For the last several years, my favorite way to fix celery root has been to turn it into raw salads.  After cutting the bulb in half and slicing off the thick outer skin, I cut the creamy white inner flesh into matchstick-sized strips, toss them in cider or white wine vinegar to which I’ve added diced shallots, salt and perhaps some Dijon mustard and let them sit for an hour or so.  For a pound and a half of celery root, I use a quarter cup of vinegar, half a teaspoon of sea salt, one to two tablespoons of minced shallot and a tablespoon of Dijon mustard.  Some recipes suggest blanching the celery root pieces for a minute in boiling water first, but I’ve found that simply marinating works better to slightly soften the strips but keep their crispness.  Celery root does discolor unless it’s put in a vinegar marinade or a lemon juice and water mixture soon after cutting so I make the marinade first.

Add some olive oil and you have a simple salad that features the nutty, subtly sweet celery and parsley flavors of celery root.  For a richer experience, add some mayonnaise and heavy cream to create the classic French remoulade.  For more flavors and visual interest, however, I often add diced apples, skins still on for color, maybe some toasted hazelnuts or pecans, some crumbled Gorgonzola or blue cheese if I have it, some chopped parsley or some mache.  The mix of crisp and crunchy textures and nutty, sweet and sharp flavors makes a perfect winter salad.

But celery root is wonderful cooked too.  One classic recipe I return to at least once a winter is Alice Waters’ Delicata Squash, Potato and Celery Root Puree from Chez Panisse Vegetables (1996).  It’s sweet and softly orange from the squash, earthy from the potatoes and mysteriously nutty from the celery root.  This Christmas I served it with a pork roast and apples sautéed with onions.

As this recipe shows, celery root blends well with other winter vegetables—squash, potatoes, turnips, carrots, leeks—in purees and also in soups. Mixed with winter roots and roasted its flavor adds another earthy note.  It’s also delicious by itself roughly mashed, pureed or roasted in chunks or slices. Google recipes for celery root and you’ll find pages of inspiration.

And if you’re inspired to try growing celery root this year, the most available variety is Brilliant.  I get my seeds from Fedco whose catalog description will convince you to try it if this post hasn’t already.

Why We Grow Vegetable Gardens

For all of us who grow vegetable gardens, the New Year is a good time to pause and consider why we choose to spend our time planting and harvesting food.  There’s the food, of course, but as a sampling of Lopez gardeners reveals, there’s also a sense of self-reliance and most of all there’s the garden itself.

But first to the food: “The obvious reason to grow a vegetable garden is to have fresh and delicious organic produce, especially the types that are either highly perishable (raspberries, lettuce) or mysteriously expensive (leeks, artichokes, kale). Be careful, though—our children now have expensive tastes and turn up their noses at pesto from the market.”

Others agree: “there’s the intense flavor.”  “Homegrown food just tastes better.  I’ll always remember the first time I ate a sweet pepper from my garden (it was a sweet banana).  It was so crisp, juicy, so flavorful.  The tastes can spoil you.”

And, others add, there are the health benefits of eating homegrown food.  “As more information continues to surface on chemical contamination and GMOs (“Frankenstein Foods”), I feel so blessed to be relatively free of those threats to my body.”

Freedom, security, and independence: these are more reasons people grow their own food.  “I love the security of not being dependent on other sources for my food. Truthfully, I have always possessed a ‘doomsday’ mentality. Not in a morbid, fearful way but simply in a non-dependence on the ‘system’ way.”

Another considers herself “more of a subsistence gardener, growing as much of my family’s food as I can, including grains, dry beans, edible seeds, etc., and seeds to plant in future years; my intention is also to provide as many material needs as possible from the garden (e.g. fuel, fiber, medicines, etc.). Mother Earth provides abundance for free, and I celebrate how that gives me some small measure of independence from a cash economy that enslaves people and brings about terrible harm.”

“When I first became interested in gardening (as a teen),” another writes, “it was mainly for the idea of growing my own food, to be self-reliant.  Having my garden produce food is a given at this point.”

And for another family, there’s “the satisfaction of eating a meal made up largely of our own produce. We sit at the table sometimes and list off all the foods that came from our own patch of dirt!”

Food we grow ourselves is important, but all the effort isn’t only for the food.

“I garden because I love spending my days in nature, amazed by plants, insects, birds, sky and I feel blessed to participate in the wondrous and the miraculous.”

“There is the eternal miracle of a tiny brown seed becoming a huge green plant. The transition from nearly bare brown spring soil to late summer, when there is barely room for a weed, astonishes every year.”  “I’m still in awe that seeds will sprout, that cuttings will form roots.”

“There is also an adventurous piece to gardening—you never know what will flourish and what will succumb in a given year. Gardens are for optimists!”  “Gardening teaches acceptance: there will always be some plants that just don’t thrive. OK, I lied about that—I still feel a little sad when a plant doesn’t make it.”

“I love the peace and solitude of my garden.  It is the pure joy of being on the land raising my own vital foods that keeps me hunkered down with my hands in the soil.”

“The garden surrounds us with enlivening energy, provides a place to see into nature, gently humbles, and welcomes us no matter what.  What a privilege!”

“I don’t think I would garden only to be growing food.  There are so many excellent farms in the area that can provide.  I garden because I love the process, the satisfaction of producing from seed to soup.  When I eat from my garden I have a personal history with that food—it goes beyond sustenance, politics or economy.”

Happy New Gardening Year!  And thanks to Ona Blue, Jeanna Carter, Beckie Heinlein, Carol Noyes, Irene Skyriver, and Suzanne Strom for joining their voices in celebration of vegetable gardening.

First published in the Islands’ Weekly January, 2010

With winter salads in mind, I planted these greens in summer and fall, beginning with kale in mid-July, continuing with escarole, endive and radicchio in early August and the others, mache, mustard and arugula every few weeks from mid-August until late September.  In an August post I wrote about planting many of these greens:  http://lopezislandkitchengardens.wordpress.com/2011/08/15/greens-for-fall-and-winter/

Now they are mature, growing slowly if at all in the cooler temperatures and shorter days of our coastal northwest winter.  I keep the escarole, curly endive and radicchio covered in a low plastic tunnel because the rain will cause them to rot.  The kale, mustard, arugula and mache are fine in the rain though I cover them as well when nighttime temperatures head for the low twenties.

Escarole: “Natacha”

Radicchio: “Fiero” and “Indigo”

Mache: “Verte de Cambrai”

Arugula and Red Giant Mustard

Harvesting these greens is pretty straightforward.  With kale, mustard and arugula, I snip off individual leaves and the plant continues growing. With mache, escarole, curly endive and radicchio I harvest the entire plant by cutting it off at the base.  The mache rosette is usually free of any tough or yellowed bottom leaves but the others often have some weathered and tough outer leaves that I pull off and compost.

Washing the individual leaves is easy in a salad spinner.  Washing the full plants is a bit more complicated.  After rinsing the mache rosettes, I grasp the rosette root side up in one hand and with the other hand slice across the plant about an inch or so above the root stem.  The now separated leaves wash and dry easily in a salad spinner.  I use the same approach with the much bigger escarole and curly endive plants.  The one variation is that after cutting off the root end I separate the outer leaves from the smaller, creamier-colored inner leaves.  I use the inner leaves for salad and save the larger outer leaves to sauté in olive oil, garlic and red pepper flakes.  Finally, the radicchio heads are usually tightly wrapped, so after trimming off the root and outer leaves, I simply slice or tear the leaves of the head as I would cabbage.

Each of these greens has a distinctive flavor.  Kale is earthy, arugula is peppery, mustard is, well, mustardy.  Mache is nutty and escarole, curly endive and radicchio are all pleasantly bitter.  The flavors mix well together and are especially pretty with their shades of red, green and white.

Sometimes though I’ll enjoy just one all by itself heaped into a salad bowl.  For dressings, I like simple vinaigrettes made with sherry, cider or white wine vinegar, salt, pepper and olive oil so that the flavors of greens stand out.

I often stop here, with a delicious, leafy salad.  But, there are winter roots and fruits that mix wonderfully with these greens.  Turnip, celery root, beets, apples and pears all add further flavors and textures as well as red and white colors to the greens.  The other day, I sliced some Gilfeather turnip into matchstick-size pieces and added them and some diced winter pears to a mix of escarole and mache.  The soft, sweetness of the pear and the crisp, pungency of the turnip blended perfectly with the bitter escarole and nutty, mineral flavored mache.  I used cider vinegar vinaigrette.

Another favorite winter salad is celery root and apple with mache or arugula.  I slice the celery root into matchstick-size pieces and marinate them for an hour or so in a mix of white wine or cider vinegar, Dijon mustard, salt and finely diced shallots.  For a pound and a half of celery root, I use a quarter cup of vinegar, a tablespoon of Dijon mustard and one to two tablespoons of minced shallot.  Then I add diced red apples, mache or arugula and four to six tablespoons of olive oil.  It’s a beautiful red, white and green salad.  A few toasted pecans or hazelnuts add one more delicious flavor.

Finally, beets, boiled, peeled and diced or peeled, diced and roasted are a perfect addition to any of these greens, both for flavor and for color.

On these dark December days with seed catalogs arriving daily, it’s tempting to look ahead to the first tender salads of spring but right now and for the next few months are perfect times to enjoy tasty winter salads.

Roasted roots aren’t exactly the caponata of winter food, but they are close.  Caponata blends tomatoes, peppers and eggplant into a stew of sweet and spicy flavors and soft textures.  Roasted roots are chunks of rutabagas, turnips, parsnips, carrots, beets tossed in a little olive oil and roasted until they soften and their separate, earthy flavors sweeten and intensify then play off each other.  I look forward to them both.  Caponata is high summer picnic food, something to eat outdoors in the sun, while roasted roots are definitely food for the indoor table, with candles burning and the curtains drawn over the dark windows.

I made the first big batch last week for a holiday potluck.  Because I was preparing a lot of roots, I roasted each separately on its own baking sheet, but for smaller batches I often mix them all together before coating them very lightly with olive oil and sprinkling on a little salt.  They all take about the same amount of time to roast: 30-45 minutes at 400 degrees depending on the size of the chunks.  The beets are the only exception: I peel and cut them, lightly oil them and roast them in their own pan and add them to the rest at the end.  Don’t crowd the roots on the sheets or they will steam instead of roast and check them often after the first 15 minutes, turning them over so all sides will brown and caramelize.  Be careful not to let them burn or they will be bitter.

Served warm or at room temperature, roasted roots are a great side dish with meats but they also make a perfect addition to grains like emmer farro for a main dish.  For a hearty and delicious winter salad, I toss room temperature roasted roots with greens like mache, arugula or escarole, add a few toasted nuts and maybe some goat cheese or grated Pecorino Romano, and dress it all with vinaigrette.  There are all sorts of variations on this winter salad.  Another favorite way to use leftover roasted roots is to mix them with some grated cheese, cheddar or Gruyere, to bind them together, add a little cooked bacon or sausage if you like, and wrap the mixture in pastry for a free-form, open tart. Again, there’s plenty of room for experimenting.

Roots also work well with spices.  The other night, I made Nigel Slater’s root vegetable korma from his wonderful book Tender: A Cook and his Vegetable Patch (2009). Cardamom, coriander, cumin, chili powder, cinnamon filled the kitchen with the fragrance of curry, most welcome after a chilly late afternoon bike ride. The earthy sweetness of the roots was a perfect match for this mild curry. Here’s a link to the recipe: http://www.goodtoknow.co.uk/recipes/398410/Nigel-Slater-s-root-vegetable-korma. I want to experiment more with roots and these spices.  Winter seems like the perfect time.

P.S.  The Winter Luxury Pie Pumpkins are as wonderful as everyone says!

Thanksgiving Reverie

It’s November and people are planning Thanksgiving dinner menus and inviting friends and family. In these weeks and days before the big meal, before trying to remember how to cook a turkey, there’s pleasure in thinking back on past Thanksgiving dinners and remembering who brought what side dishes to this ultimate potluck. The vegetables are familiar: Brussels sprouts, rutabaga, potatoes, onions, kale, winter squash.  Their presentation changes with the guests who bring them.

Take Brussels sprouts, for example.  For years, they were a vegetable I prepared, boiling them whole after cutting an X in each base so they’d cook evenly, watching them carefully and removing them while they were still green and flavorful, hoping they’d convert the skeptics.

Then sometime in the early ‘90s our friend Liz offered to fix them, cutting them in half, steaming them, mixing them with chestnuts, bacon and shallots and tossing all in a mustard cream sauce.  This dish appealed to many, especially bacon lovers, and was the standard for as long as Liz could join us.

Back on my own to fix them, I disguised the mini-cabbage shaped sprouts by slicing them thinly and then sautéing the pile of slivered sprouts in browned butter.  This preparation is now a favorite, though there is the variation of thicker slices tossed in olive oil and roasted on a cookie sheet in a hot oven.  Either appeals to Brussels sprouts skeptics.

Other vegetables have also made the shift from boiling to roasting.  Mashed rutabaga, a favorite at our neighbor’s Thanksgiving and one they shared when they joined us, has been replaced with rutabaga sliced into strips, tossed in olive oil and roasted like French fries.  We all like it better this way, but I still remember the first time I prepared mashed rutabaga with my neighbor’s mom.  She told me to grip the rutabaga with a dishtowel when I cut into it so it wouldn’t slide around.  I still do that, for safety, but also for the pleasure of remembering Sallie.

Roasted vegetables may be healthier but butter and cream aren’t absent from the table.   Making perfect mashed potatoes is really an art, one that my neighbor Laura has mastered.  She claims it’s the butter, lots of it.  Whatever, this is one dish no one wants changed.

And kale, such a health food when simply steamed or braised takes on new dimensions with the addition of heavy cream.  I didn’t know this until my friend Karen described it as one of her family’s favorite Thanksgiving dishes and I tried it.

Onions, on the other hand, have become healthier.  After years of traditional creamed onions, we now bring to the table thick onion slices that have been brushed with a little olive oil, roasted on cookie sheets until soft, then tossed with sherry vinegar and a pinch of cayenne.

Winter squash was always on the Thanksgiving table: sweet, nutty, bright orange fleshed Buttercup, baked like a potato and then, after removal of seeds, scooped into a bowl and served.  Then one year our friend Chris brought “Sweet and Sour Squash with Mint,” quarter inch slices of winter squash fried until tender and slightly blistered in garlic flavored olive oil, sprinkled with chopped mint and marinated in a vinegar and sugar sauce.  It hasn’t replaced Buttercup, but it has freed up some of the Buttercup for more squash pie.

Every Thanksgiving potluck has pies.  In addition to many variations on apple, there are squash and pumpkin pies with squash the slight favorite with us because it is richer and sweeter.  This year though my friend Molly gave me one of her Winter Luxury Pie pumpkins, a gorgeous orange pumpkin distinguished by delicate netting over the entire surface.  Fans claim that it makes the “smoothest and most velvety pumpkin pie” ever.  Who knows, it may replace squash pie as the favorite way to end the feast.

So before the stress of the holiday season kicks in, enjoy this time to savor memories of friends and food.  Visit farm stands, buy local produce, be thankful for the farmers who grow these vegetables and the friends and family who prepare and share them.  Then you can start worrying about the turkey.

First published in the Islands’ Weekly, November 9, 2010.