I was a weird kid. I loved eating vegetables ever since I can remember. Growing up farming gave me a deep appreciation for organic produce, and my favorite treat was baby carrots. No, not the “baby carrots” you see in the grocery store – which are just oddly shaped larger carrots cut down to shapes. A real baby carrot is the first carrot to grow in winter, before the larger carrots come in early spring. We used to go out and pick those tiny little funky-shaped root vegetables, wash the dirt off of them and eat them as a little snack. They’re incredibly sweet, almost like candy, with an intense concentrated carrot flavor.
My all-time favorite vegetable, though, is artichokes. They’re incredibly difficult to grow in most places, so I only tried growing them once in Virginia. You have to pick them at just the right time, too, because the part of the artichoke that we eat is actually the flower just before it blooms. There are a few days window between the artichoke ripening and the large, vibrant purple flower blossoming. Once the flower blooms, the petals become hard, dry and bitter.
My grandmother used to cook artichokes by carefully cutting off the spikes on the leaves with a pair of scissors, stuffing each leaf with a slice of fresh garlic, then steaming it for an hour in a pot with a little water and a drizzle of olive oil. Then she melted a whole stick of butter and added some salt and lemon juice to it, and we dipped each leaf in melted butter before scraping a bit of it off with our teeth. It was a messy endeavor, but I loved every minute of it. My hands and face would be covered in melted butter and the whole house smelled like garlic.
In the spring and summer I always loved going to nearby farmers markets and seeing rows of fresh produce – vibrant red onions, multicolor bell peppers, huge russet potatoes. Now that I live in California there are farmers markets all year round. In fact, since Winter is the rainy season, the vegetables are thriving even in spite of the cold. It’s hard to beat how big and fresh everything is here.
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