YUM: Roast Your Garden Vegetables

Are your garden vegetables ganging up on you? Did you get carried away at the farmer's market? Inherit the bounty of a generous gardening neighbor, friend or family member?

Time to fire up the oven and roast some root vegetables. Roasting is an easy and delicious way to process a lot of fresh vegetables without a lot of hassle.

Click here now for my entry on Examiner.com with simple instructions for roasting vegetables.
Yum!

Photo by Quincy Benton

YUM: Memory of Cherry Cobbler

AT LEFT: "MY" CHERRY TREE IN BLOOM LAST SPRING.





The cherry tree that nuzzles up to my front porch is about to blossom. This isn’t just any cherry tree. For one thing, I live on the border of a Denver neighborhood known as Cherry Creek North, and I like to boast that this is one of the last of the old- guard cherry trees in Cherry Creek.

A TREE PLANTED BY A BIRD

The tree, my father guessed, must have been “planted” by a bird because nobody would place a sapling so close to a house, allowing no room for growth. The tree’s roots run into my house’s foundation.
About 15 years ago, a wet autumn snow burdened the cherry branches and nearly toppled the tree, leaving the crown leaning way out over the sidewalk. Several neighbors suggested I might have to cut the tree down.
I refused. I couldn’t bear to see the tree destroyed, not to mention the robins’ nest in its crotch. I decided to give the cherry tree another year.

CHERRY PIE ON THE 4TH OF JULY

So when that next spring the tree rallied with blossoms, I rejoiced. By Independence Day, the limbs were loaded with brilliant red cherries. To celebrate, I found a recipe for an old-fashioned cherry pie with a crust finished with decorative pastry cherries and leaves. When I took a slice to my nearly-90-year-old neighbor across the street, she delighted in the flavor of a by-gone era. If you’ve ever had fresh cherry pie, you know there’s no comparison to the kind baked with canned cherries.
One day that following winter I came home to find the cherry tree pruned, though I hadn’t hired anybody to do the trimming. To my astonishment, one of my neighbors told me that a crew from the City Forester’s office had happened by and done the work. The gratis trimming left a higher canopy above the public sidewalk and helped the tree achieve its balance and grow upright again.

CHERRY BRANCHES, EGG TREE

The following spring, I began snipping long twigs from the cherry tree for my Easter tree--my mother’s tradition I took up in her memory. If I cut the branches around Ash Wednesday and bring them inside, the fresh and lacy white cherry blossoms open to add new life to the Easter tree just in time for the celebration of the resurrection.
The cherry had more misadventures with winter. More blizzards broke off more limbs. The tree surgeons did their best, but the tree always looked deformed. Still, it blossomed and bore fruit and provided the beautiful, burgundy branches for the egg tree.
But this is my favorite harvest from the cherry tree: One spring, I was gardening in an herb bed near the cherry tree when some neighbors from the next block passed by walking their dog. These neighbors were flamboyant, openly homosexual men. To be honest, I probably judged them at first and maybe wanted to shun them, suspecting from their gaunt appearance that they could be HIV positive.
Our dogs sniffed one another. We said our polite hellos. Then they commented on the lovely blossoms on the tree, seeming genuinely excited by the white flowers. And thinking they'd never take me up on my offer, I invited them to come back to pick cherries when they ripened.
In July, they did just that, thanking me profusely as they filled plastic containers with cheery red cherries. I remember feeling gratified to share the cherries--after all, it wasn’t really my tree, a bird just happened to plant it years ago. And even the City Forester’s office had chipped in to see the tree through. The cherry tree helped me to understand the difference between stewardship and ownership.

ONE GOOD DEED DESERVES ANOTHER

The following winter, I had been suffering from a bout of influenza. Bed-ridden, I had eaten little or nothing for two days. I live alone, and on the evening of the third day, when I started feeling well enough to eat, I, like Old Mother Hubbard, went to my cupboards and found them bare. The refrigerator was empty, too. I was hungry, but still too sick to drive to the grocery store.
Just then, my doorbell rang. I hesitated to answer, still in my pajamas and aware that I must look a fright from two days of illness. When I peeked out my door, I saw one of the gay neighbor men. He wore oven mitts and held a steaming glass casserole dish. His eyes lit up when I opened the door, then his mouth dropped.
“You’re sick,” he said. “I’m sorry. Well, this is cherry cobbler just out of the oven. I made it with the cherries we picked from your tree. It would be nice with some vanilla ice cream,” he said. “Or just enjoy it plain.”
I stood speechless. I took the casserole dish from him and felt in my hands its weight and its warmth and its love.
I thanked him. He thanked me again, as he let himself out the porch gate, for letting him pick the cherries. I didn’t have any vanilla ice cream on hand, but that cherry cobbler was one of the sweetest, most nourishing, satisfying comfort foods ever I have eaten. YUM!

YUM: Roasted Strawberries on a Snowy March Day

Outside, Old Man Winter makes a last March stand. Chilly and overcast, as another snow melts, the drips in my bungalow’s metal gutters sound like incessant snare drumming.

Inside, it's a good day to turn on the oven, so I'm roasting strawberries.

That’s right—(a drumroll from the gutters)—I’m roasting strawberries.

When I mention this preparation to people, they seem aghast. So was I. I first read about this in Martha Stewart Living way back—long before Martha did her stretch in jail.

NOT HOME GROWN, THO' I DID MAKE AN ATTEMPT

Pssssst: This is not politically correct cooking. It’s 30 March in Colorado, so these berries did not grow locally, sorry to say. Last year, I tried growing strawberries in a hanging container. I bought a healthy plant from a local, organic grower. I potted it up, tended it, treated it to compost courtesy of the red wiggler worms in the bins. I watered and watched as the runners grew and formed a few dainty, white flowers. And I harvested exactly five strawberries all season.

The strawberries were tiny, about the size of my small fingernail. But these petite fruits tasted at least 100 times better than the berries I buy regularly in the grocery store. These miniature strawberries packed the biggest whallop I’ve tasted in years.

THE TASTE OF LOVE ITSELF

As I kid, I savored the flavor of sun-ripened strawberries. I remember going as a wee one to pick the heart-shaped fruits at Furleigh Fruit & Vegetable Farms in Clear Lake, Iowa. Eating sun-warmed berries while picking was the best part—that is, until the berries appeared on our dessert plates in my mother’s strawberry or strawberry-rhubarb pies that to my little palette tasted of love itself. My mother also made delicious strawberry jam, and a couple of my sisters still do, but I've never tried.

The strawberries now roasting came from California. But they are not California’s best berries. I’ve tasted delicious strawberries in California, where they are grown and can be eaten fresh. Ripe berries in California are significantly better than ones in Colorado. So much better that I once carried on a flat of strawberries when I caught a flight from Santa Barbara to Denver. The hassle was mitigated by prolonged epicurian enjoyment of those juicy fruits.

SWEET & ACIDIC CALIFORNIA STRAWBERRIES

On assignment each year for the last 11 in Southern California, I’ve many times passed the wide open strawberry fields in various seasons. Making a visit with one’s family to pick strawberries as a kid was something of an adventure with a treat. However, stooping to pick berries day after day in the hot sun is horrendously hard work—especially given that the labor is not only stooped, therefore back-breaking, but also hard on the hands. I once interviewed a school principal in Oxnard, California, who told me that when field workers came to pay their children’s tuition, she noticed their hands damaged from the acids in the strawberries and the chemicals on the berries.

Strawberries have complex flavors—but when picked too early and shipped long distances, they arrive woody and have little flavor at all. Fresh produce tends to begin the process of breaking down as soon as picked. Some fruits will ripen on the kitchen counter, but not with strawberries. If serving for dessert, I generally coax nuances out of them by macerating them in a drizzle of Grand Marnier or Amaretto. Sometimes I sprinkle sliced berries with balsamic vinegar from Modena.

Or I roast them. Roasting has a surprising way of plumping fruits in their juices and enhancing their flavors. I roast plums, too, and can barely eat them raw anymore. The fruit is all too often not ripe, hard-fleshed, and tasteless.

MORE READING: The 19 August 2002 issue of The New Yorker published a fascinating profile titled “The Fruit Detective” about a stone-fruit fanatic who searches the lands far and wide to find flavorful peaches, plums, apricots, and the like. I Googled the title, and it came right up.

But roast strawberries, and you’ve got a mouthful of flavor. I vary from roasting berries with a bit of butter and a bit of honey, or a spill of liquor. Today, I happened to have on hand some Devon butter, obviously not local.

To enjoy roasted strawberries, allow them to cool a bit, but do try them warm. On a snowy day like today, a warm, roasted strawberry seems a bit of the divine. I had
The good fortune to have some French vanilla goat yogurt. Eaten with the berries rendered something sweet and slightly sour, creamy and fruity—not unlike cheesecake. Yum!

P.S. Best to buy organic strawberries because this fruit ranks high among produce most laden with toxic pesticides. See the post AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE FOR ALL: A Primer on Produce and Pesticides. Another odd fact: I read somewhere that strawberries had been genetically engineered with salmon to increase their susceptibility to cold. Yuck!