A Real Everlasting Meal

Laurie loaned me a book, An Everlasting Meal. The author, Tamar Adler, who cooks at La Panisse in Berkeley, cooks by using what was left from recent meals and adding new ingredients. She doesn’t waste a thing, always building on what is at hand.

I’ve cooked that way for years and I did it again today. I made chicken noodle soup. The soup was based on two baked chicken thighs, left from a couple of days ago. There was some good juice, too, and that was the first thing into the pot. I added chopped carrots, celery, and shallots along with two quarts of water and two teaspoons of chicken base.. After these ingredients had cooked for a while Dennis chopped the chicken meat and we added that with a generous pinch of thyme that I dried last summer.

I have a great advantage in this style of cooking because there’s a wealth of fresh ingredients waiting outside to be harvested. Today, having started a love affair with dandelion greens, I decided that the soup would be improved by the addition of some greens–dandelions.

In the yard I found plenty of young green leaves.

Before coming back inside I stopped by the garden to cut a few sprigs of parsley for an additional green kick to the soup.

Here at the beginning of October many vegetables remain to be harvested. Roma tomatoes, for example, are still producing. A few of them have blossom end rot, but the top parts are still good. The peppers just won’t quit, either.

Dennis, eager to see how the sweet potatoes look, dug a couple of hills today. It looks like a bumper crop.

I think the true everlasting meal is having a garden and the means to preserve some of its produce for the winter months. It is having a cold frame that produces lettuce, spinach, and kale over the cold season. It is having a small flock of chickens, who consume vegetable scraps from the kitchen and garden plants past their prime. The chickens complete the cycle, giving us all the eggs we can eat and producing manure that enriches the soil for next year’s garden that will be planted with seeds we have saved from this year’s mature plants.

Now, that’s an everlasting meal.

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer

Dandelion Greens

When I was a girl my mother and grandmother practiced a spring ritual – gathering wild greens. On a fine May day they roamed the nearby countryside, gathering dandelion leaves, pokeweed sprouts, lamb’s quarter and curly dock.

All of these plants were treasured food after a long winter without fresh greens. All the A&P in our little town had to offer was pale heads of iceberg lettuce shipped by rail from California. We relished the wild greens, cooked in a little bacon fat and water, served with cornbread.

These days, of course, dandelions, pokeweed, curly dock, and lamb’s quarter are deemed to be weeds, doomed for eradication by mower, spade, or poisonous spray. Except in my yard, where they grow freely along with a little grass. They are safe here and last week’s generous rain has inspired the dandelions to put forth prodigious tender new leaves.

Yesterday, in memory of my mother and grandmother, I collected a bunch of lovely dandelion leaves. I collected them, too, in memory of the old days when everybody knew which plants were good to eat and which ones might cure human and animal ailments.

Back in the kitchen I washed the dandelions while a minced clove of garlic simmered in a little olive oil.

I chopped the green parts of the plants and added them to the garlic and oil, added a dash of salt and a tiny bit of water, covered the pan, and let the greens simmer for a few minutes. Served with a splash of vinegar they were delicious.

Many thanks, Mom. Many thanks, Grandma.

Copyright 2013 by Shirley Domer