Thursday: Back in the groove and the garden

Lorna has her cooking groove back.

Breakfast was another Crossroads latte, with a pear mid-morning. For lunch I'd packed a chef’s salad of lettuce and radishes, topped with sliced hard-boiled egg and the rounds of baked goat cheese I made last night, with homemade vinaigrette and some carrot sticks and homemade bread on the side.

Later in the afternoon I snacked on a handful of home-grown and home-dried raisins and cherries. We have a food dryer, a fine little machine that whirs away on the back porch for much of the summer, whenever we have an excess of fruits and sometimes vegetables. My husband Andreas is the food dryer guy. He uses it for pitted cherries from our own trees and from the U-pick, which go into muffins and salads year-round and which we pack with nuts as a snack for school or work. He uses it for the many grapes we have growing on arbors around the edge of our property (we planted them for wine, but after a couple of spectacularly failed attempts at home winemaking we are happy to have the raisins). He also uses it in the winter to make ginger-spiced persimmon fruit leather from the persimmons that grow on the tree in our front yard.

We have raised a garden of some kind for all 17 years we’ve lived in Medford. We moved here from Los Angeles with a couple of pots of basil, an intensive pesto-production center that was all we could manage in the way of home-grown food in UCLA student housing where we’d been living. Our Medford home, in an older section of town on a normal-sized city lot, came with two plum trees and a fig. Since then we have added apple, pear, cherry, persimmons and (new this year) pomegranate trees.

We have many grape vines, and each year we till up a large section of the back yard for an assortment of summer fruits and vegetables. The array varies, but this year between May and September we have enjoyed snow peas, English peas, cucumbers, pumpkin, several varieties of peppers, several varieties of tomato, corn, green beans, Italian flat beans, zucchini (yellow and green), eggplant, lettuce and lemon cucumber. I am probably forgetting a few things but it’s too dark to go outside and look right now.

Chard seems to do well all year. This spring Andreas moved our strawberries to a sunnier spot where they are quite happy, and he added blueberries and raspberries. Everything is completely organic, nourished by the compost pile along the alley that we feed all year with kitchen scraps and which Andreas uses to amend the soil in springtime. We have better luck with some types of plants than others, and our fortune varies from year to year. A couple of years ago we had a bumper crop of green beans, and I was able to make enough dilly beans out of the surplus to last us all winter. Sometimes we have great loads of cucumbers or pumpkins. This year the tomatoes were late, but we have been fortunate to avoid the blossom-end rot that I have heard so many gardeners complain about this season. We have never had good luck with corn or eggplant, but we keep trying.

We are thrilled to have friends who grow more than they can use and are generous with sharing the wealth. And when I go outside in the morning to find a zucchini like a baseball bat that I could swear wasn’t there yesterday, I know I can pass it along to my friend Kim who will use it in her Italian family’s beloved stuffed zucchini recipe. I say “we” when I talk about the garden, but really it is Andreas who gets all the credit for the bounty. I only get away with shunning the garden gloves by being the chief cook and bottle washer. This year one of the great new additions Andreas made to our garden space was the three large planters he built into the deck, all devoted to herbs and edible flowers. I just have to step out my back door to harvest everything from calendula petals to tarragon. Instead of running to the store for the forgotten parsley, I find it just a couple of steps away.

The main course for tonight’s dinner was the Oregon tuna loin I ordered yesterday from The Wharf. There’s no way to know where off the coast the boat was when they caught it. And wherever that boat came in on the coast, it was surely more than a 100-mile drive from here. But I will pretend that fish hit land at Gold Beach and then flew to Medford. Yeah, I know that’s a stretch but, boy, was that one tasty fish.

I marinated it in a little oil and vinegar, garlic and fresh herbs. We grilled it, and I served it with a homemade aioli mixed with more herbs. Nik grilled slices of eggplant, zucchini and onions. I served the roasted tomatoes I’d made yesterday with toasted slices of homemade bread and Siskiyou Crest chevre (spread a little cheese on the toast, top with a roasted tomato – delicious).

And Andreas made his wonderful Ikarian potato salad, a specialty of the Greek island his family comes from. He used the fingerling potatoes I’d steamed yesterday, cubed and mixed with chopped tomato, cucumber, red onion, purslane (growing wild in the garden and considered to be a weed by many Americans who don’t know what they’re missing) and fresh herbs, with a vinaigrette dressing. There was loaf of fresh bread and a green salad. And thanks to the hands of my whole family in the kitchen, it was all done by 8 p.m.