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About The Observer. (La Grande, Or.) 1968-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 9, 2021)
B Tuesday, February 9, 2021 The Observer & Baker City Herald BETWEEN THE ROWS WENDY SCHMIDT Consider growing season when you choose tomatoes If you’re trying to have a lot of vegetables to preserve in various ways, to add variety to your pantry shelves, it is good to read and understand what your seed catalogs tell you. Mostly, the vegetables with a short growing season will produce best for you in this climate zone because our growing season can be short. Late spring frosts and early autumn killing frosts can leave you with a lot of green tomatoes. For successful canning, avoid the heirloom tomatoes that take more than 90 days to grow, mature and fruit. Be mindful of the length of the growing season. Even some cherry tomatoes require 80 days. The size of the tomato doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with growing season length. Some of the hybrid tomatoes claim to be ready in as little as 55 days. Some heirlooms are 65 to 75 days. Catalogs claim that hybrids lack full fl avor and their heirloom tomatoes have a more complex and delicious fl avor. A lot of the claims about tomato fl avor are subjective opinions. Flavor can be affected by soil fertility and the amount and quality of sunlight and how evenly they are watered. Most people have favorite tomato varieties. Flavor and tradition play a big part in choosing favorites. Since tomato plants can’t be planted out in the garden until May, it’s a bit early to start seeds indoors. Even if your plants are small when you set them out, they will grow rapidly in warm soil. If you have garden questions or com- ments, please write to greengardencol- umn@yahoo.com. Thanks for reading! Abel Uribe/Chicago Tribune-TNS This cheesy cream of caulifl ower soup takes less than an hour to make from prep time to the fi nished dish. S TILL G REAT T ASTE , W ITH L ESS W ASTE Himalaya way, water buffalo dung nourishes the grass of the Terai-Duar savanna. Those I should come clean about a recent New grasses give sustenance to the blackbuck Why you need to learn this Year’s resolution, the one where I swore to antelope, whose carcass later feeds the noble contemporize my cultural references. I have Yorbus crispy, have you forgotten 2020 white-rumped vulture who herself ends up failed. Miserably. already? The fi res? The murder hornets? The in the belly of bacteria who render her to Which brings us to the irrepressible Irving plague? I’m thinking our had-it-up-to-here dust. Same with the maple and the mulberry planet’s giving us a hint. I’m thinking it’s time bush, the bison’s boogers and the tapir’s tush. Berlin. “Just around the corner, there’s a rainbow in the sky, so let’s have another cup to slow our headlong plunge into the abyss. Everything becomes food for somebody else. Save more. Use less. of coffee and let’s have another piece of pie.” Humans, on the other hand, produce Golly, that man had pluck. garbage. We throw out actual food, pile it into The steps you take But, speaking of resolutions, you may plastic and lob it full tilt into landfi lls, where Our species (homo sapiens) is the only recall they were the topic of last month’s Prep it rests, undisturbed for thousands of years. School. Today, we’ll tackle Resolutions, Part 2: planetary resident that creates actual, use- Waste. less waste. Birds don’t do it. Bees don’t do it. In Which We Inhabit Frugality. Here’s an idea: Let’s reduce that waste. Even educated fl eas don’t do it. We’ll do more and waste less. We’ll har- Let’s leave the planet like we should be leav- Nobody else produces waste because every ing our kitchen: cleaner than we found it. ness that pluck. With a song in our heart byproduct of every species but our own and a sandwich in our satchel, we’ll aim for See Waste/Page 2B becomes food for some other species. Out a teenier garbage footprint as we roam this James P. DeWan Chicago Tribune wide earth and, in so doing, maybe make it a better place. A salad that combines cold, salty and sweetness absorbing into their membranes and mingling with their juices. The vinaigrette makes the oranges taste, um, orange-ier! Paper-thin slices of celery add crunchy salinity, while crumbles of feta offer a creamy, condensed brine, and torn Castelvetrano olives provide a pop of fatty brackishness. This trio of salty garnishes balances the sweet citrus perfectly, turning them into something one step re- moved from raw but exponentially more fun to eat. Ben Mims Los Angeles Times There are people who eat fruit as a snack, and then there’s me. It’s not that I haven’t tried. Currently, as I stock up on fruit from the farm- ers market, I have grand visions of reaching for an orange from the fruit bowl, peeling it with my hands, then enjoying the juicy pops of the sections as I eat them. Healthy! Re- freshing! “Mother Nature’s candy,” I’ve even heard, clenching my smile to stave off an eye roll. It should be so easy, but I can never commit. Inevitably, I reach for a piece of cake or chips instead (don’t worry, I balance my diet in other ways) and have at this point in my life overcome the guilt that used to ac- company that. No, I love fruit best when it’s cooked down into a sweet jam or marmalade, baked under a bubbling biscuit crust or even blended into ice cream or sorbet. Infl uenced by a Southern upbringing, my predilec- tion for eating fruit coated in sugar and butter is a diffi cult habit to break. However, the one time I will hap- pily eat fruit in a raw-ish state is cit- rus season. All those sweet oranges — Cara Caras, page and kishu mandarins and tangerines — are too wonderful to tarnish by cooking. Instead of eating them out of hand, though, I put in the smallest bit of COLD AND SALTY ORANGE SALAD Time: 20 minutes, plus 1 hour unat- tended Yields: Serves 2 to 4 Ben Mims/Los Angeles Times-TNS Feta, celery and green olives add just the right amount of saltiness to a salad of sweet orange citrus. effort and turn them into a salad. But there are no lettuce leaves or other vegetables in this salad to dis- tract from the star ingredients. It’s just cold citrus slices, seasoned with a simple vinaigrette and garnished with a few salty toppings to balance all that sweetness. On a platter, I layer slices of at least three different sweet orange citrus: something large like Cara Caras or organic navels, something small like kishus, and then always blood oranges for their deep ruby color. Then, I mix up a tame rice vinegar dressing enhanced with some of the citrus zest and a pinch of chile fl akes to spoon over the top, Any sweet orange citrus shines in this simple salad, which is more of a treatment than an actual recipe. Navels, Cara Caras, tangerines, Page or Daisy mandarins, Kishus and blood oranges fi t the bill, particularly blood oranges since their deep red fl esh and stripes add colorful contrast. The vinaigrette concentrates their fl avor with more zest and a shot of mild rice vinegar to add an unobtrusive acidity. Use any kind of chile fl akes you like for a spicier, or milder, heat. See Salad/Page 3B