SCAPES

From French country cuisine to the brautmasters of Germany to even us Swamp Yankees of Plymouth County, there has been a long standing opinion in cooking, that there is no waste in the hard-earned reward of food.

Just as snails are flavored with garlic and meat scraped to the bone to make sausages, the economy of the traditional harvest continues today. "We shall waste no part of the animal," Peter Straub once observed. ...Or plant!

I cannot recount how many times my grandfather from Madeira practiced this belief, knawing on trotters (pickled pigs feet) or the turkey's gizard and anus - all the while stating as fact their delicacy.

Well we don't have to go to quite that extreme to illustrate this week's true delicacy: garlic scapes.

Pictured here are the wrangled snarls of the "waste" of the garlic plant. Technically, garlic scapes are the flower & seed stem, which twist into a bizarrely beautiful coil prior to blossoming. Garlic farms routinely cut down the stem at this point as it directs the growth energy of the plant into the bulb rather than the foliage and blossom. A 30-35% increase in the bulb yeild can be managed by this method.

Cooking of scapes is very easy and the flavor is not as intense as the bulb itself. If you have never had scapes before, you will truly find them to be a "new" delicacy, but enjoy them while they last, because they are VERY, VERY seasonal.

Bon appetit!





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SPRING FLOWER SHOW

Surprizing (and disappointing) as it may be the BOSTON FLOWER SHOW (a/k/a the NEW ENGLAND FLOWER SHOW) has been cancelled! Funding appears to be the main issue and if you would like to help the Mass Horticultural Society out for 2010, you can visit their site at http://www.masshort.org/New-England-Spring-Flower-Show.
The good news to all this is that The 16th Annual Rhode Island Spring Flower & Garden Show will take place THIS WEEKEND, February 19-22, 2009 at the Rhode Island Convention Center. For all information follow this link. http://www.flowershow.com/. These shows are always welcomed by winter-weary New Englanders and are well worth your support.

Visual wasteland, spiritual begining

It is early October. I'm wearing a long sleave shirt and holding a glass of cabernet (that sadly I neither grew nor vinted) but still the evening air is nipping at my skin. There a a stillness, but a breeze so light, perhaps a single knaut. It is more of a coldness on the right side of my face than a draft. Even the black silouettes of maples and poplars against the dwidling western sky are still in the post-sunset twighlight. I stand here, grounding myself to nature, feeling my inner core sway to the earth like a water-lily facing the warm sun on a cool april day.

In the garden I see not the itchy sculptures of dried sunflowers, but the remaining seeds the birds have left behind. A promise of the future... Of next season's harvest that might fetch exorbitant returns in an over-priveledged urban farmers market. I see not the twigs & stems of black iron weeds, but the fodder and forage for my daylight pulletts that will soon bear free-range organic eggs, high in oleic aciddy goodness & low in hormonal, anitbiotic maddness. I see not the despair of a plot gone to seed, the the promise of fresh organic matter ready to feed the future. I see elderly grandparents crying and praying for their children's children.

There is a sliver of crescent glowing moon, slung higher in its invisible hammock than last night. Across the abutting marsh, there are not misquitoes, but rather honking, migratory Canadian geese preparing their courage for twightlight flight. I will wait for their magestic presence to pass over me in a flying "V", almost close enough to reach. I won't need to wait long. There is nothing here in the season of life that is long... Although it may take forever to arrive, its fleeting is always too soon.


Seamus McRagnall