Seed to Supper: Growing and Cooking Great Food No Matter Where You Live--100+ Delicious Recipes & Growing Tips for Windowsills to Wide Open Spaces - Softcover

Introduction

Food, Glorious Food

I grew up on a small farm that produced nearly everything we ate. My mother used to say that Grandma always began her shopping list with 'sugar, coffee, oatmeal' because those were three staples we did not grow. Some folks in the neighborhood grew sorghum, though, and after they harvested the crop, squeezed the juice from it, and boiled down the juice to make syrup, Grandma could barter eggs for a quart or two. It has a special, grassy flavor all its own and is not quite as sweet as honey or agave nectar. You will find it listed in some of the recipes in this book. These days, sorghum is making a comeback as people seek out alternatives to refined sugar and corn syrup.

The best part of farm life was the abundance of garden-fresh vegetables that dominated every meal. Even breakfast might include fried potatoes, a tomato bread pudding, or fried green tomatoes. My dad remembered his mother frying squash blossoms dipped in batter and serving them with honey for breakfast. Other meals would include at least three vegetables, and twice that many on Sundays or when guests came by for dinner.

My family food traditions are rooted in the Southern Appalachians, but every region of the country has traditional recipes featuring the farm-fresh ingredients typical of that locale. Home gardeners are seeking out the heirloom vegetables their ancestors grew and sharing recipes from their grandparents' time.

Not since the Greatest Generation marched off to war have Americans embraced home food gardening with such enthusiasm. Instead of aiding in the fight to protect democracy, this time we are working to save Earth's ecosystem, surely a goal with equivalent, if not greater, urgency. An increasing number of people are growing fresh, wholesome food. Home food production has taken off, even in urban areas where earnest apartment dwellers cultivate tomatoes and herbs under artificial lights, and in suburban sprawl-scapes, where lawns are giving way to lettuces and leeks.

According to the National Gardening Association, 2014 marked the first time food gardening surpassed flower gardening as a backyard hobby among Americans. Whether it's a few pots of herbs on a sunny windowsill or a traditional vegetable patch, the new American food garden represents a heartening response to the commodification of food and the industrialization of farming.

In Seed to Supper, I endeavor to provide a balanced, concise introduction to food gardening and to cooking with homegrown produce. The kitchen-tested recipes feature the most popular homegrown vegetables and fresh herbs, paired with meat and dairy from the grocery store. You don't have to be an expert, either in the garden or the kitchen, to grow the ingredients or to create the recipes offered in this book.

Americans have rediscovered local products and are incorporating them into both traditional and contemporary recipes. In a few cases, I mention by name high-quality products from my region that anyone can buy online. I encourage readers to substitute similar ingredients when they come from producers close to your home. And if you simply use whatever brand you can find at the grocery, the recipe will still taste great.

We are each a part of a vast, living system that is the Earth's biosphere. Increasingly, we behave more like a virulent pathogen than the rational beings we consider ourselves to be. Whether for good or ill, we undeniably interact with and alter our environment every day. Our most intimate connection with the biosphere is via the food system. All of us, despite our differences, must eat. Some of us get way too much food, too many of us do not get enough, and the complex system of industrial food production and distribution scarcely serves anyone well, save the corporate moguls upon whose investments commercial farmers are forced to depend.

Industrial agriculture requires enormous inputs of petroleum and water. Increasingly, farmers are planting genetically modified varieties of staple crops in an effort to reduce labor costs, increase productivity, and secure enough profit to stay in business. Besides the unknown and potentially harmful environmental effects of the genetic modifications themselves, growing these crops almost always involves increased application of pesticides. For example, many genetically modified crops are 'Roundup Ready,' meaning they carry resistance to the herbicide glyphosate, marketed under the name Roundup by the Monsanto Corporation. Instead of traditional cultivation to control weeds in soybeans, farmers spray the crop with herbicide, which kills the weeds, leaving the soybeans to fight another day. For the most part, the environmental effects of these practices are unknown. According to the Institute for Responsible Technology, we learn the following:

Currently commercialized GM crops in the U.S. include soy (94%), cotton (90%), canola (90%), sugar beets (95%), corn (88%), Hawaiian papaya (more than 50%), zucchini and yellow squash (over 24,000 acres). (Number in parentheses represents the estimated percent that is genetically modified.)1

The benefits of growing and cooking with homegrown produce are many. Unparalleled freshness, maximum nutrition, and outstanding flavor comprise the top three, but growing food saves energy, reduces our dependence upon fossil fuels, conserves water, promotes ecological diversity, and protects local landscapes from development. The exercise gardening affords is exactly the type recommended for our aging population, and a diet rich in fruits and vegetables―invariably a consequence of home food gardening―helps stem the rising tide of obesity. Any location in the United States can produce a variety of vegetables, although local conditions will determine which vegetables do best in any given area. Where I live, the growing
season is long, rainfall is reliable and abundant, and the list of potential crops is extensive. Because local conditions vary widely, I have focused upon the needs of the vegetables in the chapters on outdoor gardening. If you read my comments regarding what vegetables need and their dislikes, you can decide for yourself how easy or difficult a particular plant will be to grow in your individual circumstances.

For example, where summers are short, tropical vegetables such as okra and watermelons seldom succeed. On the other hand, in the Deep South, lettuce production is limited to the winter months and perhaps late fall and early spring. Otherwise, the temperature becomes too hot to support a crop. For these and other reasons, most people will find it difficult to produce all the vegetables they may want to eat. My advice is to focus on what will grow well and utilize your crops to the maximum, and then look to your local farmer's market, CSA, or organic food co-op for the rest. We should never avoid delicious, wholesome foods like bananas or cinnamon because we cannot grow them on the patio.

Instead of grouping recipes by season, and gardening advice by plant variety, I chose the novel approach of organizing growing and cooking information by the nature and size of the space available to the gardener. Thus, we begin with herbs and greens that can be successfully produced at a sunny window, then move on to larger containers on the patio or deck, then to raised beds in a corner of the yard, and finally to an integrated backyard landscape. Each increase in the gardener's growing room brings additional possibilities for the kitchen. Recipes accompany the growing advice for each crop discussed. The final chapter offers generalized advice for successful vegetable gardening, regardless of the amount of space devoted to the activity.

How to Read the Recipes

The recipes emphasize getting the best flavors out of ultra-fresh ingredients without the need for complex kitchen techniques. While some recipes require more preparation time than others, or include more ingredients, none is inaccessible to the average home cook. Neither are all recipes vegan or vegetarian. Pairings of seasonal produce with meat, chicken, and fish, as well as eggs and dairy products, creates a culinary palette offering greater interest and opportunity for exploration. Nevertheless, many recipes can be executed without resorting to animal products, so I offer suggestions for vegetarian substitutions.

To avoid repetition, I include here information that applies to all the recipes in the book. The recipes all begin with a list of the ingredients in the order in which they are used and the amount of each needed for the dish.

• Eggs are large in size.
• I always use plain, all-purpose flour. Sifting is unnecessary. If you need to blend in salt or baking powder, use a wire whisk to combine the dry ingredients.
• Measurements need not be precise, except for baked goods. Soups, stews, and other dishes will turn out just fine if you alter slightly the amounts of ingredients. You should have two types of measuring cups. For dry ingredients, these typically have a long handle and look like a miniature saucepan. For liquids, measuring cups are shaped like a small pitcher with graduations on the side. You can use these interchangeably, except when baking.

Food should look good as well as taste good. Having your own garden allows you to choose vegetable varieties based on their appearance. Green or orange tomatoes or purple carrots on the plate are sure to impress and please your family and friends. I find it a useful rule to try to have as much color on the plate as possible. This is a good way not only to make the meal pleasingly attractive but also to maximize the nutritional benefits from a varied selection of plant foods. I encourage you to be visually creative when serving the dishes listed in the following pages.

1 Source: http://www.responsibletechnology.org/buy-non-gmo/non-gmo-seed, accessed January 9, 2015.

©2016 John Tullock. All rights reserved. Reprinted from Seed to Supper: Growing and Cooking Great Food No Matter Where You Live ― 100+ Delicious Recipes & Growing Tips for Windowsills to Wide Open Spaces. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the written permission of the publisher. Publisher: Health Communications, Inc., 3201 SW 15th Street, Deerfield Beach, FL 33442.