It just goes to show how unsuccessful my attempts at vegetable gardening have been the last few years, that I’m this impressed about actually having fresh lettuce in my yard. For whatever reason (thirty straight days of rain, maybe), my lettuce starts have performed fabulously this spring, and we’ve had a number of gorgeously fresh salads. The one shown above (accompanying Jon’s deeply savory meatloaf) was sprinkled with tiny sliced radishes and dressed with mustard and balsamic vinegar, while others have had chive flowers shredded into them. A real taste of spring.

I will always make room in my garden for herbs.

Also garlic, and spring bulbs, and maple trees, and iris (my garden is pretty full of stuff)…but if I could only grow a few plants, they would almost certainly be herbs. Pretty, hardy, easy to grow, and edible – what more could you ask from a plant? Not to mention how much a pack of fresh herbs costs at the grocery store. It’s cheaper to grow them yourself, and you know they’re fresh when you picked out of the back garden just a few minutes before dinner.

Here’s what’s currently growing in my garden:

I’ve always grown sage. My main sage bush came from a clump in my mother’s garden in Eastern Washington, unceremoniously dug out with a shovel and plopped into my first real garden over ten years ago. It gets straggly, but I simply cut it back hard and back it comes. I have several more sage plants, including a culinary sage in a pot on the deck, a large leaf sage mostly for ornament in the front yard, and a few purple sages for color. I hardly ever have dried sage on hand in the kitchen, because I can always go outside and pick some fresh, even in the snow.

I was so thrilled when I realized the Western Washington climate allowed me to grow bay laurel. I’m not sure I’d ever had sweet bay before, just the slightly toxic and harsh California bay sold in grocery stores. I adore fresh bay leaves, and use them in soups, braises, curries and roasts. A leaf in a simmering bechamel sauce gives it a great earthy scent. Going out to the patio in my bathrobe to pick a few leaves is a wonderful thing. My tree was enormous a few years ago, pushing up through the decking, but then a hard winter took it down and it’s currently reinventing itself with a forest of suckers. Sometimes when it needs pruning I’ll take a branch inside, so I’ll have dry leaves for blending into curry powders and sausage.

Rosemary is an absolute must. It grows like a weed in this climate, apart from the occasional hard frost, and I wouldn’t want to do without it. Our house came with an enormous Tuscan Blue plant established in the backyard, and I have to dissuade it from taking over the garden by whacking off several feet of new growth every spring. I also have an “Arp” in the front, in a difficult dry sunny spot. It’s blooming its little head off this year.

Fresh thyme is a wonderful thing. I have different varieties of thyme all over my garden, especially out in that difficult area by the sidewalk- lemon, lime, and Doone Valley – but I always make sure to have a pot or clump of regular culinary thyme. It’s not as tidy a grower as some, but a branch or two in a pot of beans provides a flavor nothing else can match. And when it blooms it’s always covered in bees.

I love chives. I currently have two clumps, but I hope to work up to several more. The season for snipping fresh chives is fairly short, so I tend to look for excuses to use it in the early spring before the tender sprigs toughen up. Scallion-chive breads are an absolute necessity, and anything involving cream cheese, goat cheese or eggs (not to mention crab risotto). When the flowers bloom, petals can be included in the snips. I have trouble keeping crabgrass from growing up into my chives, so whenever I bring some into the house I make sure to sort through it and pull out the flat blades. I really need to do a better job of weeding.

Parsley is a tender herb that I try not to be without. Every spring I buy a six-pack of starts and plant them out on the deck, which usually keeps me in tabouli all summer. It’s easy to grow and bug-free. I usually get Italian flat-leaf, but I have one plant of curly parsley that’s been hogging a container since last year.

Spearmint is very important! I don’t dare plant mint in the ground, as it would probably join forces with the buttercup and bindweed and take over the neighborhood, but I always keep a pot of it going, sometimes two or three. Fresh spearmint (not peppermint, mind you) is indispensible for mint juleps, mojitos, and our favorite lamb noodles with yogurt. We go through a lot of it.

Cilantro is an herb that I love, but seldom grow. This year I have a few starts tossed into pots alongside leafy greens and flowers – not enough for cooking, but it should provide the occasional garnish over the summer. Back when I had a full-sun garden I grew vast amounts of cilantro from seed, which was wonderful.

And then there’s fennel. When we lived near the sea bluffs in California, I would walk through the fields of wild fennel and inhale the fragrance of it. When I began gardening, I discovered the existence of bronze-leafed fennel, bought a plant, and now have an inexhaustible supply, as it’s an enthusiastic self-seeder. When the plants are allowed to establish, they get to be six feet tall and over a foot across at the base, and the only care they require is pruning out the old stalks in the early spring.

Note that this is a different variety than Florence, or bulb, fennel – there’s no bulbous root here to eat – but the leaves and seeds are edible. I sometimes harvest the seeds, but mostly I leave them for the adorable tiny birds that come through every winter and cling to the branches.

I may as well mention lemon balm, or melissa, as I will probably never be rid of it. This also came from my mother’s garden, planted by me with the thought of repelling mosquitoes and maybe flavoring iced tea. In truth, I’ve seen loads of mosquitoes around the plant, and rubbing it on skin has no effect at all except to make yourself smell like a citronella candle. The leaves are pretty enough and the scent is bright and lemony (although a bit reminiscent of furniture polish), but it spreads quickly, is hard to dig out and needs to be pruned to the ground twice a year to keep it tidy. I’ve found clumps of it coming up in remote parts of the garden, presumably transmitted through compost. Or magic. I may have put a leaf in a glass of tea once. Perhaps.

I’ve just added oregano and tarragon this year. I had an oregano plant for a while, but it got eaten by the sage bush. I recently planted a healthy start in a pot on the deck where it should get plenty of sun, and I just made a batch of chimichurri with it. The hailstorm we had last week knocked it pretty flat, but it looks vigorous enough to rebound. Tarragon is something I’ve never grown, and I hear it’s finicky and delicate. I love the occasional tarragon-scented sauce for fish, though, so I’m hopeful. It will probably go in a container as well – it’s currently in one of those plantable peat pots.

What herbs are you growing this season?

For the last two weeks I’ve had the latest issue of Food & Wine sitting on my kitchen table. It’s not that I haven’t read it - I have – but I don’t allow myself to keep the back issues and so I hate to recycle it until I’m absolutely done with it. I keep going back through it to make sure there isn’t one more recipe to cut out or one more restaurant review to make a note of. As a result, I’ve been staring constantly at a large front-cover photo of chicken salad with Green Goddess dressing. With predictable results.

I have actually never made Green Goddess dressing. I mean, ever. So this was sort of a duh moment for me, as I realized that I had fresh herbs all over the place, garlic and anchovies ready to hand, and a tub of sour cream in the fridge left over from our Monday night enchiladas. There was no reason at all not to make this. And I had the perfect vehicle for the dressing: a large bag of perfect, slender green beans from Blue Heron Farm. I cut the beans in half, blanched them in boiling salted water and drained them, then got to work on my dressing.

Being incapable of following a recipe for salad dressing, I made this up as I went along. I pulled some parsley and basil from the garden and chopped them roughly, tossing them into a small food processor with two anchovies, a clove of garlic, two large spoonfuls of mayonnaise and one of sour cream. I thought about cutting open a fresh lemon but decided on champagne vinegar instead, adding just a small dash. Once all was blended, I stirred in a good handful of finely chopped fresh chives, then scraped it all over the blanched and cooled green beans. Once it was all mixed up, I decided it needed a little color and added one fresh tomato, cut into thin wedges. Perfect.

In a word? Yum. We ate our green bean salad alongside a truly spectacular rack of pork baby back ribs, which Jon had barbecued and glazed with reduced apple cider. A bottle of Pinot Noir rosé was a textbook-perfect accompaniment to the beans, complementing the sharp herbs while cutting through the creaminess. I suspect this will not be my last batch of Green Goddess.

The tomato harvest this year has really blown me away. Normally, having just one or two vines in pots on the deck, I’m lucky if I have enough tomatoes to make the occasional salad, or to top a taco now and then. This year the stars aligned to produce showers of juicy little red Stupice tomatoes and bowlfuls of Sungold cherry tomatoes, including the single prettiest tomato I have ever grown. Look, isn’t it beautiful?

So, finding myself in the unusual position of needing to eat a lot of tomatoes all at once, I opened a few cookbooks at random and found a recipe: Oven Roasted Tomatoes with Thyme and Garlic, from James Peterson’s impressive tome Vegetables. I had a pile of freshly dug garlic drying on the front porch, a pot of thyme on the deck, and plenty of olive oil, so it was but the work of a moment to get a pan of this roasting in the oven. And then the work of an hour or two to wait for it to finish up…

All I needed to do was wash the tomatoes, cut them in half, and lay them cut-side-down in a pan filmed with olive oil.

I broke up a head of garlic, peeled the cloves and nestled them amid the tomatoes, then sprinkled fresh thyme branches over the top. The pan went into a 400° oven and immediately the house filled with the scent of roasted garlic. About 45 minutes later I poured out most of the liquid expressed by the tomatoes into a small saucepan, then continued to roast until the garlic was soft and turning golden, and the tomatoes were blistering on top – maybe another twenty minutes or so. I could have roasted them further, but at this stage they were still soft and juicy, but with a nicely deepened flavor.

The first time I tried this, I had the brilliant notion of adding canned tuna to the reserved liquid, then mashing the garlic in. Then I tossed the garlicky tuna with the roasted tomatoes and some rotini pasta. That was really, really good, and we will be doing it again. Oh yes.

The second time I made this, just a couple of days later, I used it as a topping for a pork tenderloin that Jon seared and roasted. That was pretty good, too, especially when we smeared the garlic cloves over pieces of pork, as if we were buttering toast. The juices from the tomatoes went beautifully with the soft lettuce salad I served alongside – you could easily make a salad dressing out of them. When I separated the juices from the pan, I followed Peterson’s directions and reduced them, then poured them back in at the end – they end up fantastically infused with garlic.

What I’d really like to do is make a pizza with this stuff as the topping – now that would be excellent. I just need to wait for a few more tomatoes to ripen.

By the way, this post unintentionally coincided with Tomato Week of the blog event Summer Fest 2009, hosted by Margaret Roach at A Way to Garden. To check out what other people are doing with fresh tomatoes this week, take a look at the participating blogs: Mattbites, Steamy Kitchen,  White on Rice Couple,  Simmer Till Done,  The Sister Project, and Gluten-Free Girl. And feel free to chime in with your own favorite tomato recipes!

At this point in the season, the rhubarb plants have peaked, attempted to bloom their heads off (and been thwarted by my Felcos), and are beginning to settle back into merely being a large green presence in the yard without actually attempting to overrun or squash anything. We’ve had rhubarb crisp, clafoutis, pie, compote, and muffins, and stowed away a large freezer bag of chopped stalks for later.

Despite all that, I’m nowhere near rhubarb burnout, and there are several recipes left that I want to try – for instance, I’ve still never roasted rhubarb. Or poached it in red wine. I have, however, braised it with green herbs, onion, tomato and saffron. Sound weird? It’s actually really, really good.

I found this recipe quite by accident, several years ago, in a library book called Silk Road Cooking (come to think of it, I should check it out again). Out of curiosity I tried it out, and liked it so much I immediately wrote it into my personal recipe notebook. My parents have made it several times, too. It’s piquant and savory and a great way to use up rhubarb. This is a perfect time of year to make it, too, when all the green herbs are hitting their stride.

The book attributes this dish to Kurdish nomads, living in the mountains where rhubarb grows wild. The smell as it cooks is very much like the Afghan soup called ash, redolent with dill and turmeric. There’s just a hint of heat, depending on what kind of chile you add.

The recipe is very specific about what herbs to use, but I would feel free to make substitutions or change quantities (make sure you use at least some dill, though, if possible). For this last batch, I happened to have tons of fresh mint, dill, parsley and cilantro, but I didn’t want to use up all my chives so I left them out. Dried herbs could work fine as well, since they are incorporated early and have plenty of time to stew.

The other ingredient that I’ve considered changing is the split peas. They give the braise a more colorful appearance – rather like corn - and a subtle nutty flavor, but I have trouble getting them to cook soft enough in the given cooking time, and find them a little distracting in texture. Next time I might substitute chickpeas, or leave them out altogether, depending on how I’m serving the braise.

Despite having both rhubarb and lime juice, this really isn’t too tart – the sweet onion and the herbs really cut the sour. But feel free to add extra sugar at the end if you think it needs it. Personally I like the tartness.

Kurdish Braised Rhubarb

adapted from Silk Road Cooking: A Vegetarian Journey
by Najmieh Batmanglij

• 4 Tbsp oil
• 1 sweet onion, thinly sliced
• 4 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
• 1 hot chile or 1/2 tsp chile paste (she specifies a red chile, but I sliced up a green serrano)
• 3 cups chopped parsley
• 1/2 cup chopped mint
• 1/2 cup chopped chives
• 1/2 cup choppped dill
• 1/2 cup chopped cilantro
• 2/3 cup yellow split peas (or canned chickpeas)
• salt and pepper
• 1/4 tsp turmeric
• 3 1/2 cups stock or water
• 1 fresh tomato, sliced
• pinch of saffron soaked in 2 Tbsp hot water
• juice of half a lime
• 2 Tbsp sugar
• 1 lb rhubarb, cut into 1 inch chunks

Saute the onion in the oil until soft, then add the garlic, chile and herbs. Add the split peas, salt, pepper and turmeric, saute for a few minutes. Add stock or water, bring to a boil, cover and simmer 20 min or until the split peas have softened. Check to make sure it’s not boiling dry; if so, add a little more water.

Add the tomato, the saffron and its soaking liquid, the lime juice and sugar. Bring back to a boil, then arrange the rhubarb on top, cover and simmer another 10-15 minutes, until the rhubarb is soft. Taste and adjust salt or sugar as necessary.

Serve over couscous or rice, or with plenty of bread – something to soak up all the tart herby sauce. Excellent with lamb or chicken. Leftovers could easily be turned into a soup.

This post is part of the Grow Your Own blog event – check out the roundup at Gardenopolis!

We had a little impromptu celebration the other night, in honor of my first published piece of food writing. Nothing fancy, just some rotini pasta tossed with garlic scape pesto from the freezer and some hot Italian sausages, a salad with balsamic vinaigrette, a bottle of Bonny Doon Dolcetto, and a bowl of all the ripe tomatoes left on the vine. Easy to throw together, and fun to eat while curled up on the couch watching a very stupid movie. Sometimes you don’t want to have to try too hard.

I’ve been growing garlic for years – it’s one of the few vegetables that I consistently have in my garden, and I can usually grow enough that we only need to buy a few heads in the spring to tide us over. I used to grow softneck, but I discovered Rocambole hardneck garlic about 5 years ago and have grown it exclusively ever since – I think it has a better flavor, and it’s often much easier to peel.

One major difference between softneck and hardneck is that hardneck puts up flower stalks in the spring. If you leave them on, the flowers turn into little clusters of bulbils, taking energy from the main bulb, so it’s best to cut them off – I haven’t always been good about this, but I usually make it out there at some point, haphazardly whack off the flower scapes and compost them.

But this year! This year I’ve been reading food blogs, and I’ve discovered something new. Turns out, if you pick the scape before it blooms and hardens, you can eat it! I have never seen this information in a cookbook, not even my Alice Waters book. So last week, when I saw the scapes coming up from my little garlic plot, I made sure I got right out there with my clippers and gathered up a good handful. I wasn’t sure what to do with them, but they seem to get treated rather like asparagus or green beans, so I decided to try a really straightforward approach for our first attempt: olive oil and salt, and a quick toss on a hot grill.

J had seasoned a boneless leg of lamb with garlic and lemon juice, then grilled it until it was nice and crispy on the outside. Then we tossed on some Japanese eggplant and the garlic scapes. They seemed to grill nicely, although they have a tendency to try to slip between the grates.

The verdict? They were fun, with a very pleasant green garlic flavor. We discovered that the sheaths covering the flower buds are not good to eat – very tough and stringy – but if you pull on them they pop right off, and there’s a bit of tasty stuff rather like an artichoke leaf right at the base of the sheath. The stem is tender, just a little firmer than a fresh asparagus stem. I think I won’t have any trouble trimming my garlic scapes in future years.