Kitchen Gardeners International: Vegetables That Cut to the Quick
By Barbara Damrosch
As a gardening cook, I always say that flavor is everything, but my evil twin, the lazy cook, knows otherwise. Sometimes I just want vegetables that are easy to slice.
Cooking is all about cutting things up, and a cylindrical variety that yields uniform slices -- quick to do, tidy on the plate -- is what I reach for on a busy day. I'll choose a long, slender beet such as Forono over a round one. I'll grab tapered radishes such as red-and-white D'Avignon, or a daikon, to slice for salad. I might even forgo my favorite Brandywine tomato (delicious but a bit lumpy) in favor of a paste type that makes quick, round disks. I'll skip the flying-saucer-shaped pattypan squash and reach for zucchini. Chop, chop. Pattypans, like round tomatoes, are great for stuffing. But stuff anything on a day when there's 10 for lunch? Not a chance.
On a quiet day in winter, I'll gladly embrace vegetables for which the prep work is a labor of love. I'll cut gnarled, grimy roots off celeriac, and probe the knobby crevices of nutty-tasting Jerusalem artichokes. Even in summer, I might take time to stuff a bell pepper or line a baking pan with eggplant for moussaka. But when prep time is nonexistent, it's long, thin peppers for salad slicing, skinny eggplants for ratatouille, slender fingerlings for potato salad.
Seed breeders know this. I'll bet the ever-popular Waltham butternut squash got its all-America selection rating not for its smooth orange flesh, but for its thick-waisted shape and small seed cavity. Butternuts with hourglass figures are harder to peel, and you get fewer perfect circles to fry in butter. And why peel an onion when you can hold a scallion over the salad bowl and snip for an instant shower of pungency? Even greens with narrow heads get preference when life is frantic. Romaine lettuce beats butterhead, pac choi beats cabbage. In a kitchen war of Italian cities, long Treviso radicchio sends round Chioggia and Castelfranco into retreat.
Seedsmen know that cooks like their beans nice and straight. Look at them in the catalogues, aligned in a row, ready to have their ends severed in a single stroke. And yet somehow, there are days in summer when, busy or not, I make time for the old-fashioned bean Anellino Giallo, which translates as little yellow rings (from http://www.growitalian.com). Since they form corkscrew curls, the ends must be snipped one by one. But they're yummy, and a bowl of them, sprinkled with olive oil and parmesan, looks so much like pasta it could be a main course.
Article copyright of Barbara Damrosch. Reprinted with permission.
Vegetable photos by Dey
Posted by KGI on August 24, 2007 7:08 AM to Kitchen Gardeners International
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