Sculpin

Josh and I biked down to the University District farmers market on Saturday, thinking we’d buy half a dozen bunches of greens and make a big batch of Gumbo Zeb. There had been lots of gorgeous bunches of greens the week before; I had happy thoughts of coming back with a trailer full of local collard greens. I wasn’t thinking straight.

The farmers market was missing maybe a third of its farmers because of the floods, and many more had been affected. There were no dahlia farmers at all. Willie Green’s is said to be entirely under water. So is Growing Things. Full Circle has root crops but its lettuce is a total loss. “They’re free. Just come back,” said the Full Circle guy when we asked for the bunch of rootless beet greens that he’d just offered to the previous customer. I couldn’t let him just give us beet greens and then walk away, so we bought carrots, too. He sounded worried and exhausted.

I came home thinking that this was the year for me to learn to enjoy borscht, if only so I can support local farmers through a hard winter. (Well, that, and it sounds tasty.)

I wound up buying some greens I’d never heard of before. “Perpetual spinach” is a sort of spinach-like chard. It tastes to me like a mature spinach crossed with a little sorrel. The market was fairly picked over when we got there, but there were still lots of beautiful bunches of this mysterious stuff that nobody was buying, presumably because they’d never heard of it either. I also got some kale from Whistling Train which is notable mostly in being so delicious that I’d eat it raw. Seriously fantastic. And it’s kale, as in “I am just about desperate enough in mid-winter to eat kale.”

The gumbo is killer. It’s worth buying this book just for the gumbo recipe. I make it over three days: day 1, make the roux; day 2, prep the vegetables; day 3, assemble the soup base and make the first batch of soup.

The car is gone at last. I’m a little sad to see it go. It was a good car for a while there. (And then, not so much, and eventually not at all.) Even if it were easy to make it run again, it wouldn’t make sense to pay to keep a car that’s driven less than ten miles a week most weeks. And reading The Weather Makers is doing wonders for any lingering regret I might have.

Today was the first time I’d ridden a bike in the rain. We really need to get some fenders on that thing. And I’ve got to get myself some rain pants. On the bright side, everybody seems to enjoy watching a couple of soggy, grinning people on a tandem. A bunch of folks waved to us as we rode by. Riding the tandem’s always fun, even in the rain.

Being married to an amiable driver made me go soft, I have to say. I used to go out for walks in the pouring rain and not think much of it. But after being ferried around in a car for a few years, I got so reluctant to go out in the rain, you’d think I’d melt. I’ve wondered if I’d regret going car-free once the fall rains set in. So far, the answer is no. I’m rediscovering that it’s not that bad, even with imperfect rain gear. Sometimes it’s even kind of nice. (Though we’ll see how nice I think it is when the rain is less Pineapple Express than Hyperborean Drench.)

At the market today, we picked up enough sausage to hold us for a couple of weeks, some fabulous Microbakery cheese-and-onion rolls, and about twenty bucks’ worth of potatoes. And yes, that’s a lot of potatoes.

There’s a new potato you can get from Olsen Farms, called “Purple Majesty”, that’s stunningly purple. (If you go to the U District market or some of the others in Seattle, you’ll probably remember the Olsen Farms guy; he’s really nice and has a big bushy beard.) It’s a lot more vivid than the old All-Blue, which was no slouch itself. It’s likely the anthocyanidins are good for us, but it’s the sheer gorgeousness that really draws us in. And it makes great mashed potatoes. Josh is the mashed potato czar at his family-of-origin’s Thanksgiving (weighty responsibility!) and this year he’s going for the dramatic flourish.

Next week I’ll try to remember to bring a really large plastic bag and a couple of straps so we can buy a ton of greens. It’s just about time for us to have another round of making and freezing gumbo base. We’ve been using a recipe out of Crescent Dragonwagon’s Soup and Bread cookbook. It takes a couple of days to do it at a relaxed pace, and we wind up filling every big pot we own with chopped vegetables. But in the end, we get around a gallon and a half of pure gumbo-base bliss, which makes about three gallons of gumbo not counting the rice. This is the recipe that taught me that collard greens are food. I’d happily live on this stuff all winter.