The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Lucy Kemnitzer:

On a non-culinary, non-botanical note, those of you within shouting distance might consider the eighth annual Harry Smith Festival:
http://www.celestialmonochord.org/2009/11/kai-schafft-the-monochord-interview.html

Too far away for me to consider even if I had founf out early enough.

I think enough bands getting together and playing Coo Coo Bird all weekend might make the state of Pennsylvania rise into the air and float away.

Is there a wild carrot in any part of the US that is actually a carrot? The thing we call wild carrot around here is not only not a carrot, it's poisonous.

Re chard: chard is beet, beet is chard. (beta vulgaris) Greens came before swollen roots.

I like yellow chard best, but it's hard to find except as a component of "rainbow chard."

Carrots were originally either pale yellow (not white, my error of memory) or purple. Orange didn't appear until the 1500s, in Europe.

My point is that orange is an improvement. Other colors are nice as pcounterpoint, though.

You can taste the nutritional advantage in the orange cauliflower. It tastes like the cauliflower that cauliflower lovers are talking about when they talk about the heavenliness of cauliflower.


You know, carrots used to be white, too, before somebody got wise.


Oh, and purple cauliflower is disappointing in taste, as is romanesco, which is so beautiful you can almost forgive it.

@696, Serge: I have been the unfortunate savior of bird brains that keep flying into crevices in buildings where I am. The most recent was a young female towhee, I think, and it crashed around my kitchen doing about as much damage as a 3-point earthquake centered in Hollister (that is, not much, but enough to be annoying). To get to the point, my cat just sat there and kvetched at me about his peace being disturbed, or maybe he wanted me to catch it and serve it to him.

It took all night and part of the morning to get the little creep to fly out the inviting open windows instead of down behind my stove or between various toolboxes in the back room.

Around here, all sweet potatoes are called yams indiscriminately. Yams are also yams, when you can find them.

Also, as to turnip trolling: foo.

I have turnips in my vegetable drawer, and celery root, and cabbage.

Unfortunately in orange cauliflower season I can hardly find any attention for anything else.

Also, after Halloween I seem to be accumulating the pumpkins other people won't eat. Now that I know how easy it is to eat them I don't understand why everybody doesn't just have them for breakfast two or three times a week.

Two cabbages will last me two weeks, living by myself these days, depending on what else I have in the kitchen. I lived on cabbage pretty much for a long time. Mostly raw. I made salad with stuff, any stuff at all, especially nuts and cheese and meat in it. if you dress it with Japanese rice vinegar, it's one thing. If you dress with with mayonaisse and apple juice it's another thing. And so on. If you shred vegetables into it, you have one thing. If you shred fruit into it it's another thing. And so on.

I also like to make a crustless quiche with interchangeable brassicas: cabbage works well in that, lightly steamed and patted dry before sticking in the casserole. And then the custard part has a fraction of a bay leaf (if you use French ones instead of wild California ones maybe you need a whole one), and some nutmeg and green onion.

Also cabbage leaves can be used instead of lettuce to wrap sandwich fillings for breadless sandwiches.

Also you can make stuffed cabbage.

Also you can shred your cabbage and float it in hot broth until it wilts.

Also you can shred your cabbage and steam it gently with fresh dill.

Any of these things can be enhanced with various forms of pepper.

@374: I will resist the temptation to become the Defender of Turnips.

All's I will say is, if turnips is evil, I don't want to be good.

I usually get somewhere north of sixty. Closer to eighty, maybe, when you count the young adults that arrive later. But two weeks ago there was a fatal stabbing two blocks away and a week ago there was a shooting six blocks away, and I got maybe ten last night.

I understand. But. I wish I had more.

I'm a little uneasy about classification of the brasicaceae. Every time I feel comfortable with it, I read something that turns my head upside down/ They're really quite mind-boggling.

I'm very happy with them generally as food, but it annoys me that they don't, as a clade, make friends with soil fungi. It seems sort of wrong that something so yummy isolates itself from the dirt community like that.

@300: I might could make a meetup too, given that all the factors intersect properly. Sunday more likely than Saturday.

Paula @190: Well, everybody doesn't like something, and things with strong flavors probably have more people who don't like them. It could be that you just don't like the basic flavor of turnips. Or maybe you never had good turnips. But I'm betting on the former (that you simply don't like Turnips).

However, turnips are not a nasty trick for me. For me, they are iffy: if they are young and nice, and if they are cooked nicely (or not cooked but prepared nicely), and if I am in the mood for them, they are delightful.

I eat them in vinegar, like Japanese cucumbers, sometimes with cucumbers, and/or radishes and/or kohlrabi and/or celery root. I cube them with celery root and sautee them with onions and garlic and chiles and herbs for potato-less home fries (better than potatoes I think). If I make tempura -- which I don't do anymore, because nobody's home for Hanukah and that's the only time of year I deep fry anything -- turnips are there. I chunk them with celery root, beets, a bit of potato, kohlrabi, carrot, and sometimes sweet potato, and coat them lightly with oil and bake them with garlic, onion, chiles and herbs. I cook them tender enough to mash and mash them with cauliflower and celery root for a thing which behaves culinarily like mashed potatoes (but isn't as stable when held in a warm place, so don't). I cook them tender enough to mash and and mash them with tender-cooked kale and gobs of salsa fresca. I grate them with carrot instead of daikon, when turnips are cheap or available and daikon isn't (after all where do turnips stop and radishes or daikon begin? I don't know). And I stew them with carrots and onions and cabbage and celery or celery root and some kind of bony meat, whatever I can find that is still cheap (a bad side effect of the foodie revolution is that shanks and tails have become gourmet food, and what's up with that?).

So I am fond of turnips, because I know some nice ways to eat them. There is also Chinese turnip cake, which is heavenly, but I don't cook it. Yet.

It's just not so that people don't use all the other veggies with potatoes as well as brassicas. What is true is that the underlying umami and bitter and sharp flavor of brassicas does taste especially good with potatoes.

Or turnips.

I don't do potatoes much anymore, which means I now have the experience to say turnips and celery root substitute quite well for potatoes in these contexts.

Re the particle on the ossuary near Kutna Hora:

I was there! Last January, and I have photos to prove it. I was in Prague to visit (cue jewish mother stereotype) My Son the Medical Student. It was both the only church I visited and the only out-of-town trip we took. There was enough else to do in Prague . . .

It's really, really, really creepy, especially the coats of arms and stuff. It's also confusing, because that bit of explanation that is translated is translated into Czechlish, not English. And outside, there's one of those tesselated sidewalks like I saw all over Prague (but this is of course not in Prague but an hour's bus ride away from it), but this sidewalk was graced with a jolly roger.

@#581: apparently, Wikipedia is always improving, because it wasn't there some years ago the last time I went on a search for it! That's what I thought they meant, anyway.

Terry, that's probably the source -- I recall a lot of cultural references to soldiers who have nothing much to do until they have everything to do. Like firefighters, I guess. They all have to be there, because when you need them you really really need them.

Okay, vocabulary tangent.

Back in the Ice Age when I was a young adult I worked at a vegetable freezer plant. One season was brussels sprouts and the other season was spinach. They gave us a rule card, and the one rule I never got an interpretation for was "no soldiering."

I thought it might mean "no pretending to work when you're really just hanging around waiting for the floor lady to punch your card."

But Terry has used the phrase "shut up and soldier" to mean "just follow orders." And how come a freezer plant would want its workers not to do that?

I can tell a few stories to demonstrate that wasn't what they wanted, anyway.

Anybidy know what that rule really meant? West Coast, if that helps. The rules were written sometime after WWII and before 1974.

Nancy @ 404: It might work, but it's unecessary. I used two things: the simple explanation "the cars are very large, and you are very small, so they can't see you:" and the stopping game. On quiet streets, on long sidewalks, have them run ahead a bit and stop when you say stop (or you could use a cute keyword but that wouldn't help if someone else is telling them to stop for a car). You give them plenty of room to stop before corners and driveways, that's why you need quiet streets and long sidewalks. You can do it on playing fields too but that's a bit more abstract.

They win the stopping game, see, and now stopping when you say so because you see something they don't is easy.

Also, stop at every driveway and corner when they're little. Elaborately emphasize the looking around.

Much more organic than bags of sticks, though there's nothing wrong with a fancy trick too.

California seems to be voting against spending money more than anything else.

My legs are on fire. I just got home from the precinct. I was the Electronic Voting Specialist -- that is, I walked people through using the ballot box-with-scanner-on-top and the touchscreen ballot filler-out. It meant I was on my feet most of the time from a bit before six in the morning until a bit after nine at night (and actually that meant I got out faster than I ever have before, a fact I attrribute to a cleaner, quicker, easier checkout process).

I have never seen so many voters. I have never seen so many young voters, I have never seen so many first-time voters. I have never seen so many excited voters.

I have the beginnings of an idea about what the last two elections did in preparing the framework for the outside-the-party organization for this one, but I'm just not smart enough to work it out.

As usual, I won't be able to watch the results come in real-time because I'll be working at the polls till nearly midnight.

O dog, you just made me buy something online and I never do that. Third thing in a week, even (the others were a wall-mounted clothes drying rack and a black walnut cracker). I got the double acorn cookie mold from House on a Hill. My daughter's getting married next year and her ring is oak leaves and acorns and I couldn't resist it.

I did like the St. Martin cutting the cloak mold, too, though it's hard to imagine eatingj that.

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