China Bayles' Book of Days (19 page)

—THICH NHAT HANH, THE MIRACLE OF MINDFULNESS

Mustard Greens Are Sacred: From Susan’s Journal

In our part of Texas, the wild mustard (
Brassica kaber
) has been blooming along the roads for several weeks. This herb—a member of the family that includes broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, cabbages, and radishes—grows everywhere, and is generally considered a weed. But I have mustard (
Brassica sp.
) in my herb garden, too. And I treasure Thich Nhat Hanh’s gentle reminder: The mustard green is sacred, as are all plants, all people and things, all feelings.

Mustard greens were among my mother’s favorite garden vegetables, appearing on our table as soon as the leaves started showing up in our Illinois garden. Mom cooked them with fat back and served them with corn bread, the way her grandmother taught her to do it. Comfort food, simple and good. I can smell it still, and taste it, but just thinking of it makes me smile.

When I grow mustard for greens, I plant it in the fall or in early spring, three weeks before the last frost date. For a fall harvest, I plant from midsummer on; in my warm Texas garden, the fall plantings are better, because the cooler weather delays the inevitable bitterness. I pick the lower leaves while they’re young and tender, and get a come-again harvest. Mustard is one of the healthiest plants in the garden, containing the important antioxidants beta carotene and vitamin C. Mustard greens also contain calcium (important to lactose intolerant individuals) and a significant amount of iron.

What I like to do with mustard greens:

• Add the leaves to salads;

• Sauté them with walnuts, water chestnuts, and lemon juice;

• Add them to a warm pasta salad. My favorite: hot cooked pasta, with chopped hot cooked mustard greens, chopped tomatoes, a few nuts, and feta cheese, tossed with hot Italian dressing;

• Cook them the way Mom did; and

• Remember that mustard is every bit as sacred as my teapot and me.

Read more about cooked greens and other Southern comfort food:

The Taste of Country Cooking
, by Edna Lewis

MARCH 29

I followed Leatha into the house. She had stopped at Maggie’s restaurant and bought a carton of thick tomato soup, Maggie’s broccoli salad (she makes it Greek-style, with feta cheese and olives and gives you a separate container of olive-oil dressing), and two walnut and cinnamon-basil cupcakes. While I washed my hands and dug most of the dirt from under my nails, she spread everything on the kitchen table, picnic style. I found two bottles of homemade root beer in the refrigerator, and we settled down.

—WITCHES’ BANE: A CHINA BAYLES MYSTERY

Beautiful, Bountiful Basil

If you live in the south, you’ll find basil plants (
Ocimum basilicum
) in your local nursery now. But most nurseries stock only one or two varieties, so if you’re planning to grow different varieties, seeds are your best bet. Start your crop indoors about 4 weeks before you’d put tomato plants into your garden. Sow each variety in a separate container at least 6 inches deep and 18 inches wide. Sift a thin layer of potting medium over the seeds, and water well. When the plants germinate, move the containers into a sunny spot. When they have one or two sets of true leaves, thin with scissors, leaving them spaced an inch apart. In another week, take them outside to harden off, then transplant into your garden.

FIVE BASIL FAVORITES

• Sweet Genovese Basil. The perfect pesto basil. Full flavor, bright green leaf. Traditional Italian variety.

• Lemon Basil. Culinary, intense lemon flavor, bright green leaves. Great with fish and chicken or fruit salads

• Cinnamon Basil. Culinary, ornamental. Violet stems, lavender flowers. Cinnamon flavor, especially good with Middle Eastern and Asian cuisine. Delicious in fruit salad dressings.

• Purple Ruffles Basil. Culinary, ornamental. Ruffled purple leaves on a compact plant, with a scent of cloves and licorice. Makes a beautiful cranberry-colored flavored vinegar.

• Thai Basil. Culinary, ornamental. Attractive red stems and flowers, green leaves. Licorice-basil aroma. Essential for Thai cuisine.

Read more about basil:

Basil: An Herb Lover’s Guide
, by Thomas DeBaggio and Susan Belsinger

The ordinary Basil is . . . wholly spent to make sweete or washing waters among other sweet herbs, yet sometimes it is put into nosegays. The Physicall properties are to procure a cheerfull and merry hearte whereunto the seeds are chiefly used in pouder.

—JOHN PARKINSON, A GARDEN OF PLEASANT FLOWERS,1629

MARCH 30

I like to pluck a handful of blossoms and toss them over a spring salad. . . . Redbud’s cheery color brightens white desserts like custard or rice pudding: just stir in a handful of blossoms before you set the dish in the oven to bake. And homemade ice cream can be infused with the pastel color and flavor of early redbud blooms.

—SUSAN TYLER HITCHCOCK, GATHER YE WILD THINGS

The Many Virtues of Redbuds

The redbud trees (
Cercis canadensis
var.
texensis
) are in bloom this week around the margins of our little woodland, their purple flowers like a cloud of color, brightening the darker oaks and elms around them. Green leaves will replace the flowers in another week or two, and by the end of summer the tree will be hung with purple-brown fruits, pods four inches long, flat and leathery. These lovely trees are worth growing for their stunning beauty, at a time of year when most other trees are still thinking about putting out their first leaves. But loveliness is only one of the many virtues of this little North American native.

THE MEDICINAL REDBUD

Dried and powdered, the inner bark was an important medicine. Indian healers used it to staunch bleeding, ease skin irritations and poison ivy rash, and treat sores and tumors. Bark tea was drunk to treat diarrhea and dysentery and used (like quinine) to reduce malarial fevers and ease joint and muscle pain and headaches. The flowers were also steeped as a tea and drunk to prevent scurvy, treat kidney and bladder infections, and ease urinary ailments.

THE EDIBLE REDBUD

The buds can be pickled: Cover with a pickling brine of 1 quart cider vinegar, 1 teaspoon salt, 6 cloves, 1 2-inch cinnamon stick, and ½ teaspoon each allspice and celery seed; ready in about 2 weeks. The flowers are tossed in salads to add tartness and color. The buds, flowers, and tender young pods are sautéed for 10 minutes in butter and eaten as a vegetable. Native Americans roasted the pods in ashes before eating the seeds.

THE PLIABLE REDBUD

The supple young sprouts, peeled and stripped, can be used in the construction of baskets. Some tribes used the white inner bark or the red outer bark as decorative elements in very sophisticated work. The bark was also used as cordage and coarse twine, and the roots were used in sewing animal skins.

Read more about redbud:

Gather Ye Wild Things: A Forager’s Year
, by Susan Tyler Hitchcock

MARCH 31

In the end, there is really nothing more important than taking care of the earth and letting it take care of you.

—CHARLES SCOTT

Cattails: The Generous Plant

CATTAILS, CATTAILS, AND MORE CATTAILS

Even if you don’t immediately recognize the cattail’s swordlike leaves (green in the growing season, red-brown in the winter), you’ll notice its unmistakable stalk, topped with a brown, cigar-shaped flower spike in the summer and a cottony, gray-white seed head in the winter. What you won’t see (unless you dig for it) is the rhizome—the thick, fleshy root from which the cattail stalk grows. It’s impossible to have just one cattail: A healthy rhizome system, sometimes 15 feet in diameter, produces dozens of stalks, which is why this plant can be invasive.

STALKING THE COSSACK’S ASPARAGUS

The cattail’s generosity begins with its edible roots and shoots. Native peoples dug the rhizomes in winter, because that’s when they are crisp and sweet. In the spring, before the flowers began to develop, they stalked the young shoots (in Russia, called “Cossack’s asparagus”), which look like leeks and taste something like cucumbers. The edible core is rich in beta carotene, niacin, riboflavin, thiamin, potassium, phosphorus, vitamin C, and plant protein. Cold-weather

root- and shoot-gathering is not a picnic, but Indians and settlers couldn’t just stop at the local supermarket to stock up on staples.

If you’re still hungry when summer comes, you can stalk the flower. The cattail (a primitive plant that was already old when the dinosaurs were young) has a pollen-producing male flower spike (small, always on top) and a seed-producing female (always under the male)—a reasonable (if not politically correct) arrangement. In late spring, the male spike is covered with a saffron-yellow pollen. Bend the flower spike into a paper bag, tap or shake off the loose yellow pollen, and sift out any trash. Substitute up to ¼ or ½ cup of pollen for an equal amount of flour in your favorite pancake or biscuit recipe or use to top yogurt, cereals, and salads.

One Indian tribe’s name for cattail was translated as “fruit for papoose’s bed,” because the fluffy masses of seeds are soft and do not mat. During World War II, several million pounds of seed pods were collected (much of it by children) and used to stuff life jackets, flight suits, mattresses, and pillows.

More Reading:

Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places
, by Steve Brill

Stalking the Wild Asparagus
, by Euell Gibbons

April May June

APRIL 1

Today is April Fool’s Day.

The first of April, of all days in the year, enjoys a character of its own. On this day, it becomes the business of a vast number of people, especially the younger sort, to practice innocent impostures upon their unsuspicious neighbors, by way of making them what in France are called
poissons d’Avril
, and with us April fools.

—R. CHAMBERS, THE BOOK OF DAYS, 1869

Fern Seeds Will Make You Invisible!

One of the favorite April Fool tricks of bygone days was to give somebody a packet of fern seed, telling him that if he carried it in his pocket, he’d be invisible. Yes, I know. Ferns can’t make you invisible. But that was part of the April Fool trick, and a lot of people fell for it.

The connection between fern seed and invisibility goes back to the times when it was thought that all plants reproduced from seed. Well, then, it was logical. If there are no visible seeds, the seeds must be invisible. And if your logic took you that far, it could take you one step farther: put some of those fern seeds in your pocket, and you would be invisible, too.

Since Midsummer Night’s Eve was known to be a magical night, it was obviously the best time to collect these magical, mythical, mysterious fern seeds. On that night in Bohemia, girls spread white cloths under the ferns to catch the seeds, which could not only make them invisible, but lead them to a vein of gold. In Brittany, fern seed collected on Midsummer Night could be kept until the next Palm Sunday, when it would show the way to treasure. And in Austria, fern seed tossed into a cache of money would keep that money from decreasing in value. Quite a reputation for something that couldn’t be seen!