Old Hippie Chef: Fall Planting

I got my act together this year and planted my winter vegetables two weeks ago. We planted green and red kale, spinach, chives, iceberg lettuce, arugula. As you can see by the photos below we're not talking about a large quantity of food, but just enough to feel good about producing something for yourself that didn't come from the store.

We all had gardens growing up back east. Quite a few of my Italian and Polish cousins lived in our same neighborhood. My father Rocco's cousin Danny had a garden last time I was back in Connecticut. Danny was pushing a hundred years old, and that garden was producing like crazy.

The soil in New England is a rich musty dark brown, and when you picked up a handful, put it to your nose you could smell mother earth, and you knew instantly that this was where you came from, and that this was where you would return when your journey on this planet was complete.

My grandmother Angelina bought little pieces of land when she got an extra fifty or hundred dollars. You could buy a lot, a whole acre, for fifty bucks back in those days. Our house was where she had her big garden. She had a milk cow, pigs, chickens, and a little red barn. She had red grapes and Concord white grapes, and made a crude form of wine. One year my Dad made some dandelion wine, which turned out to be vinegar.

There was a slight slope to our property, and my father had the garden configured so you could put a hose with a small trickle of water at the top of the garden, and it would irrigate all the rows of vegtables of the garden all the way down.

He explained to me how the Romans had built the aqueducts, and that our little garden in dirty old Danbury Connecticut was operating on the same principle of moving water that had been perfected thousands of years before. Or as the old man might have said; "Water moves down hill kid."

Gardens were a source of pride, and the people with the best gardens had bragging rights all year round because what wasn't used or given away was canned. Old tomatoes made great bombs to throw at people's cars, and made wonderful weapons for a food fight with your friends.

So, for this blog I'm going to give you a simple salad dressing recipe, and that's it for this week. The veggies are nice, but they need something to accompany them, to make them shine, and this salad dressing will do just that. It goes well with some nice crispy frisee', cherry tomatoes, kalamata olives, cucumber and dandelions.

Peace,

Make Food/Not War

Toasted Sesame Salad Dressing

1/3 cup of dark toasted sesame seed oil
1/2 cup rice wine vinegar
pinch of celery salt
1 tsp fresh crushed garlic
2 tbs dark brown sugar
crushed black pepper to taste
1/2 tsp onion salt

Let chill for at least one hour. Mix well and drizzle over fresh organic greens and veggies. Toss lightly.