Pages

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

A Taste of the Garden State

For those of you who don't know, New Jersey is called the "Garden State." You can see why when you look in my backyard, which I just open the door to look at, because the flowers, grass trees, and bushes are all just overflowing. I really need to trim it all back, but you just can't keep up with things in this state. If I were in NM or AZ everything would be dead by now because I would have forgotten to move the dripper close enough for the poor plants to get water. My neighbor goes to Turkey for the summer so we take care of all her house plants, which means we stick them out in the backyard and they look great by the end of the summer with only a few extra spiders or bugs mixed in.

Anyway, at the train station every Wednesday there is a farmers market. The produce of the Garden state is right there in front of me as I walk to and from work. I must say it's a miracle I've resisted the temptation of homemade fruit pies and cookies so far. One of these days I'll have to cave and taste them, but for now I finally remembered to get cash so I could buy some fruit and vegetables. I stopped off at one stall where they had Romanesque Broccoli. This is also known at my house as fractal broccoli. I was particularly happy to see it because I was going through my pictures last night trying to find some entertaining picture to share with you all and I found my old cell phone shot of fractal broccoli. I considered posting it, but it's already a year old so I decided not to. But today I had my little Canon with me so I can now show you this mysterious vegetable. This year's crop didn't look quite as nice and crazy as last year's but it's still interesting. BTW, the 2 pictures above are from my phone's camera last year. I ended up posting them for comparison. I tasted it last year, it was more like cauliflower than broccoli. I also got some sort of green apple which I hope is nice and tart and some peaches. I used to pack peaches in the summer so I have a love/hate relationship with them. They taste good and I have lots of excellent peach cobbler, and bread recipes etc. My mom's homemade peach icecream is probably one of the best things I've ever tasted in my life. Hannah I think you're the only one that can vouch for this. But I did spend my summers in Colorado working 12 or 15 hour days 7 days a week packing peaches until their rough skin wore my fingertips down to the nerve endings. When I looked at my fingers, the pad part would be very shiny and you could see little red dots which I called nerve endings because it hurt like heck to touch anything once I got to that point. The rest of my hands would be totally cracked and dry with black all crusted in the cracks. No matter how much I washed that wouldn't go away until they healed. Maybe my sister has pictures of her peach hands. She certainly put in many more years than I did.

I also bough some supposedly super healthy Swiss Chard, which tastes like mild spinach, but I hear it's good for you so I added some to my dinner. I like the color of the stems and leaves. Very nice.


The triva question for the day is a fill in the blank..... The peach is a member of the ______ family. Hint: it's a popular flower.

4 comments:

  1. Ok, ok, I'll join in the trivia. I'm gonna say the Rose family.

    Also, that is the scariest looking broccoli I have ever seen. I think I would be afraid to eat it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I was definitely afraid to eat it, but Adrienne made me. It was actually quite good, once you got over how weird it looked.

    I was going to guess rose too...

    ReplyDelete
  3. You are correct! It is a member of the rose family. I like trying new foods from different cultures. Even if it looks like the culture this one came from is somewhere in outer space. I'm glad I could convince Scott to try it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Yeah I cheated and used wikipedia to find that out, but thank you Adrienne for making me learn something new!I also learned that it is related to prunes and almonds...cool!

    ReplyDelete

Recap Defined

ri•cap 1 (rē-kāp') Pronunciation Key tr.v. ri•capped, ri•cap•ping, ri•caps
1. a summary at the end that repeats the substance of a longer discussion
2. To replace a cap or caplike covering on: recapped the camera lens.
3. Ri - a female given name: derived from Adrienne.