Monday morning, is for kimchi making! (and Tuesday posts are for those who post late about Monday...)

(Yesterday I didn't get to update as promised because I have been busy busy with guests, so please forgive me for this late post.)

As many of you are experiencing, at least down in the South here, it's warmin' up and many of the cold weather plants are BOLTING.

The cilantro's gone to flower (off to become coriander if you so wish), the mustards are sending up stalks too and the corn salad (aka mache) has long gone by the wayside of anything near delicious.

My turnips and radishes have also begun to send up flower stalks and show off a few pretty purple flowers.

A few of those useful for next season's cold planting, but to salvage some for food use, I needed to think quickly about how best to use them.  Unfortunately the husband is not a fan of either of those vegetables and I can't eat them all on my own in enough time especially before it all becomes unpalatable.  So after thinking, thinking and thinking I realized: KIMCHEE!

I can't get the husband to want to eat kimchee either, but at least this will allow me to preserve the vegetables that I can eat it slowly on my own over time.  I thought about searching for some recipes online, but what wouldjaknow, reliable Mother Earth News read my mind in their most recent issue (got a subscription from the in-laws for Christmas).

Spiffy, so now I just needed the veggies...  M.E.N. lists using turnips, radishes (tops if wished), horseradish, garlic, ginger, carrots and scallions in their recipe.  I didn't have too many red radishes, and so I used what I could, the turnips were white Asian ones:

...ones that I had forgotten to thin out and grew a little weird and... obscene:

(sorry about the knife and "surgery" that happened to the turnip guys, don't mean to make you uncomfortable...) 

To make up for the lack of radishes and relatively small amount of turnip-y-ness I used some small Chinese cabbage.  I didn't have 'official' scallions and so I raided some stalks from the Egyptian Walking onion.

My carrots were 2 years in the ground and flowering (and too woody obviously for use).  I've decided to use carrots in the garden now for loosening the soil and when they flower, the umbels of carrots have such tiny flowers that they are good for attracting especially nice pollinators.  It's so cheap to purchase a bag of carrots it's hard for me to justify growing them when I could use the room for other things.

Perhaps I will grow some of those awesome purple or red carrots that I can't find in the stores usually that would make it worthwhile.

After a lot of chopping I finally was ready to brine the veggies in a jar!  As it turned out, the cabbage gave the recipe more heft and caused the recipe to double and I needed to add more brine than it called for.  To make sure that the vegetables become fully preserved, it's suggested to immerse cover (use a plate)or use a plastic water weight (plastic bag full of water here) over the jar of vegetables and brine so that there's no spoilage and contact with air.

After the veggies sit in brine overnight you taste for saltiness level in the morning (which is what I did today, Tuesday morning) and then you add the seasonings.  I would have used horseradish, ginger, garlic and fresh chili peppers grown here, but they were not ready/ in season and I had used all of mine already from last season anyways.

So, alas... note to self to make this recipe again in the winter when all those things are in season in the garden (duh).  (Ooh, then I can have jars and jars and JARS of kimchee!  I wonder if I can, can it so that it doesn't take up room in the fridge... mmm)

We had all these seasonings in the fridge/pantry on hand as we cook Asian-y food often enough, so that was helpful.  I used whole red chilis (though the recipes states powdered Korean chili is fine) and had a mini workout by grating ginger (gotta stay buff somehow!)  Technically you're supposed to make a paste of the rest of the spices/seasonings which I proceeded to do for 2 minutes with a small mortar and pestle of mine, but then gave up and just dumped my relatively finely minced/shredded seasonings in the vegetable and brine mix and decided it would probably be fine.  After stirring everything around well, you cover with a dish or water weight again to begin, FERMENTATION! (a beautiful process that all delicious things in life use: wine, beer, pickles, etc.)

(ta da!  Seasoned kimchee, ready to bum around for a week and get sour!  please note: the stove was just a convenient place to put the jar for the pic.  I found that it leaked some brine after a while when the plastic water bag weight settles a bit.  No actual cooking over a hot stove was done during this mini-project)

The recipe tells me to let the jar go for a week like this and to check on it every day for sourness level and make sure that it's still covered.  Hopefully I don't die of botulism or something... My understanding, like my past failed experience with pickles, is that if the stuff doesn't taste good, you did something wrong, and you need to toss whatever you tried pickling (because why would you want to keep it anyways?)

So, if you don't hear from me after I try this stuff in a week... you'll know the reason.  

Plant Haul Adventures! and Battle won on plant mislabeling!

I had the fortune of being able to attend the Botanic Garden and Lichterman Nature Center plant sale this past Friday and what great finds there were!

(I feel a little silly talking about “my haul” as this reminds me of a recent Slate.com article about people, specifically teenage girls talking about their clothing purchases online on Youtube.  Granted I’m not going through the effort to upload a video of this, so I feel better about gushing in text about “le haul.”)

The day began with a plant dropoff to a good friend’s place and then a dig n’ dash (with her permission of course!) of what I identified as an arum from her newly inherited backyard garden (she just moved there).  Though not edible, it’s somewhat rare to find (at least for me) and the cherry red berry studded spathe (ok, that sounded just a little salacious)  in the winter months will be pleasant to look at.

Then I jetted off to the awesome Lichterman Nature Center plant sale (which was awesome and lovingly laid out) where, though I didn’t get everything I wanted (stupid budgets as usual) I did get: 2 spicebushes ($10/apiece!), a good size yarrow ($4), a baby ornamental pepper ($4) by the intriguing name of “Fish,”

 
and I won a mini-mislabeling battle on the spicebush!

Explanation of won-battle:
Prior to going to the sale I was doing research on the plants I was interested in that would be at the sale.  The Center is brilliant enough to put out a preview list, which makes things very helpful when you know what to expect/pick up what you want immediately.  The spicebush was a definite draw.  There were two plants listed by the common name spicebush, but from research, Lindera benzoin is the native edible kind.  Crushed leaves make a spicy tea and the berries are like allspice.  They also have the advantage of being one of the first plants to flower in spring, so that’s pleasant.

I found the spicebushes soon after my first run through of the place and was setting some nice looking ones off to the side talking out loud about “how these are going to taste great!”  when a lady overheard me and said that the description sign on the plant stated that “all parts are poisonous.”

“WHAAAAT?!?!?”  I explained that it couldn’t be.  The internet does not lie (ha, btw on that one), but no really, I looked up the LATIN name to confirm that it was indeed edible and every source confirmed it.  I frantically whipped out my netbook in hopes that there would amazingly be wireless available in the MIDDLE OF THE HUGE LICHTERMAN LAWN, but to no avail, no connection for confirmation.  I was pretty confident that something was wrong, but worried that Lichterman’s staff knew some news that I (and the internet community) wasn’t aware of about the plant.

After confronting a very helpful volunteer about the labeling, she too was confused because she had always been told of the bush’s edibility.  During this entire time and a little prior a few people had walked by at the few available spicebushes and clucked that they had been interested but saw that the sign noted it was poisonous.  In a weird way, I think that might have helped me get the bushes I got, due to misinformation!

A half an hour of research on the Lichterman staff and confirmed with 3 other sources that yep, the sign was wrong and out of nowhere a new sign replaced it with the correct info.
Ok, so a little over-proud of myself here, but I think it was really important to fix that mistake because it’s my mission obviously to educate people that you can eat nearly everything (to me, apparently).

Though excited about the spicebushes, I got 2 because they are dioecious, meaning they need a male and female plant in order to produce berries.  Unfortunately plants are not labeled or were in flower to be able to ‘sex’ the plants (harder than chickens, I swear!)  So unless I wanted to wait and try to locate the opposite sex plant later, no berries until who know when.  So I decided to gamble and got 2 plants for that fun 50-50 thing.  Tell you how it goes and if I get berried or buried eventually.

On another note, I convinced a lady to purchase a Haight-Ashbury hibiscus because it’s awesome of course.  In addition to this note, this lady buys these hibiscus for her dog who eat the flowers.  Yep, hibiscus flower eating dogs.  AND, she gives EACH of them a hibiscus of their own to consume/destroy and they each know which hibiscus is theirs to eat.

I wonder if they pee on their respective plants to fertilize them and get them to produce more flowers (though I am sure this could stimulate more foliage growth… and um, that was a little crass thought, but if you have a dog the peeing thing shouldn’t make you blink).  I also told her that you can just keep taking cuttings of the Haight Ashbury and have forever amounts of it eventually to feed to the dogs.  I wish I had gotten her number so I could have had opportunity to witness hibiscus flower eating dogs someday.  Obviously I am easily amused.

The yarrow purchased was for potential edible reasons and also I happen to purchase plants that have the potential/are noted to repel pests because I need help avoiding getting bitten by mosquitoes/ticks/THINGS at all costs.  I have mosquitoes with apparently steel syringe mouth parts on them because they bite through thick jeans when I garden and I don’t appreciate it.  Thus, I have a nice collection of pennyroyal, citronella, lemon thyme, Artemisia, oregano and the like around the garden for pest repelling properties and not just for taste.  I literally give hugs to them all prior to gardening in hopes that their properties will linger with me as I garden.  (I also tend to tuck a sprig of  pennyroyal into my hat as a precaution too).

Obviously this is a long-ish entry so allow me to hurry it up a bit.

Next was the Memphis Botanic Garden’s Spring’s Best Plant sale which was also wonderful and huge (and crammed, lots of people and plants).  There is obvious love for hostas there, a plant that I have little fondness for (unless someone tells me the leaves make a good salad), but there is one variety called “mouse ears” that caught my attention some years back.  I wondered if the price had gone down at all, and when I was led to the plant by a volunteer, we both gushed at its cuteness and minuteness, but spending $15 for a 3 inch diameter plant I’m not that even fond of was not going to occur.

I did fantasize about how much fun and “Alice in Wonderland”-like it would be to plant a tea set with one in a tea cup, a little larger version in the pot and some small flowering plants like white violets in the creamer and sugar set (!!!)  With also maybe a tea spoon with light colored lichen in it on the tea saucer (!!!!!)  So, um, if anyone does something like that, take a picture of it for me.  OR if anyone has any money to spare I’d love to make a display like this for you.  I wouldn’t even want it, or ask for money to my time, I just want to make this happen! (<---plant design geek)

 

The ginger scented geranium was to replace one that died earlier this year.  Smells like ginger ale and I look forward to cooking with it, or making delicious drinks from the leaves!

Little pots of rue were a steal at $2/apiece if I can keep the swallowtail butterfly caterpillars from completely eating them again.  Note to self again: DO NOT place rue  right next to the other caterpillar food plants such as cilantro, dill and parsley.

So, my total haul for Friday was this:
Arum (FREE!)
Spicebush (x2) ($10 x 2 = $20)
Yarrow ($4)
Ornamental pepper “Fish” var. ($4)
Ginger Scented Geranium ($5)
Rue ($2)

TOTAL: $35

Amazing.  Lesson learned: Go to local plant sales annual for a great deal on unusual and awesome plants.