Shaggy Parasol & Asparagus Risotto
6 cups vegetable broth
1 cup dry white wine
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 cup finely chopped onion
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 cups Arborio rice
5 ounces Shaggy Parasols, sautéed and coarsely chopped, approximately 3/4 cup
7 ounces asparagus, cooked and cut into 1-inch pieces, approximately 1 1/2 cups
4 ounces cheese (we use a combination of parmesan, sheep’s gouda, and gruyere), approximately 1/2 cup
1 teaspoon grated lemon zest (if you have it)
1/2 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

This is a four pan dish, so clear the stove.

PAN #1:
In a medium saucepan with a lid, heat the vegetable broth just to simmering. Keep at a near boil.

PAN #2 (main pan):
In a large 3 to 4-quart heavy saucepan over medium heat, melt the butter. Add the onions and a pinch of salt and sweat until translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the rice and stir. Cook for 3 to 5 minutes or until the grains are translucent around the edges. Be careful not to allow the grains or the onions to brown.

(Pans #3 & #4 are for sautéing the mushrooms and steaming the asparagus, respectively)

Reduce the heat to low. Add the wine and enough vegetable stock just to cover the top of the rice. Stir or move the pan often, until the liquid is completely absorbed into rice. Once absorbed, add another amount of liquid just to cover the rice and continue stirring or moving as before. There should be just enough liquid left to repeat 1 more time. It should take approximately 35 to 40 minutes for all of the liquid to be absorbed. After the last addition of liquid has been mostly absorbed, add the mushrooms and asparagus and stir until risotto is creamy and asparagus is heated through. Remove from the heat and stir in the cheese, lemon zest, and nutmeg. Taste and season, to taste, with salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Just a warning, kids: even good boots go bad. The mold won in this case, but Sam gave them a good life before they were consumed.

Our vacation was really, really great. Saw old friends, made new ones, had my mind cranked open by some fantastic art and discussing it with the giddy but extremely modest artists, fabulous food, and lots of kind folks from south of here. Wish I hadn’t been bitten by fire ants all over, but hey, you can’t win them all.

One last mention – I found this article from Melbourne, Florida. The zoo there is opening a new Visayan warty pig exhibit in a week, and they are offering free admission to those who attend sporting a mohawk similar to the hairstyle of the pigs. Yet another benefit!

Perhaps one of the most rewarding aspects was that so many of our friends in this city think a great deal about what MAKES a good city, a good neighborhood, a good block. Sam and I are thinking a great deal about this too after reading the majority of a very dense but altogether sensible book called A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. Sitting in at close to 1200 pages, I think we should be forgiven for jumping over a few pages, but by and large, this tome on design of all types and sizes of spaces written in the 1970s has a ton of good ideas that seem common sense but don’t automatically spring to mind. Like, what kinds of neighborhoods inspire the residents to walk instead of drive? Some say they want a jumbomart to get everything in one place, but large numbers of people find a corner grocery to be useful for most of their needs. How big should a town square be in order to be more inviting for a variety of people? How do you even design housing to encourage a diversity of ages, socio-economic class, and family types to move in? These questions are thought about a lot when you don’t consider your own city to be ideal, and the residents of STL certainly are hard on theirs. But many of our friends are improving their city actively through day jobs or weekend projects: from working with local arts and youth organizations to renovating a house in a neighborhood that needs a lot of work, from building a rooftop garden at work to becoming a teacher or building a sculpture for a public event, we’re lucky to know so many people who think so much about how to make their city a better place to be. And stranger still, most of these people flow effortlessly between white collar and blue collar jobs – and mingle with a combination of both in their neighborhoods and friend groups. Few cities in the U.S. really achieve this.

That’s actually two concepts, but I still appreciate both. And it’s exciting for us to see all the things our friends have accomplished since we moved – even if it’s buying a ‘76 camper named a “scamp” or plotting hijinks for their upcoming wedding. In the meantime, we’ll try to improve the city we live in now, even if most of the residents here have a much higher opinion of their city and don’t believe it needs help, change or any more people in it. It takes time, naturally, to tap in to the improvement elements in a city.

The other thing that makes trivia fun is that we have a waitress whom is really sweet and very cute, and would make a great gf for said brother. As far as I know, this hasn’t yet happened, but she has come up to him at his place of work, and chatted with him asking why she hadn’t seen him at the bar in a while. In fact, she smiles and grabs our shoulders when we walk in, which are all good signs! I’ve made it very clear he’s my brother, so he just needs to make a move. I’m willing to take the risk that things go sour, and we’re awkward at trivia forever after…but for now, I’ll just take advantage of the pub nachos and enjoy having a brother that can do the chug off when I get all the answers right and we tie with another team. That’s awfully handy.

The bad news is a little more serious. Our 100 square foot plot sits next to two 30-feet tall blue spruces. That might be OK, except they sit immediately to the south. The. plot. is. shady. all. day.

If you’re not a gardener, you may at this point be saying, “So what? Clearly plants grow in shade, I see them all the time. Grow up!” In part, you’re right: I should grow up, but this is the second time in recent months I’ve had this problem: when we moved into our northwest-bottom-corner apartment and found I couldn’t raise much in pots on the windowsills. The garden was supposed to correct that problem, but as Sam considers, perhaps we are being “hazed” as new members of this exclusive locale. The pure shadiness of the plot means that more than half of the things I planned to grow must be crossed off. So, tomatoes, gladiolas, all peppers, basil, daisies and zinnias are out. LOTS of lettuce, spinach, broccoli, peas, collards, and did I mention lettuce? are in. We’ll show them we know how to garden.

The tragedy that keeps me from accepting this and moving on is that I haven’t grown tomatoes for over a year now, and was desperately looking forward to raising the crop that has the most payoff: a freshly grown and plucked tomato, something I could rest assured would grow in Colorado with much the same requirements as in Missouri. While I could quietly slip my brother $50 cash (he’s a certified sawyer) and the trees would suddenly no longer block the sun, I have a feeling I’d be hunted down by an angry mob if I did, since no one else would stand to gain from the trees mysteriously being chopped down.

So, we’ve taken the first steps – meeting a few other gardeners, and amending the soil with high-quality compost and sheep manure while picking out the blue spruce pinecones. This week I’ll probably put down peas and a few kinds of lettuce and spinach. If things work out, we’ll get a lucrative trading system down, offering the rare mid-summer spinach and lettuce when everyone else is drowning in tomatoes and basil. Oh, and next year we’ll request a move to a sunny plot.

Sam, on the other hand, has a different new condiment love. It’d be an exaggeration to say he puts it on everything, but pizza, soup, pasta, bagels, chik patties, and maybe salads at least. It’s called Togarashi, or sometimes Shichimi Togarashi, or sometimes “Japanese 7 Spice”. In short, it’s a spicy powdered mixture that includes chiles, salt and seaweed. We discovered it through its requirement in a ramen-based soup, and since then, it’s dominated Sam’s foods. While it falls within my spice tolerance, I think most foods don’t have to have a delicate combination of chiles and seaweed to finish them off. Hey, to each their own.

However, bananas are not an evolutionarily favored plant, for all their benefits. They are clones – which explains the lack of any seeds, and the remarkable uniformity of the ones you see at the grocery store. But in the past, and now again, it means bananas fall easily to any fungus, disease, mite or bacteria that successfully attack a single plant of a banana cultivar. In the 1950s, Big Mike bananas started disappearing due to a fungus traveling easily between plantations. Big Mike bananas are not extinct, but they don’t work in big plantations anymore. How frustrating, then, that our bananas today aren’t as good as back in your grandma’s day. I’m tempted to ask someone of the era what exactly these dream bananas were like…but to be realistic, if someone asked you forty years from your last one what was so great about Pink Lady apples, could you really pin it down?

In the 1950s, the banana companies were forced to realize that they needed a banana replacement for the Big Mike, and they scornfully switched to the “inferior” Cavendish banana you see now. It is more fickle in travel, smaller, less creamy, and generally considered a weak replacement (though consumers, apparently, didn’t mind or didn’t notice the difference slicing it into their cereal). But the Cavendish, as I write, is being attacked by a stronger strain of the same fungus that destroyed most of the Big Mike bananas. And we’re no better at solving the problem. Clones just don’t have the genetic strength of other breeding methods. The best hope currently for keeping our Banana Foster recipes for the next couple generations is to employ transgenic methods to produce a third commercial banana. Wild bananas generally aren’t very appealing, even if hardy, and most bananas eaten by the non-Western World are starchier, closer to a plantain (how many of us would switch happily to a plantain on your peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich?). And regular cross-breeding is next to impossible with seedless fruit. It’ll take a lot of trial plants to find something that we picky consumers barely notice is not a Cavendish, but doesn’t die from fungus or the other diseases currently decimating the crops.

Anyway, it was a really good book. If you don’t feel like reading it, you might want to instead check out the NPR Fresh Air interview the author did, complete with singing a banana jingle and a thoughtful explanation why transgenic bananas aren’t worrisome. The author had many opportunities to try bananas you’ll never see in the US, and confidently picks a favorite: the Lacatan. He claims it is sweet and extra creamy, and is beloved by the locals who have access to it. Again, no fair. I am being told that one of my favorite fruits isn’t even the best of it’s kind, with the two better varieties either gone from the market or only sold in and near the Phillipines. I’ll need to find someone to smuggle a Lacatan to me at some point, so I can tell kids years from now how amazing yet another banana they’ll probably never eat was.

It’s not the fairest thing to expect community, friendship, drinking buddies, outdoor activity, grassroots activism and oh yeah, fresh vegetables and herbs from a simple 100 square feet, but my last plot, at a meager 50 square feet did just that. I miss my fellow gardeners from the humble Clemens garden very much, and hope I’ll find interesting gardeners at this new location. It’s a little further away, but that’s all the more reason to become more comfortable on my bike and to prepare seeds for spring. It’s time to read up on what Colorado’s growing season will and won’t let me do (damn the desert climate), and figure out what seeds or seedlings to order.

The other benefit to Boulder’s community gardens set-up is that they have made the gardens part of city-owned land, protected from development. My last garden existed at the grace of two, not just one, private property owners, and came under threat of condo development during my time there. While it was inspiring to see how our garden group came together to argue for keeping the garden (successful so far), it’s a lot less stressful to know the city’s got your back. Plus, for a ludicrous sum, I could take a course this summer in bee-keeping, which is awfully cool. I just have to figure out whether it’s hundreds of dollars cool.

Berg’s hair is irrepressibly curly, which makes for a mohawk that practically stands up (or poofs up) on its own. Sam’s mohawk, while incredibly long (perhaps 6 inches at the apex now), is so straight that it takes 1/2 can of foul-smelling hair spray and an assistant to stand it up. Thus, he rarely stands his up, certainly not for his recent activities, which have included multiple TV appearances. It’s too bad…I think he would be an excellent speaker for his field, whether or not his hair pushes him to 6 feet tall. But he prefers to keep it down except for special occasions, which is why I haven’t posted any pictures of his mohawk on here. Encourage Sam to spike it, and you’ll see some then.

So how have things been? Same as usual, I suppose. I’m repainting my desert shoes – from green to red, and today I’m making root beer from scratch. The recipe will be posted if it’s successful, but there are days of steps before we’ll know. Root beer making is a very interesting project, however – requiring a variety of chipped barks, and created using a mixture of molasses and yeast that both carbonates the beverage and provides a low alcoholic content. Not enough to even qualify it as a wine cooler, but enough that modern companies don’t even try – as we all know, HFCS and compressed carbon dioxide are cheaper and more predictable.

I have a not-so-secret goal in this root beer project. A nearby local restaurant, better known for its well-loved alcoholic brewed products, makes the best root beer I’ve ever had. It’s not super-sweet, but full of flavor (and scent…not the best for a very pregnant friend newly sensitive to strange smells). It’s clear they’re doing something other root beer producers are not, as no bottled products (I’ve tried quite a few in the last couple months) have quite mimicked the combination of flavors. I have some ideas for how to figure out their recipe, but for now it’s the old-fashioned way: make my own, continue to drink theirs, and try to sort out which flavor compounds need tweaking in my own recipe. Failing that, I wonder what kind of offer would convince one of the hip employees to share the original recipe with me?