And why would I bother to have and squander any emotion at all about the word veggies? I’ve wondered myself about why I don’t like it and won’t use it. I think it’s this: The word veggie is infantile. Like puppies. Or Cuties. It reduces vegetables to something fluffy and insubstantial. Think about it: We don’t say “fruities,” or “meaties” “or “wheaties” — unless it’s the cereal. We don’t say “eggies” or “beefies.” We don’t have a Thanksgiving birdy; we have the bird. But we don’t seem to be able to say vegetable.  Certainly it’s no longer than saying “Grass-fed beef” or “I’ll have a latte.”

Veggie turns vegetables into something kind of sweet but dumb, and in turn, one who eats a lot of vegetables might be construed as something of a lightweight, but one who can somehow excused. “It’s just veggies, after all. They’ll snap out of it.”

‘Vegetables’ speaks to their many strong traits

But the word isn’t used just by errant omnivores. Vegetarians are very fond of the word too, and they use it all the time. Plant foods, especially vegetables, are the backbone of vegetarian magazines, yet even there they’re reduced to veggies. I think vegetable is a more dignifying name by far. Just think of what plants do and what they’ve gone through to be on our plates.

They’ve been moved all around the world and gone rather willingly to where we humans have wanted them.

They’ve been altered to be pleasing to human palates.

They have adapted to all kinds of circumstances and survive against all odds and at extremes ranges of heat and cold, wetness and aridity.

The tiniest sprouts can move concrete. Eventually.

They can be dangerous and deadly, or they can be tender and sweet. And some come close to being both in the same plant. Like potatoes and tomatoes.

They can cure ills, for example, aspirin comes from willow; liver remedies are derived from members of the aster family, which include artichokes, burdock, chicories, milk thistle and lettuce among others; brassicas may prevent cancer. There’s the whole pharmaceutical stance one can take regarding vegetables given the truly amazing nutrition they offer.

Radicchio. Credit: Deborah Madison

Vegetables have serious means of protecting themselves — with spines and thorns, or by emitting subtle odors or substances. They can keep other plants at a distance so they alone can make use of limited amounts of water and nutrients; they can find ways to use other plants to climb on. Seed pods are cleverly designed to attach a ride to a jacket, a hat, a dog’s fur to be carried elsewhere to grow. (The burdock burr was the model for Velcro.) And they can defend themselves against predators; pinions discharge a sap that keeps bark beetles from boring in. (The food part is the pine nut).

Plants also keep other forms of life going by attracting bees and hummingbirds, moths and insects, which they feed.  They can sometimes cajole birds into carrying away their seeds to plant elsewhere. Plus they give us flowers and fruits in abundance. We love honey of all varietals — especially that derived from thyme, a member of the mint family, and flowers, too. We even use flowers in the kitchen.

Their seeds can sometimes last for hundreds of years or more. Some sprout only in fires, which is one reason burned forests can recover some kind of growth soon after a fire.

Angelica. Credit: Deborah Madison

They don’t complain when we waste them by using only the most tender parts and ignoring rough-looking leaves and stems and cores. Chickens are grateful of them.

In short, plants are generally quite amazing, strong and clever beings that evolve with time. Whether you are an omnivore or a vegetarian (or a chicken), we all benefit by eating plants. Plant foods. Vegetables. Fruits. Seeds. Stalks. Heads. Crowns. Skins. Cores.

I hadn’t thought about it when I was working on “Vegetable Literacy,” but I think — I hope — that the book, among other things, offers a way to go beyond the “veggie” concept of vegetables by introducing them as the eccentric and powerful personalities they are.

Top photo: Rainbow chard. Credit: Deborah Madison

The post Stop Calling Them Veggies; Vegetables Are Due Respect appeared first on Zester Daily.

I took those unread botany books off the shelves and found out that yes, these were all members of the umbellifer family and they all make umbel-like flowers, though varying enormously in size. This family includes a lot of  wild but familiar plants, including the deadly hemlock, and it turns out that  — minus the hemlock — they all happen to be harmonious in our mouths, both the vegetables and the many herbs in that family.

It’s all relative when it comes to vegetables

I started looking more into plant families, who is in them, their stories, their shared characteristics and the way they play in our kitchens. Like people, plant family members are indeed relatives.

The daisy (composite) family, a group of ruffians, includes the prickly artichokes and cardoons; salsify and scorzanera all with their habit of oxidizing; the bitter chicories; plus milk thistle, dandelion and burdock — a feisty bunch of plants. Break any of the roots and a thick white sap appears. Taste it and you will recoil from its bitterness. But a lot of these bitter plants are good for the liver, it turns out. Interesting.

Members of the nightshade family have been universally resisted wherever they’ve been introduced. Tomatoes were thought to cause stomach cancer. The Russian Orthodox Church believed potatoes were not food because they weren’t mentioned in the Bible, and besides, why eat what a dog didn’t even find interesting? Eggplant was thought to cause leprosy, and the consumption of eggplant (and nightshades in general) stimulates the pain of arthritis, which is why some people avoid it, even today. Belladonna got its name because when ingested, the pupils of the eyes grew large and dark, which was considered a form of beauty in women. The difficulties in this family, presumed or real, are due to alkaloids that can be deadly in large quantities but helpful in smaller ones; we all get our eyes dilated by the optometrist so the doctor can look deeply into our eyes, though not because of their lustrous beauty.

The chenopods, or goosefoots (yes, I looked at a goose’s gnarly foot to confirm the association), include spinach, chard, beets, wild spinach or lamb’s-quarters, and all are related to quinoa and amaranth, whose leaves can be and are eaten as well as the seeds. Speaking broadly, they are interchangeable in the kitchen with respect to flavor. And if you have chard bolting in your garden, might you still be able to eat the leaves as they becomes smaller and further apart on their ever-lengthening stems? Indeed you can. And at this stage they taste more like some of the wild greens they’re related to. This is the kind of stuff that I find fascinating!

Anyone who gardens has opportunities that deepen one’s vegetable literacy and excitement. You’ll find treasures that won’t appear in your supermarket, such as coriander buds that are still green and moist, so surprising in the mouth and so well-paired with lentils. You get to see — and eat — the whole plant, not just the parts and pieces that show up in the store. Broccoli leaves, as well as the crowns and stems, are quite tasty, and the same is true of radish and kohlrabi leaves.

Leeks produce enormous ribbons of leaves, sometimes referred to as flags, and indeed you can wave them back and forth to signal someone, if need be. When left in the garden over winter, the shanks can grow to a few feet in length(!), by which time a firm core has formed, too dense to eat, but a great ingredient for soup stock. When a leek is left in the garden long enough to bloom, its enormous spherical flower mimics that of the pretty chive blossom. And when you finally encounter a mature leek in the garden you can see that it is a mighty and noble vegetable (one variety is named King Richard). Is it surprising that the leek is the national symbol of Wales?

The name knotweed (the family that includes rhubarb, sorrel and buckwheat) refers to jointed stems, but you might see that the blossoms of these plants resemble the kind of embroidery that consists of little knots. Not the botanical definition, but my own, and you may have your own interpretation of names, too. I might add it doesn’t take much imagination to bring these three challenging plants together in a recipe.

Does any of this matter?  Yes and no. We can still buy vegetables and cook them without knowing a bit of botany or history. But it is enormously fun to bring the familial nature of vegetables into view, to know that what relates in the garden often does so in the kitchen, which encourages both confidence and daring. And if you garden at all, your eyes will be open to possibilities that just don’t exist elsewhere.

To me, vegetable literacy enriches our world — and our culinary possibilities — by regarding the whole, wonderful plant and its relatives, not just the pieces and parts of a few cultivars.

Top photo: Deborah Madison holds an allium. Credit: Christopher Hirsheimer

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We’ve always like the food at the Avoca stores, which we knew from living in Ireland. Avoca features Irish products, from woolens to oatcakes, and Dublin’s store also has a restaurant that offers food both traditional (fish pie in cream under mashed potatoes) and contemporary (accompanied by a salad of micro greens). The staff was friendly the way the Irish tend to be, so when my husband forgot his hat that first jet-lagged day, from then on we were greeted and teased not to forget it again. There’s something to be said for being a regular someplace, but the other side is that once you’ve eaten a good way through a menu, you’re hungry to explore other choices.

On our previous visit in 2005, I, who did not get the bad oyster, was doing a piece for Gourmet magazine to accompany a story on Dublin. I ate at the most expensive restaurants, but only one of them was seemingly concerned with provenance. When we finally gave up our place at Avoca and turned to “eating out,” we had quite a different experience than in 2005. Here were menus where the source of every item, from vegetables to fish to game to breads, was named, along with those who made the bacon, made the cheese and smoked the haddock. It was surprising, astonishing even. The food was absolutely delicious and I was only sorry that we didn’t have another week to dine our way through the offerings at The Winding Stair, Chapter One and L’Ecrivain, among others.

Among the dishes we enjoyed was an earthy Jerusalem artichoke soup with ceps (they do not shy away from homely vegetables); Irish boxty with flat-cap mushrooms; Irish Hereford beef shin with colcannon (tender and oh so good); salmon cured with buttermilk whey; a spelt pearl risotto with beets and shaved fennel (and clearly a lot of good Irish butter); slow-cooked pork belly; and Ted Browne’s crab claws. Despite walking miles every day in chilly air, the desserts — of the rich and filling variety — were sadly unapproachable because there was absolutely no room for them.

Good Food Ireland a common theme during travels

One thing in common was that these restaurants claimed to be proud members of Good Food Ireland. What was that? Essentially, it’s a non-governmental industry group that links producers of Irish food to those who serve it. That sounded good, but was it for real or was Good Food Ireland (GFI) an organization that was just hitching a ride on the trend for the authentic and local?

Bags of apples for sale at a Dublin, Ireland, farmers market. Credit: Deborah Madison

As luck would have it, a few days after returning to New Mexico, Darina Allen, the doyen of Irish food and Ballymaloe Cookery School, called. She happened to be in Santa Fe, so we went to lunch and I asked her about Good Food Ireland. “Oh, that is a wonderful group!” she enthused. “And yes, they are the real deal!” Knowing that Darina’s opinion is based in reality, I was relieved. I liked the idea of Good Food Ireland. A lot. I wanted it to be just what it claimed.

GFI was started in 2006 by a woman named Margaret Jeffares, who was in the marketing business and lived on a farm in Wexford. It seemed obvious to her that there was a gap between the wonderful, authentic foods of Ireland and places where they might be experienced. Wouldn’t Irish tourism, both local and international (and with it farmers, producers and providers), be better served if there was a way to have a brand that established connection and authenticity to particular eateries? GFI is all about promoting Irish foods and linking food sources to restaurants to create “a trusted standard for authentic local food experiences.” The meals we ate at The Winding Stair, for example, certainly reflected this linkage, and to think that six years ago we never saw a menu that had so much transparency (or any, for that matter) regarding food sources.

Hearing Jeffares talk about founding GFI is to realize, as is always true with success stories, that her simple, obvious idea took an incredible amount of work to realize and its success was based in part on collaboration with the business sector of Ireland, with which she was familiar. She saw that “food tourism,” in which people should be able to experience the best foods a region had to offer, would benefit Ireland and its food producers and tourism in general.

As with Slow Food, Vermont Fresh Network and other movements here that promote authenticity and a true farm-to-table experience, even successful efforts involve a relatively small segment of the food-producing population. “Such establishments will always be in the minority,” Jeffares admits, in Ireland, too. But even so, there are more than 500 businesses committed to GFI’s core values of using locally produced food and products of high quality and service standards. And these core values apply not just to high-end restaurants but to B&Bs, hotels, pubs, cafes, cooking schools, farmers markets, food shops and more. It’s a great model for any country, but it probably helps to be a smaller one, like Ireland.

If you go to Ireland, look up Good Food Ireland and use it as a guide. You can even make your own tour based on where its member businesses are, if an authentic Irish food experience is what you want. And in my limited experience, I’d say it’s well worth having.

Photo: Cheeses for sale at a Dublin, Ireland, farmers market. Credit: Deborah Madison

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There’s always that moment when a garden starts to sigh and sink and say, in so many plant expressions, “Enough. We’re done.” It looks so exhausted that you can’t imagine there’s much left to harvest. Probably all our gardens are looking this way about now. Yet if you dig around you often discover there are still a few more tomatoes yet to ripen, the Jerusalem artichokes are coming on strong, and tiny cabbages are starting to emerge on the stems of the Brussels sprouts. The garden is far from finished, despite the strain it shows from a summer of growth, and what’s really looking big and strong, albeit somewhat tired, are cabbages and collards and those other big Brassicas.

A Savoy cabbage at Heritage Farm in Decorah, Iowa. Credit: Deborah Madison

The cabbages were especially impressive. They always are because they take up so much more room than their harvested heads would lead you to imagine. The enormous old grandmother-grandfather leaves that had been there since the start of the plants’ growth showed their scars. Though weathered, punctured by hail and nibbled upon by insects, they were still gathering sunlight and feeding the edible head. They’re hard-working plants. My respect for them, already considerable, grew even more.

The broccoli’s larger heads had long been picked, but smaller sprouts were ready for the taking — had this not been a demonstration garden, that is. The kales seemed energized by the cooler days and looked as if they were ready to sprint along for the next several months. Nothing looks as if it would be better for you to eat than kale — it is just so robust. If it were a person, I might add tightly wound.

Collards? Also huge. Brussels sprouts? What an architectural plant with the branches jutting out from the stalk leaving a window that you can peer in and see the sprouts starting to take shape.

Garden color arrives with vibrant hues of Brassica vegetables

But among all this vigor what really stood out was the extraordinary range of garden color these plants exhibited. We think of cabbages of red and green, but the leaves themselves are more of a dusky plum or a muted grayish blue-green. Pull away the leaf that just covers a head of red cabbage and beneath it is shiny purple, nothing like the smoky purple outer leaves. The broccoli and the Tuscan kale leaves are a surprising shade of blue-green-gray that escapes you until you see them en masse, not just in a bunch. The stems of the Brussels sprout leaves radiate a suggestion of violet, while the little sprouts are that calm slate green of the leaves. Taken together, the effect of all these shades and hues is breathtaking and utterly surprising. What we think of as green is actually a wide range of hues that embraces purple on the one side, green-blacks on the other, with shades of slate, blue-green, gray-green and every other shade in between. It’s another good reason for having a garden, or for visiting one like that at Heritage Farm. The goodness of plants is nothing if not layered — taste, nourishment and beauty all at once.

(Heritage Farm is the headquarters for the Seed Savers Exchange. Visiting hours and events are posted on its website at www.seedsavers.org.)

Top photo: A Mammoth Red Rock cabbage at Heritage Farm in Decorah, Iowa. Credit: Deborah Madison

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When you’re traveling on highways through the empty West, those magazine articles pointing you to culinary treasures won’t help much.  The good family-owned cafes are largely gone. Espresso (and/or good coffee) is rare. Farmers markets are dicey to connect with. Because there’s not much chance for real food anywhere, the obvious solution, it would seem, is to bring your own.

Drink up and DIY on your road trip

I suggest starting with beverages. Pack a small espresso pot and a small camping burner and you can at least stave off the misery of bad coffee. (If you’re a tea drinker, do the same for tea.) You can make good, strong coffee at rest stops or in your motel room. Or you can exit the freeway,  and find a boulder to lean against and a cool spot to set up your machine. Having a satisfying hot beverage in a beautiful spot can be magical. You sip, gratefully, listen to birds you don’t normally hear, breathe in the creosote smells of the Mojave Desert or the big sage on the “Loneliest Highway in Basin and Range Country,” maybe watch the sun rise or a hawk circle. Your only obstacle to this sublime pause, aside from running out of matches, water or coffee, is wind. I’ve been forced to give up the coffee experience because of wind more than once.

Other beverages are easy to bring and refreshing. A bottle of kombucha or decent iced tea has saved me from a spate of brain fatigue more than once when the temperature is hovering around 100 degrees. Makings for a gin and tonic or a bottle of wine will vastly improve the ambience of your cheap hotel room. Add some good crackers and cheese, a cucumber, some fruit and you don’t even have to look for place to eat in Barstow.

The hope for breakfast

Finding food is the harder part for road trip dining in the West. Yes, you can pack your own, but the problem is that after hours in the car I want to get out and stretch and sit and eat somewhere else, preferably in an air-conditioned restaurant with soft banquettes. More than once I’ve had food with me and still chosen to breakfast in a restaurant, just for the change. Breakfast is often the better meal to have on the road. If you don’t eat it normally, it’s kind of fun to have fried eggs and hash browns or eggs scrambled with chorizo. The eggs won’t be organic and nothing will be local or homemade, but you won’t perish and you will get fed.

Lunch and dinner are more difficult. That’s when the food you’ve brought comes in handy. I have absolutely relished my Motel 6 room in Needles, Calif., (105 F outdoors) because it had a little table and chair, and I had a delicious menu to assemble from my cooler, plus a bottle of chilled wine. I even had a little tablecloth to spread over the plastic table — a great help for atmosphere — and was happy as can be.

The local eatery challenge

Because there aren’t great choices for routes between New Mexico and California, I have gotten to know towns, cities and crossroads over the years. I’ve learned that Flagstaff has some good places to eat and a really good coffeehouse (Macy’s); that you can get a good cappuccino at a little café in Williams; that Kingman, my least favorite place next to Barstow, has a Mexican restaurant (Oyster’s Mexican and Seafood) with creaky fans that aren’t too effective but very cold beer that is and the chance for an OK, albeit fairly predictable, meal. There’s a café in Ludlow that will do in a pinch, too.

If I have the time to take Highway 395 up the east side of the Sierra, there are all kinds of OK restaurants in Bishop, Bridgeport and in between. But that does require extra time. Route 99 North is fast, intense and daunting.  It doesn’t take much longer to cross over the valley to the more relaxed pace of Interstate 5. And that’s where I found Baja Fresh, a relatively large restaurant chain but a welcome find in a gas station near Coalinga. I’ve had fish tacos there (grilled to order) more than a few times and found them, with their rice, beans and salsas, a fine meal. When I was there last, in June, I noticed the following words scrawled over the wall in big, friendly cursive: No Microwave. No Can Opener. No MSG. No Freezer. No Lard.

No wonder the tacos were so good.

Normally, a travel center would not be my culinary destination, but if you don’t want a steak at the Harris Ranch, a bowl of Andersen’s pea soup or a boiled egg wrapped in plastic, it might be that a travel center harbors a treasure. I have it bookmarked in my brain along with all the other little places that offer something out of the ordinary. I still do rely on my cooler, though, even if its contents more often than not aren’t eaten until my destination is reached, or until I’ve returned home.

Top photo: A taco café at Kramer Junction, the intersection of California Highways 395 and 58. Credit: Deborah Madison

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A resort that taps into local culture

Costa Navarino is in Messinia, the part of Greece that is green and lush. The beautiful resort (run by Westin) is situated at the edge of the Ionian sea, and the area is free of shops proffering Chanel and St. John. Started and owned by a local family, Costa Navarino is one of those seamless, large, well-appointed hotels in which you are well fed and lavishly cared for. Follow the signs to the beach and soon you’re standing on the sand or (swimming) in the sea. If you know where to look, you can see the ruins of a Venetian palace. The palace of Nestor is not far away, either, and while the location adds up to something exceptional, there’s more, for this is a resort that strides two worlds, that of hospitality and that which has to do with the preservation of the traditional life of Messinia and the protection of its exceptional landscape.

This part of the Peloponnese is an agriculturally rich area, but poor, and Messinians have long had to leave their homeland to find their fortunes elsewhere in the world. One man who left, Capt. Vassilis C. Constantakopoulos, vowed that he would make his fortune, return to Messinia and build something that would allow others to come home. Over a period of 20 years, he and his family created this resort that not only employs hundreds of Messininans, many who have finally been able to return to the area from afar, but is extremely sensitive to its environment and produces some very good food, starting with olive oil.

Olive oil, honey and sweets

When the hotel built a reservoir a few miles away, more than 7,500 olive trees were transplanted to Costa Navarino. The robust and spicy Koroneiki olive oil that is produced from these trees is used in the resort’s restaurants. (It is also available from Dean & DeLuca.) This olive oil is but one of about 25 foods produced, used and sold at Costa Navarino. Local artisans, working in small batches, also produce the irresistible olive oil biscuits (laid by your pillow instead of chocolates), the intense honey and sesame sweets called pastelli, an unusual, complex vinegar, wild sage tea, plump Kalamata olives simmered in a red wine syrup, preserved wild figs, seasonal spoon sweets (a small jar greets you when you arrive at your room), sea salt, and other choice foods including thyme honey embedded with a chunk of honeycomb. These, and other traditional foods, can be enjoyed at breakfast with or in lieu of the enormous spread of international delicacies. On my recent fall visit to Costa Navarino, I watched one husband and wife team make the honey-sesame pastelli, another couple, with their young daughter, make the olive oil biscuits, and three women fashion extraordinarily elaborate wedding breads.

There are a number of cuisines represented in the resort’s many restaurants, including Italian and Japanese, but Greek food dominates. A particularly interesting concept is expressed in the Omega restaurant, which offers modern dishes based on an ideal proportion of omega 3s and 6s. Instead of some vague international hotel style, the food at Costa Navarino echoes the high quality of the local products and the distinctive flavors of the area’s cuisine. Generous platters of vegetables (some vegetables are grown in the hotel’s gardens) fooled us at each meal, for my friends and I ate them as if they were dinner, forgetting to allow room for the octopus stew, the roasted pork shoulder, grilled grouper and wild greens, or the lamb dish to follow. After all, it was impossible to resist the silky puree of yellow peas studded with capers, platters of grilled eggplant, peppers and zucchini as sensual as they were simple, or the vivid salads that were nothing like what passes for “Greek salad” at home. Greek varietal wines were poured. I’m especially fond of these wines that, not surprisingly, are so right with the flavors of the vegetables, herbs and the olive oil.

Breathtaking surroundings

“As comfortable and delicious as everything was at Costa Navarino, who wants to stay in a resort when the surrounding area is so beautiful? An enormous lagoon offers refuge to birds during their migrations, among them, flamingos. There are hikes to take, golf, if you play, the sea to swim in, or pools. Kalamata (which has a great vegetable market) is a 45-minute drive away, and the charming village of Pylos is even closer. The resort will guide you to places to eat other than its own good restaurants. One, high above Pylos, was simply a house, the house, in fact, where the chef was born. While we gazed over the hills to the Ionian Sea he prepared a braised rooster dish with handmade noodles, among other delicacies. You can also end up in a small house where two local women will cook a very traditional meal and give those who yearn to try a hand at rolling phyllo dough, which is tricky but actually possible. If you’re one who has wondered about those Greek pies that combine sweet and savory flavors, like squash, sugar and leeks, this little house is where you can experience such dishes.

All the designed elements of the resort, from the buildings to the gardens the uniforms, to pillows and chandeliers were created in Greece. The tins for the oil are made in Greece. In fact, Greece has been the source of the physical manifestation of Costa Navarino, from the modern architecture to traditional stone walls built by local Messinians. Outsourcing has not figured here nor has it been necessary to create a place of beauty, plus jobs have remained in Greece, a lesson from which we could learn. So in the end Costa Navarino ends up being an interesting mix of tourism, environmental sensitivity blended with the goal of benefiting local people and keeping the area’s food and building traditions alive. The success of the resort is shared. In nearby small towns, tavernas and cafes that were once dead are now bustling. Life has returned. Still, the area is rural, the roads are small.

An American friend who lives elsewhere in Greece scoffed when I told her about Costa Navarino, projecting an over-populated tourist belt that would destroy the ambiance of this area. I hope that doesn’t happen. Rather I hope that Costa Navarino can become a model for others, for resorts will continue to be built. Certainly, if all resorts were created with the same goals in mind — to benefit locals in a meaningful way, to exist intelligently within an environment that it strives to protect, to encourage the production and use of traditional food — it would be a different and richer and more delicious world. Of course Greece has its financial nightmares right now, as do many other countries, including ours. But if you’re in want of sun and sea, good olive oil and gracious hospitality, you might lend a hand to this beautiful country while enjoying the pleasures it has to offer.

Zester Daily contributor Deborah Madison is the author many books on food and cooking, including “The Greens Cookbook” and “Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating From America’s Farmers Markets.” Her latest book is “Seasonal Fruit Desserts from Orchard, Farm and Market.”

Photo: A view of the Costa Navarino resort. Credit: Deborah Madison

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Regardless of your menu, Thanksgiving is the perfect meal to share with the company (and dishes) of others. It’s also the meal that easily absorbs the visiting friend of a cousin, the new boyfriend of a niece, a neighbor or someone you’ve just met. But sometimes Thanksgiving just doesn’t come to pass as one might hope. Many years ago our family had such a Thanksgiving, and it stays in my mind as one of the best, and most meaningful.

This was true the year I found myself reeling from a divorce. My mother, too, was alone — my father having suddenly left. My sister was expecting her first baby any minute and was in no mood to cook. Dad, of course, was not around for the first time in our lives, but was on the coast with his new lady friend. Collectively we were depressed, a little anxious, angry and confused. Not surprisingly, no one was the least bit interested in roasting a turkey or cooking even one of all those trimmings. Still, we were together — my mom, brothers, sisters and their spouses — so I threw out an idea in an offhand sort of way (not expecting any takers): “Why don’t we just grill some sausages?” There’s something about the sausage, its silly shape and its very informality that seemed about as far from a turkey dinner as one could get. Plus for us, sausage was a novelty.

We were not a sausage-eating family, or even a bacon-eating family. Pork never figured in our family’s menu, and this was long before you could get turkey sausages with spinach and chipotle peppers or whatever passes for sausage today.

So it was nice, plump Italian pork sausages that tumbled out of the butcher’s white paper. We set the table, lit a fire, opened the wine and grilled the sausages along with some onion rings and opened chewy rolls. In short order we sat down to our Thanksgiving supper. Mustard was passed. The sausages were lodged between lengths of rolls with the onions. We had a salad — coleslaw I believe. Dessert must have been something as simple as ice cream. Whatever the menu (and I no longer remember the details, maybe because there weren’t any details worth remembering), it perked everyone up, brought smiles back to faces that hadn’t been so smiley of late, and afforded our recently altered family a time of intimacy and ease, for which we were all truly grateful.

It’s curious how over a lifetime of big, happy Thanksgiving get-togethers with all the trimmings, the heritage turkeys, the good bottles, old friends and new and all of that, what stands out so clearly from the rest is this peculiar little dinner our family shared.

In giving this more thought, I realize that other Thanksgivings stand out, too, for the reasons that something was unexpected, like celebrating the day while backpacking, or a Thanksgiving in Rome when the chef at the American Academy rolled out a huge turkey covered with the flags of the nations, or the time when our family set out for a long hike in the snow but forgot to turn the oven on and had to make-do with sandwiches until the bird was cooked and fragrant — and we were all fully ready to enjoy it together.

Zester Daily contributor Deborah Madison is the author many books on food and cooking, including “The Greens Cookbook” and “Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating From America’s Farmers Markets.” Her latest book is “Seasonal Fruit Desserts from Orchard, Farm and Market.”

Photo: Sausages on the grill. Credit: istockphoto.com / Eric Naud

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I finally found out that it was a plant called huauzontle, a large goosefoot, or chenopod. In flower it looks a lot like quinoa, to which it is closely related, only one eats the little flowers before they become seeds.

A springtime fritter

This past spring I finally got to see it close up and uncooked. It was Easter week, I was teaching at Rancho la Puerta, and huauzontle happened to be available in the supermarket as a spring delicacy as well as a Lenten food. My friend Francisco, who works at the ranch and is an avid gardener, offered to show me and Penni Wisner, with whom I was teaching, how to make these succulent fritters. He and his wife and two little boys worked together while Penni and I helped out but mostly watched.

Basically, you clip off the flowers bracts, leaving only the thinnest stems, steam them until they’re tender, then mold them with your hands around a piece of salty soft white cheese. They then get dipped in a frothy batter of egg yolks and beaten egg whites before being slid into a cazuela of hot oil. Once they’re puffy and golden, the fritters are simmered in a mild chile sauce. In this case guajillo chiles were used with just a few slices of onion and a bit of garlic. When at last we sat down to eat together, we found this handsome dish utterly substantial and satisfying, indeed a perfect dish for Lent or any other time of year that huauzontle is available. And they were just as good as I remembered them from Puebla. These fritters are somewhat time-consuming to make, but interesting and good to eat. Because even the finer stems can be wiry tough it’s quite permissible to run them through your teeth, leaving the little flowers behind. Given the sauce and the coating, this is something of a down and dirty process.

Plant or weed?

Once I got home, I found seeds for huauzontle — also called Red Aztec Spinach — in the Terroir seed catalogue. That was in June. By late September, I had a huge mass of this plant in flower. Since I never expect things to grow, I’m quite thrilled. But when a Yaqui friend of mine saw my huauzontle forest and asked, “How come you planted those weeds?” I was a little deflated.

I had to admit he had a point. They do look a lot like many of the weeds growing around my garden. I hadn’t noticed them before, but now I can see a lot of plants growing well on their own that look quite a bit like huauzontle, amaranth and a host of other closely related wild greens.

But, to answer my friend’s question, why this “weed”? Because it’s so much more interesting to eat than other plants. I’ve already steamed the flower buds and had them with nothing more than butter, salt and pepper for starters, and I can see that they taste not unlike chard, spinach, beet greens, orach, Good King Henry, quinoa leaves, and all the greens domestic and wild that grow around New Mexico. But there’s something very different about eating the more unusual ones, like huauzontle, that are closer to being wild than say, spinach is: They are fortifying and intense, and it’s as if their considerable nutrients go directly into your bloodstream. Their taste is — I know, it doesn’t make sense, but I’m not the only who feels this way — green. Wild. A little strange, sometimes even salty, untamed and strength-giving. They’re not quite like other plants we know — not really like broccoli despite my initial confusion about the looks, not really like spinach, which is somewhat bland by comparison. Rather, huauzontle and other wilder greens, collectively called quelites in New Mexico, are a whole new kind of food.

My huauzontle was big and green until the temperature dropped into the forties. Now the flower buds are a deep dusky red, and the leaves are going in that direction as well. The flower plumes are too tough to eat, but gorgeous in a large vase. I intend to grow it again next year as I didn’t learn as much as I’d wanted to this time around, but I suspect it won’t be necessary to buy seed. Like amaranth and quinoa, I can see that there are going to be millions of seeds scattered about, regardless of how much I manage to cook or compost. This is one vigorous, productive plant and, I suspect, a good one to get to know.

Zester Daily contributor Deborah Madison is the author many books on food and cooking, including “The Greens Cookbook” and “Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating From America’s Farmers Markets.” Her latest book is “Seasonal Fruit Desserts from Orchard, Farm and Market.”

Photo: Huauzontle growing in Madison’s garden. Credit: Deborah Madison

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Drawing on family experience

Milan Doshi’s parents had decades of experience leasing and running hotels. Milan, 31, grew up in the world of hotel franchised chains: Comfort Inns, Holiday Inns. One year his mother bought a piece of art in India, which she placed in the lobby of the family’s hotel. When the company inspector came for a visit, he made it clear that such acts were not permitted because all the inns in the chain were supposed to look the same. So as well as being one of the most wasteful industries, the franchise word is not at all supportive of individual expression, certainly, or much else, in Milan’s opinion. He had a different vision of what might be possible. After getting a degree in economics, going to cooking school, working with Vandana Shiva in India and then in an highly respected Indian restaurant, Devi, in New York, he came back to the hotel business, but in a fresh way.

In 2008, he and his parents invested in three Queen Anne-period Victorians in Denver after Milan had looked at more than 150 properties around the country for houses he could use for B&Bs. He was looking specifically at pre-1900s buildings — not because he’s partial to the Victorian style, but because homes built before that time were generally solid structures, built to be around for a while.

“The 19th-century homes were created in a way that lasted,” he says. “I wanted to bring them up to modern efficiency, using wind-source credits, double-paned windows, low-flow showers and toilets, R-49 value insulation and, eventually, zero waste.”

A green goal

Yes, zero waste. Milan’s goal for his B&B venture was to convert the old homes into models of green living — but without the holier-than-thou overtones. “You don’t have to build a new LEEDS [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] building to be structurally efficient,” he says. “We wanted to create a green model in an inn that included scratch cooking, gardens and environmental amenities, things that a person could consider taking home and do oneself. We didn’t want to be preachy; we just wanted to show people some accessible options.”

The Queen Anne in Denver is an easy place to stay. At the entrance, a wall is given over to a scripted quote by Wendell Barry about the vitality of community. The rooms are far more spacious than you might find in a regular hotel, if a bit on the eccentric side. (Milan has invited local artists to design four of them in their entirety and others, in part. There is no unifying style.)

The breakfast part of the B&B is exceptional. Milan is at the stove, cooking for guests as they emerge from their bedrooms and move toward the coffee and tea. One morning on a recent stay, we had plush, deep waffles with a starburst of fresh strawberries, blueberries, real maple syrup and the most heavenly yogurt (produced in Colorado). The next morning Milan made light, crisp parathas (Indian breads), which he served with organic eggs scrambled with herbs from the garden and an intense cilantro salsa, a recipe from his mother. You can have breakfast seated around the big round table with other guests, or, if you don’t feel chatty, you can migrate to the back-yard garden with its beds of flowers, herbs and vegetables.

Sustainable gardening

Not only were old, tired gardens transformed into beautiful landscapes of flowers, herbs and vegetables, all garden and kitchen waste is made into compost — 550 pounds last year — for the those gardens. Local artists made all the art and furniture. Milan aims to source 20 percent of the food he cooks from the inn’s small gardens, and everything else is Colorado sourced. He has recently acquired a lease shared with three other parties on 15,000 square feet of land kitty-corner to the inn (called Moon Dog Farms) and is now using the land to grow more vegetables. (He plans to start a business making unpasteurized sauerkraut and pickles from cabbage he grows there. After getting his degree at the Natural Gourmet in New York, Milan worked with Rick’s Picks, where he learned to make pickles.)

“The city built the beds, provided the planting soil mix. We pay for the irrigation,” he says. “Produce Denver is doing the gardening. The concept is to create a new generation of urban farmers and to change the idea that food has to be grown outside urban areas instead of inside them.”

Urban farms, rather than gardens, are about bringing efficiency to growing food and doing it at a scale that can support local business, like the inn and restaurants.

All these activities support the idea of the inn as a business that’s putting its environmental impact first. “Basically, we’re trying to change the options that people have. In the hotel world, no one talks about wanting an environmental hotel; they don’t really seek it out. But I want people to steal this idea. I don’t want to franchise it.” As the last lines of their mission statement say, “At the Queen Anne, we don’t believe that comfort has to be sacrificed to create a sustainable, eco-friendly stay. Here you will find the best of both worlds.”

Zester Daily contributor Deborah Madison is the author many books on food and cooking, including “The Greens Cookbook” and “Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating From America’s Farmers Markets.” Her latest book is “Seasonal Fruit Desserts from Orchard, Farm and Market.”

Photo: Queen Anne Inn in Denver. Credit: Deborah Madison

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If nothing else, everyone discovers that the flavor of garden vegetables is superlative, and also, that recipes become increasingly meaningless. I come prepared to cook my dishes because I know them so well, but things go awry from the get-go. A recipe calls for a lot of celery and a student comes up with some narrow dark green stalks from the garden. Should she use more, she wants to know, because they’re so much smaller? I suggest that we taste it. We take a bite and leap back. This stuff is strong! “No! Don’t use more! Use less, if anything,” I say. This celery is nothing like those pale wide stalks from the store. It’s truly intense and alive (and no, it’s not cutting celery!). The plan was to make a celery salad, but now we have to rethink whether it’s possible. Maybe it is, as long as we mix it with some milder fennel.

Squaring recipes with the reality of garden vegetables

Another student approaches with some just-pulled red onions. Are these large or small or what, she wants to know? (This is why I prefer weight for measure.) The recipe suggests medium, but she’s not sure what she’s holding. They still have their greens on them and it’s not clear where the onions proper end and begin. This is not the distinct unit we know as the cured, Spanish onion, so we explore it, open it up, look at the texture of the stem and figure it out. By the time we’ve done that, we’ve decided that the onion is small, so maybe we need to use more than the recipe calls for. But after we taste it we think maybe we don’t. It’s got a lot of punch, more than most. So that recipe is altered to fit the flavor too.

The leeks present us with a challenge as well. There are several beds of tender looking small leeks, but Salvatore, the gardener, want us to use these big old grandfather leeks first — they’ve probably been the ground for about a year, and they’ve already shot their dome-shaped flower buds into the air. The shanks are wrapped in old, papery leaves from previous seasons and at the base they are as big around as my arm. Getting them out of the ground requires some real work, but they eventually come loose. Altogether there’s about four feet of vegetable in a single plant. Once trimmed and rinsed we see that the shanks — the edible white part — are at least two feet long. Two feet! Far longer than any leek you could buy. Obviously no recipe calls for a 2-foot leek. But are they good? That’s the question. We slice one lengthwise and discover a tough core running down the middle. It’s hard, like a carrot, so we take it out and use it for soup stock. The remainder of the leek, however, is quite edible and even tender once poached. As for the flower buds, we pickle them along with some chive buds and radishes.

And so it goes. The thyme has far more flavor than we’re used to, but the bay has less. The parsley is stronger too, but the turnips are sweeter. What’s also intriguing about this garden is being able to see plants in their entirety, at different stages of their lives. A radish bed has gone to seed, so we pick the pods and pickle them. (They’re too tough to be enjoyable, but the heirloom rat-tailed radish would have worked.) A row of broccoli has gone to flower right next to an arugula patch, and the area is a blaze of yellow and cream blossoms. We pick them for the dining room table and also to use for garnishes. Nettles are growing among the anise hyssop plants, so we alter a recipe so that we can use them in a soup. The anise hyssop gets made into a tea that rivals the Licorice Mint tea bags everyone’s been brewing — because it happens to be the same plant. (“I had no idea it’s so easy to make an herb tea!” says one student.)

We see how really enormous cabbage plants are, and we cook some of those outer leaves and discover that they’re good. The radicchio is gorgeous in its entirety. It’s also tender and rather puffy — not the hard little ball we’re used to seeing — yet it makes a delicious shredded salad. Interwoven varieties of kale fill one long bed, and one look tells you this is all about vigor and health. It becomes salad. Purslane gets picked inadvertently with the lettuce and goes right into that salad along with the arrow shaped leaves of orach, a relative of quinoa and chard, and some wild claytonia, or miner’s lettuce.

Breaking the limits of supermarket fare

As we tour the garden we slow down, take a closer look and see produce in its big and wild forms as well as in its most delicate and enfant forms — the potatoes breaking through the dirt, the first corn leaves.

It’s long been a frustration of mine that despite my long experience cooking from the farmers market and my garden, that in the end, my recipes are still based on the supermarket and its narrow lens of what’s what — bunches of asparagus, each stalk the same length and diameter, chad and kale listed as bunches. Cooking with garden produce keeps us on our toes, adjusting to this, accommodating to that. It forces us to see our world of food up close and then act from what we observe and taste — not what we read — or pay the consequences! It’s a truly exhilarating way to cook, one that depends on our involvement and sharpens our intuitions. It would be impossible to put all the conditions and decisions made based on them on a page. In this sense, cooking from a garden is hugely freeing. Hopefully one doesn’t mind this new freedom — you do have to be present for it and it’s not particularly convenient. But if you are available to your senses, you’ll be cooking in a very different way. Keep your cookbooks for a while, but you might eventually let them go.

Zester Daily contributor Deborah Madison is the author many books on food and cooking, including “The Greens Cookbook” and “Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating From America’s Farmers Markets.” Her latest book is “Seasonal Fruit Desserts from Orchard, Farm and Market.”

Photo: Garden-grown kale. Credit: Deborah Madison

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