POTATO AND GREENS HASH:

Comfort food after a not so great day . . .

1 1/2 lbs. potatoes
1 bunch chard, torn into pieces
2 to 4 cloves garlic
3 tomatoes, quartered
1/2 cup spanish peanuts

Chop up potatoes and put in a saucepan with cold water to cover by an inch or so. Bring to a boil and simmer for 15 mins. Add chopped greens and cook for another 5 minutes or so, until potatoes are tender but still intact; greens will be pretty much cooked by now. Drain (reserving liquid for use in a soup or stock, if you like). Chop garlic and warm in 1 tb. oil in nonstick skillet. When you can smell the garlic, add drained potatoes and greens, chopped tomatoes, and peanuts, plus salt and pepper to taste. Turn heat up to medium-high. Use a spatula to break up the potatoes a little and mix everything together, then proceed as for hash browns, allowing underside of mixture to brown, then turning mixture, and so on. Add a little more olive oil if bottom of pan seems dry. The longer you cook this mixture, the more of it will be browned and slightly crispy, so cook anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes, depending on your preferences in this regard (I like browned and crispy), making sure to turn often enough to avoid burning. Serve with whatever you like, or eat it on its own.

This dish is adapted from Deborah Madison's recipe for Potatoes and Greens in "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone," but the peanuts crept into it from various dishes involving peanuts and greens that derive from African cooking -- there's a great recipe from Bahia, Brazil, in Elisabeth Luard's The Latin American kitchen, for example, and there are also the "goobers and greens" dishes common in the southern US. Those recipes typically have some chili in them too, in one form or another, and that could easily be added here, too.

PASTA WITH ALMONDS / ROASTED ASPARAGUS:

This pasta dish is something I'm working on. Often, when Katherine wants to eat pasta with a red sauce, I don't, so I eat my share of the pasta with toasted breadcrumbs (pasta con mollica) and/or some grated parmesan/pecorino (or sometimes with minced onion, garlic, thyme, and cannelini beans). Once, a while back, when I didn't have stale bread on hand to make breadcrumbs with, I used almond meal (coarsely ground almonds) instead, and liked it. so I tried something similar tonight, when K was using up the rest of a jar of pasta sauce with spaghetti.

I put 1 tb. olive oil in the cold skillet, added 3 small cloves of minced garlic, and turned the heat on low, to allow the oil to absorb as much of the garlic's flavor as it heated. When the garlic started to cook, I added two large minced sage leaves from the garden, and continued cooking over low heat. When the sage had wilted and started to give off its scent, I put in 2 or 3 tbs. of the almond meal and stirred the resulting mixture around for ca. 5 minutes before tossing it with the spaghetti and a little more olive oil.

It tasted ok, but there's still a ways to go to make this dish into something good. More/different herbs might be good, and I think it would definitely taste better if the almond meal were toasted separately first, then tossed with the pasta and garlic/herb/oil mixture just before serving. I'll try that next time, toasting it in a shallow pan for a few minutes in a moderate oven.

The roasted asparagus was fabulous. It's getting towards the end of the season for asparagus, which means the crop in the stores is mostly local (since we're further north) and hence very flavorful -- because fresher -- even when it isn't organic. (There's an argument to be made that locally produced non-organic food can be less environmentally harmful than organic produce that's been trucked hundreds of miles north -- I know there's some discussion of that online somewhere and will provide the link later).

And regardless of this, roasting asparagus (lightly tossed in olive oil w/ salt and pepper) for 15 mins. at 450 degrees is absolutely the way to go. A little minced garlic during the roasting, and a little lemon juice before serving are good but not necessary additions. Thanks to Jack Bishop's "Vegetables Every Day" for making this clear.

ZUCCHINI AND POTATO SKILLET PIE:

I make this quite often, since it's a one-pot meal and largely looks after itself. As long as the zucchini are fresh (and these were fresh small ones from the tiny organic section at our local Fred Meyer), it tastes fantastic. The basic recipe (taken from p. 277 of Diane Kochilas' "The Glorious Foods of Greece") is: cubed potatoes tossed in olive oil and cooked for a few minutes over medium heat with generous amounts of chopped mint and garlic sprinkled over them, then topped with cubes of zucchini, a small amount of chopped tomato, more garlic and mint, salt and pepper, drizzled with olive oil, then cooked over very low heat (I use a diffuser) for 30-40 minutes until the veg are tender.

Sometimes, to get a slightly more luxurious pie, I've added a layer of cheese (e.g. grated provolone, or crumbled feta) in between 2 layers of zucchini in the pan, and a little more on the top, and then browned it under the grill before serving.

Tonight I incorporated some of Quorn's great faux-meatballs between the potato and zucchini layers, mixed a bunch of chopped scallions in with the zucchini cubes, and served the dish with a sauce made with mashed feta, pepper, olive oil, and lemon juice, plus enough yoghurt to make a thick sauce.

THE GARDEN PLOT:

Most of my vegetable gardening is done in two smallish beds, which are supplemented by numerous pots.

One of the beds is about 15 ft x 5 ft, with good sun (the long side faces south). Towards its eastern end is a rhubarb plant, as well as my main mint bed. I use a small area at the far eastern tip to grow fava beans every year, planting twenty or so seed beans close together in October. They all sprouted fine, as usual, and by now each plant is around 5 ft tall and densely flowered (the white and deep purple blossoms justify the beans' prominent position outside the dining area's French doors!). The beans will come in a few weeks, the first ones harvested as small green pods and cooked whole, the rest shelled and eaten at varying degrees of maturity through June. I leave a few of the sturdiest pods to dry on the plant and provide next season's seed. More on favas when we're eating them . . .

The rest of this bed is used for summer vegetables: tomatoes, summer squash, and pole beans (grown up a bamboo tepee). In fall I sow a cover crop of rye and hairy vetch in this area, which is then tilled in in early April so I can plant at the beginning of May. This year the plot holds 5 tomato plants: Carmello (2 of those), Principe Borghese (a great Roma type I liked last year), Moskvich (this year's "gotta try a different one"), and my favorite cherry tomato, Matt's Finest Cherry. Two summer squash: a Yellowstick straight yellow one, and a "Spacesaver" zucchini plant. The pole beans are Blue Lake, which I've stuck to in recent years (originally seed from Territorial, but now saved seeds from last year's crop). All those went in last week, the beans as seeds, everything else as seedlings from Portland Nursery.

The eastern end of this bed is flanked by our 2 fig trees in pots (grown on multiple stems, so they're only about 6 ft. high), a gooseberry bush (also in a pot), plus a few pots of herbs (silver thyme, marjoram, more mint, and something bitter I can't remember the name of right now).

The second vegetable bed is 12 ft x 15 ft, against the side of the house outside my office window, and faces west. So it's in shade in the morning, gets sun for some hours in the middle of the day, then is cast into shade again by the big walnut tree that dominates much of the garden. As a result, it's not a good spot for growing tomatoes or beans, but it does fine with greens and the less sun-demanding herbs. Permanent plantings include an aging rosemary, thyme, oregano (comes up like a weed), sage, winter savory, fennel (the leafy, non-bulbing variety), and lovage.

There's always some parsley growing in one section or another -- mostly it seeds itself -- and this year I've been growing as much chervil as I have room for, too, since I've read the Greeks use it as a pot green much as they do spinach or dandelion leaves. I'm looking forward to trying that. Late last summer I sowed a lot of chard in this bed, and it's been very productive this spring, though it's mostly used up now, and the plants bolted in early April. Still another meal or two to get from them before I pull them up, though. I also found some other seed fava beans and planted them at the back of this bed -- I think they're a different variety than the Sweet Lorane variety developed by Territorial Seeds which I've been using and saving in recent years, but I won't really know until the pods form.

Half of the central part of this bed was sown with "cavolo nero" in March -- three short rows of it, which will soon need thinning to maybe a dozen plants. This much vaunted "black cabbage" is regarded as essential for true Tuscan bean soup (it's also called "Tuscan black kale"), and cookbooks claim it's hard to find in this country, but as far as I can tell it's the same plant as the "lacinato kale" that began to show up in larger produce depts. a few years back. We'll see when it matures, but it certainly looks like the same species from the seedlings. Either way, it'll surely be good.

I sowed some bulbing (Florence) fennel in another portion of the bed -- looks like I have about 6 seedlings at this point -- it's supposed to be a heavy feeder, so we'll see how it does. So I only have a small amount of space still unsown, until I pull up the chard and tie back the favas, at which point perhaps I can sow some lettuce and arugula, which also do fine in this bed. For the time being, my only salad greens are in a rectangular pot about 1 ft square, half lettuce, half arugula.

Around this bed are more pots: a tulip tree we bought as a tiny seedling which is now 10 ft. tall and taking up the largest pot we have, plus a couple of tarragon plants (used some the other night in a fabulous bean dish that combines dried green flageolet beans, soaked and cooked, fresh string beans, and tomatoes -- taken from Deborah Madison's indispensable "Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone").

As for other veg. in pots, I have 2 Japanese eggplants and a couple of (Italian sweet) peppers, plus a bush tomato plant ("Early Girl"). Last year I grew about 8 pepper plants, everything from bells to Anaheims to jalapeños. Haven't decided yet whether to get more than the two this year. This might be enough to take care of, given that everything has to be watered once (sometimes twice) a day through July and August . . .

CATCHING UP:

Three months since my last entry. Hmmm . . . But I've been cooking all this time -- just not writing. I hope to catch up with that very soon. And the garden's set to go for the summer, too, so that will provide more to write about.

In other news, I learned that my cholesterol is very high. Given that my diet is relatively good (no meat, not much dairy, only occasional eggs, plenty of vegetables and grains), the causes are probably mostly genetic, and I'll need medication to get the levels under control. I've been researching this, because I think there are useful dietary changes I can make, even if those won't be enough on their own. More to come on all of this.