Green Bean Season

Pole beans are one of those crops that go from flowers to fruit in about a day. On Monday, you can look at the plants and find zero beans at all, and then on Tuesday, there will be approximately 43 million. The vexing thing about beans is that they need to be harvested regularly, or they’ll stop fruiting ; so you’ll have a lot all at once, and across a long season. They’re good do-ers, as the old-timers say!

I personally love pole beans best when picked young and tender, then blistered in bacon fat or olive oil with plenty of salt and pepper. However, one can only eat so many beans prepared this way; eventually something new will be most welcome. We had such a great response to zucchini recipes that I thought we could do the same with string beans. What are your favorite recipes?

To start things off, here’s one of our family’s favorites that incorporates green beans (and other summer fruits) - Garlic Lime Steak and Noodle Salad from Smitten Kitchen. (Deb Perelman from SK also has a great many fabulous zucchini recipes, by the way.)

‘Rattlesnake’ is my go-to variety of pole bean; I’ve tried others, but I always come back to this one. Along with being delicious, they have beautiful flowers and interesting speckled bean pods, and they are very prolific. They can also be used as dried beans later in the season, when you’re sick of eating them fresh.

Happily, it’s also blueberry season. Despite having eight bushes, we never get enough at once to make a pie or anything substantial, but we like to pick them every couple of days and eat them as a sweet finish to a meal. If we do get a bumper crop, I like to either make clafoutis or cobbler, or freeze them for later use in the winter.

Please share your favorite bean or blueberry recipes in the comments!

Crop Swap

My friend Kerstin has started a Crop Swap in Oakland. This will take place from 10 am - 12 pm on the second Sunday of every month, starting July 10th, in Snow Park. Snow Park is located at 19th and Harrison Street, not far from Lakeside Drive and Lake Merritt (why not combine it with a walk around the lake, or a visit to the Lake Merritt gardens?). For more information, you can email Kerstin at cropswap.oakland@gmail.com. You can also reach her @cropswap.oakland on Instagram.

This is a great way to trade something you have too much of (peaches? zucchini? cilantro?) and go home with something you want more of (avocados? peas? sunflowers?). Don’t let that excess produce go to waste!

I Swore I'd Never Eat This Again

Well, the day has come. I’m going to eat zucchini, a vegetable I swore I’d never eat again, after growing up having it with nearly every dinner in the summertime. I just don’t get why people like it - it’s mushy, it’s tasteless, it’s watery. You have to jump through hoops to make it taste good, adding all kinds of other things until it doesn’t even resemble its original form. You can’t just roast it in olive oil and salt, like you can do with so many other vegetables, and have it taste good.

But, dang it, my students planted a bunch of it in the Environmental Center garden at Merritt, and I must admit it’s a lovely plant, with those enormous green leaves and bee-friendly yellow blossoms. It grows fast, it grows big, it shades the soil and keeps out weeds while retaining moisture in the soil, and by golly it makes the garden look professional and productive. I’ve been delighted with its appearance and growing habit, but also eyeing it with a certain amount of dread, knowing that the day would come when the plants would finally put out fruit, and then I’d have to face it.

Today is that day.

I can’t waste them - the zucchini must be eaten! This presents me with a challenge: Find the most delicious recipe for zucchini; or, if that sounds too lofty a goal, find a merely acceptable one. So my friends, I throw it out to you. I am asking for your favorite recipes for this questionable vegetable, especially since I know this is just the beginning of the (long, long, long) harvest season. Please post your recipes below, and I guarantee I will try them all.

Tonight, I think I will make lentil-zucchini fritters, to go with the Middle-Eastern meal that Adam is cooking for us. If they taste terrible, I at least can smother them in tzatziki!

*P/S: I found this hilarious article from Bon Appetit about zucchini. I guess I’m not the only person in the world who finds this vegetable disgusting.

*P/P/S: The fritters were freaking delicious. I didn’t make the sauce because we had leftover tzatziki. Definitely a winner recipe, thanks Barbara!

Saving Poppy Seeds

This year, the California poppies in our garden were insanely beautiful. They self-seeded everywhere, tending to find the worst soil at the edges of the garden, hence this picture above (taken about a month ago) of mostly borage and salvias, with the poppies peeping over the back, in a patch of neglected mulch next to the train shed.

Now, the poppies have mostly gone over and set seed. Many will self-seed again for next year’s display, but I also like to collect a good deal of seed to give as gifts, or spread in other areas of the garden. Collecting the seed couldn’t be easier.

I just pull out the plants, and make a big pile. Then I methodically go through the pile, choosing the plumpest, driest seed pods (the ones that haven’t dried completely and already burst open). I pull them off and place them in a parchment bag. I like these:

These bags are quite large, about a gallon maybe, and hold a lot of seeds. After filling, I crimp the bag tightly at the top to keep the seeds safe; when the pods dry, they spring open and scatter the seeds, so if the top is open they go every which-way. Because the bag is paper, it allows for air to freely circulate and dry the seeds. If you store them in plastic, they will likely rot. Another thing I’ve done in the past is put them in a glass, quart-sized Ball canning jar, and used cheesecloth to cover the opening.

Here they are, as I’m starting to fill up the bag. After I’ve saved as many as I like, and crimped the top, I put the bag in the house in a cool, dry spot so that the seeds have a change to dry out completely and burst. Once they pop, I can take out the dried seed pods easily, saving the collected seed at the bottom to scatter in the garden next fall or winter.

Nature has some brilliant designs, and watching (and hearing) these seeds dry, then spring open to release the seeds high into the air, is fascinating. Lupines do the same sort of thing. I’ve collected lupine seed from my hikes before (shhh, don’t tell anyone, you’re supposed to have a permit for such things) and stored it similarly in paper bags on the piano. One night, Tom and I kept hearing a rustling in the corner while we were watching TV. We were convinced that a rat had somehow gotten in the house, and kept pausing the TV and searching around the room for the rodent. Imagine our chagrin when we realized the sound we were hearing was just the lupine seeds popping open in their paper bag.

What I'm Teaching in Fall 2022

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