Treeless Leeves- The Army Corps Is At It Again
Army Corps orders thousands of trees chopped down Here they go again. The Army Corps of Engineers’ track record when it comes to flood control along the Mississippi has been disastrous. Remember the drowning of New Orleans. Here’s a clue- it wasn’t the natural disaster Hurricane Katrina that devastated the city. Just a couple of months before the post-Katrina flooding of NOLA, I finished reading a book I highly recommend to everyone. RISING TIDE: THE GREAT MISSISSIPPI FLOOD OF 1927 AND HOW IT CHANGED AMERICA by John Barry is, among other things, a history of the flawed policies regarding flood control in the Mississippi Delta. It’s a book that took Mr. Barry 20 years to write, and although it is history, it reads like a novel. I highly recommend it to anyone who ever wondered how it was that New Orleans found itself in the position it did in late August of 2005. In fact, I recommend it to anyone who wants to better understand New Orleans. You’ll also come away learning much about this country, and how things work in the corridors of power, just in case you didn’t know already. And now, I read today the article linked to above on the latest pursuits of the Army Corps. Please read it (and seriously-pick up Rising Tide) and then do whatever you can to get the word out about this, and hopefully stop it. Do we really need, in a world threatened by global warming, to have our government destroy thousands of trees (many old growth) across the country? Please take action now! ...
read moreThe Caterer’s Garden- Working on the Menus
So, as I said last time, Paul asked if I would create some menus for him as a starting point. He wanted vegetables, fruit, herbs, edible flowers, and specifically mentioned a variety of cherry tomatoes. Colorful food- in that Cal-Mediterranean kind of mode- just my kind of thing. When I started thinking about it, my mind first lit on the okra plant. Okay, it’s not exactly Cal-Med, but I started out as a Southerner, and I really have a thing for okra. Also, several years back, I had seen an okra plant growing in the kitchen garden at the erstwhile COPIA in Napa, and had been captivated by its showy flower. I thought it was perfect for the plant which gives us the main ingredient for okra gumbo, one of my favorite foods, and a New Orleans specialty, because the flower would look right at home tucked behind the ear of a sultry jazz singer-even wrote a story about it-the plant, the flower, the gumbo, and the city, but that’s for another time. I paired the okra with corn (because they just go together, right?), tomatoes and fresh shell beans in a kind of succotash. Paul called to tell me that corn was not exactly what he had in mind. “It sucks up a tremendous amount of water” he said. Not a great thing in drought ridden Southern California. “I was thinking more along the lines of zucchini and eggplant.” I also remembered hearing Michael Abelman, urban farmer, author of On Good Land: The Autobiography of an Urban Farm, From the Good Earth: A Celebration of Growing Food Around the World ,Fields of Plenty: A Farmer’s Journey in Search of Real Food and the People Who Grow It , and photographer, say a few years back that he’d never seen a plant that sucked the soil of nutrients like corn. Probably not such a horrible thing in the alluvial soil of the Mississippi Basin, but again, in So Cal… Okay, so think like a farmer, not primarily like a chef, Gisele. So, there was a bit more back and forth between Paul and I: He couldn’t find a dwarf apricot tree for the apricot frangipane tarts which I love in the spring-“maybe berries”? “We’re already using them with Meyer lemon curd to serve with pound cake.” A call: “Hey, I found a dwarf pear tree”- an old standby for frangipane tarts – and now we’re set. Next time -the menus and what’s actually being planted. Bon Appetit!...
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