Soul Food...

You know it's going to be strange when I submit a blog post with a title like that.

This started when a friend on twitter, who lives in China, casually commented on a vegetable with an odd, hard to translate (i.e., cryptically idiomatic) name. The photo he enclosed of the feast he was having included a beautiful vegetable that I thought might be one of their local fresh pickles (fresh in the sense of being pickled only for a few days or weeks, rather than the truly long-term pickling processes, and/or fermented products such as kimchee, etc.). The colors reminded me of amaranth, but it was clearly a sliced root vegetable with the texture / appearance of a daikon radish, and the colors of a watermelon candy - pastel pink, a ring of white, and an edge of pale green. It certainly looked tasty, but he reported a name [ 心灵美 ]  that translated as "beautiful soul" - so you can see why it became a tantalizing msytery. Still, many favored dishes and foods have poetically unhelpful names, like "空心菜" ["hollow heart vegetable"]. She apparently suggested to him that it was a carrot. I was pretty confident it was not, and when he said it tasted more like a radish, I had hope.

I started searching around on variants of radish (not terribly helpful) and then tried adding the characters and vegetable, and eventuauly found a hilarious artist in Beijing who uses vegetables to create collages. Enjoy the image here:

[courtesy of this site: http://www.parisbeijingphotogallery.com/main/cn/juduoqiworks.asp ]

The title translates to "soul kiss radish" and as you can see is a funny homage to Klimt. It's worth poking around the rest of the site to enjoy the images, it really is sweet.

From there I was able to do a little further searching and figure out that unless you use the full "心灵美萝卜" it won't appear in the vegetable category of words. I also found that in the States, (somewhere at least - no where I'd ever seen it but...) it's called Watermelon radish. By whatever name, it looks delicious and I think I'm going to have to see if I can grow some.
Enjoy the 'soul food'!

Tis the season for soup

onion soup, originally uploaded by Margo and George.

Foiled in my attempts to grow a winter crop of radishes, carrots and other root vegetables, I am at least still taking comfort in soup with root vegetables (note how this onion soup became rather carrot-heavy).

In other news, I have learned that our community gardens will open a little earlier this year, on April 4th (Yay!!!!) so I now feel I have some planning to do. Also, the Duchess of 78A may yet return to the plot (the logistics were, for her, an understandable challenge, given her lengthy commute from the office...) so I may still have a gardening-buddy over in the wilds of the garden plots. If not, it'll be me and the woodchucks, the pheasants and the bluebirds. And hopefully Theo the toad (I hope!).

Until spring arrives, though, I have to contend with the constant of snow, or 'poor man's fertilizer' as well as the basic urge to curl up under the covers and go into hibernation like any other sensible small animal (and even large animals) at this time of year. No dice on that though; what would my employers say?! So instead I knit furiously, attend a reading from time to time, and read gardening books. My fundamental re-read is of course Dame Damrosch's Garden Primer; but I have some nifty books on weeds, such as All About Weeds and Common Weeds of the U.S.; as last season demonstrated that there are a number of native 'weeds' growing in my plot that are edible. Nom nom!

Also I've acquired a couple of fun reads, that I guess are simply inspiring rather than practical, but then again I am an urban gardener, so...maybe more practical than I'm giving credit... On Guerrilla Gardening, (not to be mistaken for the similarly titled Guerrilla Gardening: a Manualfesto), and Fresh Food from Small Spaces, as well as Kurlansky's The Last Fish Tale (I'm a big fan of Salt as well).

If I had more room in my little apt., yes, I would indeed have set up a grow-light arrangement. Sadly, no can do. *sigh*

...back to planning the garden. Only 3 more months...