not to have traditional potato salad with mayonnaise but instead a salade niçoise with fingerling potatoes, haricots verts, and fresh seared tuna with tarragon vinaigrette. The braised baby bok choi and mushrooms in spicy ginger sauce in Hong Kong, and Italy’s slivers of raw artichoke bedecked with curls of Parmesan cheese and drizzled with lemon juice and olive oil blew the top off my perception of vegetables. This started me down the road to growing even more fantastic edible plants, or tracking them down in the market. When harvest time came, I’d use the recipes I had saved or develop my own.
I was fortunate to have firsthand experience of so many unusual foods. In the 60s when I started cooking, there were few recipes available using any but the most common of vegetables and herbs. The two books my husband had gifted to me were exceptions, yet I was still held back by the limited availability of interesting ingredients. In fact, there was an unwritten rule in the cookbook-publishing world: “Never use an ingredient the average cook could not find in his or her local grocery store.” Consequently, American cooking allowed little room for innovation and imploded in on itself. It was not until the early 1980s when Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins agreed to write their soon-to-be-classic The Silver Palate Cookbook—and insisted on including “exotic” ingredients like fresh basil and mangos—that this rule changed. Creative ingredients began to show up in a flood of good eating.
Meanwhile, gardening was running a parallel path to cooking. In the mid-twentieth century, the seed industry limited in the name of efficiency vegetable and herb varieties available to the home gardener. There were color standards: green for snap beans and bell peppers, red for tomatoes, orange for carrots, and brown skin with white flesh for potatoes. Purple—beans, peppers, tomatoes, carrots and potatoes—was nowhere to be seen, and neither were any other bright colors. Agriculture and America’s general lack of interest in vegetables and herbs had joined to present a united front against anything but run-of-the-mill garden produce. But exciting and flavorful edibles were on the horizon.
The next step on my own gardening journey came during a trip to a kibbutz outside Haifa, Israel, where I was struck by how hard it was for the Israelis to grow food on the limited arable land in their country, which is mostly desert. I was convinced that Americans were wasting the valuable soil around their homes, and that they should use it to grow at least some of their own vegetables and fruits. Thus, my version of edible landscaping was born. With this inspiration, I got to work on what would become The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping, which Sierra Club Books published in 1982. To my surprise, it became a big hit.
Great rumblings had been occurring in the cooking world and were continuing. And here I was—once again—at the epicenter of one of the quake zones—Northern California. In the 70s, the flower children pushed us toward healthier foods, including many Asian specialties and vegetables. Alice Water’s Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, which featured local and beautifully prepared seasonal foods, was becoming a phenomenon. Greens Restaurant opened in 1979 in San Francisco led by Deborah Madison (then chef), and became one of the premier vegetarian restaurants in the nation. Greens formed a close bond with Green Gulch, a large organic garden. Farmers’ markets in California were opening at an exponential rate and more and more chefs and gardeners began to work together. In nearby Napa Valley, the wine and cheese industries were taking off. Many of these businesses gave cooking demonstrations out of their gardens. At about the same time, CCOF (California Certified Organic Farmers) was busy trying to develop organic standards for vegetables and fruits. And the world sat up and took notice.
In 1985, in the midst of this glorious food revolution, I signed a contract to begin working on my second book, Cooking from the Garden. Unlike my previous book, this one was going to be all about how to grow ethnic foods, baby greens, edible flowers, and heirloom vegetables—and how to cook them in unique and interesting ways. I needed a trial garden to test at least a hundred different varieties of vegetables at one time, simultaneously growing a dozen tomato varieties, twenty different types of lettuce, and so on. These were vegetables that few cooks or gardeners had seen, such as green or striped tomatoes and red-hearted radishes, and I was faced with not only the challenge of growing them, but also creating recipes that showcased their unique flavors and textures. The only suitable place for such a garden was my sunny front yard. And I now had the skills to make it beautiful!
I hired Wendy Krupnick, an experienced food gardener, for this gargantuan two-year project. She dug up the entire front yard, transforming it into a succession of garden beds. I kept copious notes throughout the process: from finding and obtaining seeds, growing them out, photographing the resulting plants at the peak of their glory, harvesting them, and finally on to cooking, eating, and photographing the delectable results. Just as I hoped, we grew out hundreds of wonderful edibles in mini-gardens with Mexican, French, German, Asian, Native American, herb, and salad themes. It may be hard to fathom now, but back then there was almost no information on growing or cooking with foods out of the American mainstream; there was no Internet. We were pioneers, learning about roasting vegetables, how to preserve their colors when cooking them, where to find chipotle peppers, and discovering the world of Middle Eastern cookery. Even something that is familiar now, such as balsamic vinegar, was hard to find; salsa was exotic, even though in America today it is more widely used as a condiment than ketchup.
Many international dishes that were once unusual have become staples of the American diet. This classic Italian minestrone soup is a delightful opportunity to showcase homegrown vegetables.
Heirloom dishes such as this rhubarb-strawberry cobbler are irresistible and delicious American traditions.
I was truly blessed in this endeavor; Wendy was not only an expert gardener, but had also worked in a number of restaurants (including Chez Panisse). She brought sophistication to my recipes. In addition, Wendy was the state secretary for CCOF; organic farmers from all over the state came to meetings at my house. They shared new research in organic gardening methods, often bringing unusual or special produce to “show and tell” and giving us cutting-edge recipes and ideas.
I also came to be an early supporter of the Seed Savers Exchange, and felt an urgent need to help preserve some of the thousands of heirloom vegetable varieties that were going extinct. I could do my part by singing their praises to the public and food professionals. And with my ever-changing garden, I found that I had the means to make a difference.
After I finished my book, the Los Angeles Times asked me to write a monthly syndicated column about unusual vegetables. Since I couldn’t buy broccoli raab, Japanese eggplant, lemon thyme, Vietnamese coriander, tomatillos, or the many other edibles I wanted to write about, I had to grow them in my garden (and go through the familiar process of planting, note-taking, photographing, recipe testing, and so on). Once again, we grew a variety of gardens, with each bed embracing a different theme, and to distinguish them from the ones in my soon-to-be-published book, we created formal brick paths and built an arbor spanning the main walkway.
By the following year when the book finally came out, there was more media demand for new and varied gardens, including television coverage on CNN Headline News (a story about heirloom vegetables) and CBS This Morning (a feature on growing a front yard garden of mesclun salad greens). The New York Times did a feature article on cooking with unusual vegetables, and used their own photographer. Within a year, I became a contributing editor at Country Living Gardener magazine, and I needed even more new recipes and photos from my garden. Clearly, I was off on a new career path.
Since I started planting the front yard garden more than twenty years ago, my succession of gardeners and I have changed it out and planted new edibles of every sort twice a year, which means I’ve had more than forty trial gardens. It’s been great fun finding a range of unique themes. For instance, in 1992 (the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s landing in the New World), I planned a garden full of indigenous plants
