I have simply ordered a box of maniacs

So we got some bees and I want to write about it so badly, but I've been up to my ears in this little farmers' market I'm launching as well as keeping up with all the good stuff coming out of the garden, so to tide you over here's a snippet from one of Sylvia Plath's bee poems, "The Wintering."

This is the easy time, there is nothing doing.
I have whirled the midwife's extractor,
I have my honey,
Six jars of it,
Six cat's eyes in the wine cellar

Grazie mille to S. for urging me to read these again. They're so funny and scary and painfully prescient.

Still Life Raspberries with Dumpster

We've had a bit of a lull in the garden for the past couple of weeks--the spring things are done, but the summer crops aren't quite ready yet. That's allowed us to broaden our field of vision and see what's going on outside the garden.

KATE: I kept busy by making blueberry jam from the wonderful Blue Chair Jam Cookbook recipe, which adds a splash of balsamic vinegar and a cinnamon stick, and I'm happy to say that together they add a warm and complicated depth to the blueberries.

Here's a question. Did I use native berries foraged from a secret local blueberry patch, or trek down to the Pine Barrens to find an organic blueberry farmer and ransack his farm? I did not. Instead, I noticed with great delight when I opened the Shoprite circular last Friday that it was the one special week of the year when flats of commercial blueberries are on sale for an insanely cheap price. Reader, I bought them. Two, in fact. They may have been from New Jersey, but probably not. They were definitely produced using pesticides. And this is nothing to be ashamed of.

Sometimes I'm afraid I've gone so far down the garden path (har har) that I'm losing sight of why people started putting up food in the first place. Thrift is a virtue, as is eating ethically and re-learning skills like canning and gardening that are at risk of dying out when our grandparents are gone. Foraging at the supermarket is not the same as filling a basket with berries at the state park like I did as a child, but it's also not reprehensible. Sure, I'm voting for those commercial blueberries with a few of my food dollars, but I'm also saving money and storing my family's food for the winter. I keep telling myself that Shoprite is not the enemy. It's just not first on my list of food sources.

MARK: For most people, the grocery store is the first place to look for food, and a parking lot in an office park would probably be toward the bottom of the list. While the asphalt jungle may not be a primary source of food for us, I always have my eyes open--probably because it's impossible for me to get out of gardening mode--and sometimes I'm rewarded.

I like to briefly escape my corporate crypt once or twice a day just to remind myself the outside world still exists. Despite its location within spitting distance of Route 80 and the sisyphean efforts of the landscapers, some natural life persists. I like to keep tabs on the stupid little bird that built her "nest" (it's like 3 sticks) on one of the rocky medians smack in the middle of the parking lot. She yells at me as I approach, squawking to distract me from the tiny egg she guards. Occasionally, her mate will arrive and play wounded in an act of selfless subterfuge, so I'll give a half-hearted chase to boost his ego.

One of the best features of the unremarkable lot is the stand of trees at the edge. Unseen creatures can be heard busying themselves in the underbrush, even over the din of the highway. On one occasion, a bear was cavorting amongst the cars and the super-not-helpful police cruiser that showed up. Anyway, the understory of this little woodland morsel is peppered with wild raspberries, called wineberries by some. I've always assumed that the berries get devoured by animals or coworkers as soon as they ripen, since I've never noticed any good ones in years past. Today I was lucky enough to grab handfuls of ripe fruit as I passed during my constitutional, the canes prolific on either side of the ironically placed dumpster. This bounty in a bleak landscape left me incredulous, but such is the tenacity of nature and the awesomeness of summer.

Peas, Please!

Arrived home from work and promptly picked 3.3 pounds of shelling peas, 2.5 pounds of sugar snap peas, and 4 heads of broccoli. Had to stop because my basket was full.

Time to get creative! And also, to start giving produce away. Any takers?

Micro-beet

Behold the rare and wondrous micro-beet, prized by chefs and artisanal farmers around the world!

Just kidding. We didn't get around to weeding the beet patch, and this is the pathetic result. NOTE: Root vegetables, especially carrots and beets, are really freakin' hard to weed. It's almost impossible to distinguish beet greens from the dozens of really enthusiastic, invasive weeds in our garden. And we have a particularly crafty weed from the carrot family that's taken over our carrots. The leaves look identical! How the heck are we supposed to tell the difference?

Campanelle with Garlic Scape Pesto and Smoked Scallops

One hour and fifteen minutes. That's the elapsed time between the eating and the blogging of this dish. It's really so good, and made even more so by its fortuitousness. This started out as a kitchen-sink dinner, although that term is a little disrespectful because I had so many gorgeous ingredients just hanging around the house today. First, we had the garlic scapes, which are the unopened flower and stem of an immature hardneck garlic plant. I've tried putting them in salads and sauteeing them with other veggies, and they're okay, but my favorite thing to do with them is make pesto. So I did just that.

There were some house-smoked scallops I got from Metro Seafood in Clinton on Sunday, as well as the glorious bounty of today's CSA share, not to mention the goodies we have in our own garden. My pasta dish came together in one of those beautiful hallelujah sequences in which the one inspirational shaft of sunlight shone through the kitchen window onto my hand as I chose each ingredient.

On the side I served some warm chickpeas with lemon juice, good green olive oil, summer savory, and crumbled pepper-crusted chevre from Cranberry Creek, a newly discovered farmstead creamery in the Poconos that has been knocking our socks off. (We're so lucky they make deliveries to Genesis!)

To be honest, it was probably a little uncomfortable to witness my smugness as we tucked into this meal. Local scapes and basil in the pesto, sugar snap peas and herbs from our own garden, really good cheese. Is the artisanal seafood over the top? I don't care. Even our beverage was soda water with my favorite homemade lime-mint syrup. This recipe is so of-the-moment that by the time you read this the scapes and sugar snap peas may be gone until next year, but please bookmark this. It is so, so good.

Campanelle with Garlic Scape Pesto and Smoked Scallops

2/3 pound short pasta, like campanelle
1/3 pound sugar snap peas, cut into 1-inch lengths
½ cup garlic scape pesto (recipe follows)
¼ pound smoked scallops, thinly sliced

Prepare pesto, then put the pasta water on to boil. Add a couple tablespoons of salt before putting the pasta in the pot. Cook according to package instructions, then drain, reserving about ½ cup of the cooking water. Return pasta to pot and add pesto, mixing until blended. Add pasta water a tablespoon at a time until the sauce is smooth but not watery. Toss in snap peas and spoon into bowls. Add salt and pepper to taste. Top each serving with slices of scallop—the equivalent of about 2 scallops per person.

Serves 4

Garlic Scape and Walnut Pesto
10 garlic scapes, finely chopped
10 basil leaves, or however much you'd like
1/3 to 1/2 cup finely grated parmesan (to taste and texture)
1/3 cup walnuts, toasted
About 1/2 cup olive oil
Salt

Put the scapes, basil, 1/3 cup of the cheese, walnuts, and half the olive oil in the bowl of a food processor (or use a blender or a mortar and pestle). Whir to chop and blend all the ingredients and then add the remainder of the oil and, if you want, more cheese. If you like the texture, stop; if you'd like it a little thinner, add some more oil. Season with salt.

If you’re not going to use the pesto immediately, press a piece of plastic against the surface to keep it from oxidizing.The pesto can be stored in the refrigerator for a couple of days or packed airtight and frozen for a couple of months.

Makes about 1 cup
Gotta give credit to Dorie Greenspan. This pesto is a variation on hers.

Staggering

This work can be overwhelming. I know it is for Mark because for every task that gets accomplished he can tick off half a dozen things we've fallen behind on or are going wrong. But he's getting better all the time. Part of this grand-scale gardening project is to train ourselves to enjoy the process and wean ourselves off the fleeting high of accomplishing goals that's inevitably followed by the huge letdown of having no occasion to rise to.

So let's talk about something we did right this year: Staggering the broccoli harvest. Last season we had 12 beautiful broccoli heads all ready at the same time, and we couldn't eat them fast enough. This year we went with Fedco's Broccoli Blend seed mix that contains some early, mid, and late varieties. We ate the first wave this week, and the second wave will be ready next week, and some plants have yet to form heads. It's perfect.

Another thing we did right: Leaving the peonies to reign over the vegetable garden in their glory, even if they can be annoying obstacles. It helps that they're in full bloom right now. They were really bothering me when we were laying out the rows in March; I wanted to lay flagstone for the paths, and the space will never look tidy with those huge, blowsy bushes scattered all over. But they're beautiful, smell good, attract beneficial insects, and keeping them is much more true to the permaculture vibe we're trying to cultivate. I need to keep telling myself that there's no such thing as a perfect garden. It will always be a work in progress, never predictable, never finished. And that's a good thing.

Easy Being Green

The tentative yellow-green of the first grass blades and baby leaves of spring have exploded into the lushness of early summer, hanging in the heavy tree canopies overhead and busting out of the garden as the first crops of lettuce and broccoli. But for every crunchy little butterhead there are a dozen thistles and dandelions and other weeds. Mint enjoys something of a double-agent status in our garden, since it can definitely be a pest because it grows so quickly and spreads everywhere, its tough carpet of roots almost impossible to eradicate. The only thing is that I love mint so much that I can't bear to fight it with any real conviction. So instead I harvest it like crazy, making mint-apple jelly, gallons of iced tea, and especially this simple syrup that originally caught my eye because it uses surplus basil, but mint works just as well. We mix it with seltzer when we're feeling virtuous and add some rum when we're feeling less so.

But the real star of today's show is this delightful vegetable side dish that I made for dinner tonight. It's not my own; I got it from Andrea Reusing's Cooking in the Moment via this month's Saveur magazine. With only four ingredients it manages to be sweet, crisp, buttery, creamy, and salty. Best of all, it uses a lot of lettuce, which is coming out our ears right now, and also uses green garlic, which is just immature garlic bulbs and stalks that have a great garlic flavor without being overpowering. Kind of like a scallion, but garlic flavored. It's also sadly underused, in my opinion.

I had a mental block against cooking lettuce, even though there are plenty of respectable recipes out there for grilled and wilted lettuce. Now I am a convert. We ate this for dinner with fried eggs and raisin toast, and it was magical.

Fresh Peas with Lettuce and Green Garlic

4 tablespoons unsalted butter
5 small stalks green garlic, or 3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
Kosher salt, to taste
1 1/2 cups fresh or frozen green peas (I used frozen and they were terrific)
2 small heads butter lettuce (about 6 oz.), washed, cored, and torn into large pieces
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Heat 2 tablespoons of butter in a skillet over medium heat; add garlic, season with salt, and cook, stirring often, until soft but not browned, about 3 minutes. Add peas and cook until bright green and tender, about 4 minutes. Stir in remaining butter, along with lettuce and 1 tablespoon water, season with salt and pepper, and remove from heat. Stir until lettuce is just wilted, about 1 minute.

Yum.