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