Fresh Off the Vine

I used to plant snow peas in the winter garden until one year I decided to try the sugar snap peas everyone was talking about. Now each year I'm faced with the dilemma of which kind will get garden space. Because we don't have unlimited acreage (or any acreage at all), I like tall vines that make use of the wonderful trellises Joe built a few years ago.

     You can see how the trellises are attached to the concrete wall at the top with brackets. Joe's a wonderful, careful craftsman (I'm so lucky!); the trellises are extremely sturdy, more than 6 feet tall (but not so tall I can't reach what grows on them), with vertical posts every two feet and chicken wire between the posts for the vines to climb on.
     It's much easier to pick peas (or anything else) when they grow this way than with bush varieties, and I think (though I have no statistical evidence to confirm it) that the tall vines yield more per square foot, and all varieties of peas freeze well, so abundance is welcome.
     Oddly enough (at least it seems odd to me), the seed catalogues were full of the bush varieties of both snow peas and sugar snap peas, but the Oregon Sugar Snaps were the only tall ones I could find in the catalogue I'd decided to order from; ergo, the decision was taken out of my hands. I thought they were a bit slow getting started, but now they've hit their stride, they're very productive and delicious. Few things are tastier than a crunchy, sweet sugar snap pea just plucked from the vine.
     Perhaps I've said this before, but if so, I'll say it again. Picking peas of any variety is not a task to be rushed, because if you rush, you'll miss many of the pods and all of the pleasure. It's important to slow down, relax your gaze, get into a sort of meditative, Zen state in which the peas can reveal themselves to you. There may be some sort of general metaphor for life there.

Peas are not like tomatoes, for example, contrasting with the foliage and shouting "Pick me! Pick me!" No, pea pods are the same color as the leaves and vines, and depending on the angle at which they're hanging, it's easy to mistake one for the other. So I move slowly down the row, scanning from top to bottom, bottom to top, and when I've reached the end of the row, I turn around and do the same thing going back the other way, because invariably I find more on the return trip, pods I couldn't see because they were hidden among the leaves, or because the light comes at them differently from the other direction. Joe built the trellises just far enough from the wall that I can get behind them, but I guide the vines to grow on the other side, so there usually aren't too many back there.

     Another nice thing about sugar snap peas as opposed to snow peas is that if you miss a day or two of picking, they'll still be edible - you can't let snow peas get too large or the actual peas get too big - they get tough and the pods get stringy. Here's my crop from yesterday:

Together with what was in the refrigerator from an earlier picking, I was able to freeze enough for three dinners some time in the future, in the searing heat of summer, perhaps, when these cool and beautiful spring days will seem like a long-ago dream, and still have enough for dinner last night.  Here's what we had , a simple stir-fry of sugar snap peas, crimini mushrooms, red bell pepper, onion, pak choi (some of the last from the garden, since it's beginning to bolt), and tofu.

     Some years ago on Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor told the story of how Mrs. Ingqvist took cooking classes and learned a whole lot of ways to cook tofu, but when she told her husband that eating tofu could add ten years to his life, he said he didn't think those would be years he'd enjoy. Joe and I actually like tofu, but I think my mom agrees with Pastor Ingqvist, and since she's doing very well at almost 89 years old, I really can't use the longevity argument on her. I just don't cook tofu when she's coming to dinner.
     No doubt I'll write more about tofu some time in the future. This stir-fry would be equally good with shrimp or chicken, beef or pork, though those protein sources might dominate and in this case I wanted the focus to be on the vegetables.
     I don't really use a recipe for such a basic stir-fry, since my ingredients are usually whatever's on hand in the refrigerator, but here's the basic procedure:
 First, do any slicing or chopping or measuring before you turn on the stove, including cooking the rice. I heat up the pan-sprayed wok with a couple of teaspoons of oil in it (if you use a nonstick wok, as I do, be sure never to heat it without some kind of fat - even if it's just pan spray - or liquid in it, since heating them dry can release toxic chemicals) and toss in your protein (in this case, for two people, just under 1/2 pound of pressed, cubed tofu) and stir-fry till it browns a little (if you're using shrimp, cook them till they're not quite done, take them out, then add them in at the end again to finish cooking - overcooked, rubbery shrimp is not pleasant), then add seasonings - I use a combination of soy sauce, rice wine vinegar or sherry, a spoonful of sugar, grated fresh ginger, and minced garlic. Then put in the vegetables in batches, the longer cooking ones first, and the tender greens, if you're using them, at the end (the delicate pak choi last night needed only 1 minute or so to wilt deliciously). I usually add some (half a cup or so) liquid and put on the tight-fitting lid after adding the veggies so there's an element of steaming as well as frying. Then serve it all over rice.

 One final note about mushrooms:
never store them in the plastic produce bag in which you bring them home from the store. I put mine in the refrigerator in a little basket lined with a paper towel, so they can breathe and not get slimy if I forget and don't use them right away.  My mom does the same thing but uses a bowl with a paper towel. Don't cover them unless it's with more paper towel. (Actually, a cloth napkin would work as well as the paper towel and be more eco-conscious, and I'm sure I have a stained one that I can put to that use.) They may dry up and shrink a little, but they're usually still good if you're going to put them in a dish where they cook in some liquid that will reconstitute them. That was the case with the criminis I used last night; they'd shrunk to about 3/5 their original size and gotten a bit leathery, but they drank up the seasoned liquid and steam and were a flavorful addition to our dinner.
 

over-the-hill cooking

No, I don't mean the cook is over-the-hill, though sometimes we may feel that way! What I'm talking about here are those ingredients that get forgotten in the refrigerator or garden till they're a bit past their prime. Not rotting or slimy or anything, just not as fresh as they used to be. The question, then, is whether to throw them out or find some way to incorporate them into something tasty. There's a saying I like (I saw it on an old embroidered sampler):

Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.

My grandmother, who was very important in my upbringing and who raised her children during the Great Depression, would have liked that. She taught me a lot about cooking, sewing, gardening, etc., and I also absorbed many of my beliefs and values from her. One of those is that it just makes me crazy to see people throw away perfectly good food that could be put to use and provide eating pleasure.

All of this is just the lead-in to what we had for lunch yesterday, a zucchini frittata enhanced by a few over-the-hill mushrooms.

You can't see the mushrooms in the picture. There were four of them, nice Creminis, stored properly in a brown paper bag with the edges turned down and partly open to let the mushrooms breathe, and they'd been breathing at the back of the refrigerator for a couple of weeks or so, and now they were showing their age. Not crispy crumbly dried like the ones in the little packets that we buy as delicacies at the market, but slightly shriveled and leathery though otherwise okay. I didn't want to "reconstitute" them by soaking and thus lose their flavor and "structural integrity," so I sliced off the bottoms of the stems and chopped what remained into fairly small bits, then sautéed them in olive oil with quite a bit of minced garlic and a couple of sliced zucchini for 10 minutes or so over pretty low heat. I salted the zucchini at this stage rather than salting the dish later because if you salt the vegetables as you sauté them, it not only enhances the flavor but it also draws out more of their moisture, and zucchini have considerable moisture that, before it cooked down, helped to rehydrate my mushroom bits and enhance the flavor addition they made to the frittata.

I should add here that the zucchini had also been forgotten a few days longer than I would have liked, so their lovely dark green skin was starting to show the first signs of cellulite, but they were still quite wholesome and acceptable, though they'd lost some of their youthful perfection. Anyway, after the zucchini were tender it was time to pour the eggs over (I use 6 eggs to serve 4), sprinkle a good handful or two of freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano over the top, pop on the lid, turn the heat down even lower, and go do something else for 10 or 15 minutes. I know that's not the traditional way of cooking a frittata, but it produces a lovely, puffy dish with minimal effort, and with a nice salad (the dressing recipe is in an earlier post), some good bread, and a glass of wine (this is a decent but not too pricey white Zin) it was a lovely lunch.

The bread is the "bran-enriched white bread" from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë François, my current new favorite cookbook. If you follow the instructions to the letter you get exactly the results they promise - excellent bread with minimal effort. Don't let hubris derail you. As a long-time bread-baker who even used to teach classes on it, I thought I could improve on their method, so the first time I tried one of their recipes I didn't really pay attention, and what I got wasn't all that great. In fact, I almost took the book to Bookman's (Tucson's wonderful used book/music/and many other things exchange) but then I tried it again and followed the directions and was very happy with the results. With a bit more experience under my belt, I now feel able to improvise and adapt, but baking, more than other forms of cooking, does require a bit more attention to certain details.

Frittatas are such a lovely way to use up bits of this and that and turn them into something special. I'd meant to add some slivers of sun-dried tomato to this one, but I forgot. Fresh mushrooms are great, of course, and I often use just mushrooms and onions or scallions. Fresh herbs - parsley, basil, thyme, marjoram, etc. - brighten things up, but don't confuse the issue by using too much or too many different ones all together. Rosemary, for example, is wonderful with garlic and anything else, but in something as delicate as a frittata, it's probably all the herb you need, and it should be minced quite finely (dried rosemary is to be avoided - those little sharp sticks could really hurt a person! - unless you really have no possible way to get the fresh stuff, in which case the dried herb should be very finely minced and simmered in whatever you're making for a long time, or ground to a powder so it can't choke you). Leftover crumbled bacon and/or various cheeses - that last ounce of gorgonzola with some caramelized onion and a slice of crumbled bacon from yesterday's breakfast (or the day before - it's cooked so it will keep for a few days) can really elevate what might otherwise just seem like scrambled eggs for two.

And now it's time for me to go see what I can come up with for lunch today!