Tag: food

The tender attributes of garlic chives

Garlic chives (Allium tuberosum) posses such an above ground showiness they are known more as visual spectacle than food. When used in the kitchen, or included in edible landscapes, it is almost always as an obscure herb rather than a substantial vegetable.

The truth is it can be a side dish of its own if you know its more tender attributes.

I say this, first and foremost, because garlic chives readily propagate themselves. To me, abundance is a prerequisite to utility in perennial cooking; because just about any small delicacy can be made a meal if you have enough of it. Garlic chives not only divide to form handsome, large clumps in short order if conditions are sunny and fertile as they like, they also self seed like crazy.

The leaves themselves are a small delicacy. In early spring these come up thick, each leaf flat, with rounded tips like linguine noodles. As there is almost nothing below ground on this plant, it’s most productive for future harvests to pick only a few of these above ground leaves from each plant, leaving a couple on the base to produce the real harvest of flower and stem.

These stems show up around late August for me, with a trickle of flowers popping their papery covers throughout the month.

The flowers themselves can be tossed over salads. The stems can be snipped as young as you find them. By the time a stem has an open flower on top, it has become far to tough to enjoy.

There is a point, just as the unopened buds still hang their heads down, but the stem has begun to get hard at the bottom, that the top quarter to third of the stem is still tender.

Here I prepared garlic chives at about this stage. I sprinkled the with some oil (ghee, or butter oil in this case) , beef broth, hickory smoked salt, pepper, with mint and oregano flowers on top, and let sit while a pan heated. Once the pan was warm enough I could throw water on it and watch the water skitter around bubbling, I threw this mixture in the pan, stirred, reduced heat, then swished the liquids around in the pan to keep them bubbling between the stems until it was about gone and a thick sauce covered them.

These can be eaten like large asparagus -picking up the stem at the bottom, munching the tender part as far down as you enjoy.

At any point you can harvest whatever portion is tender and throw them into stir-fry or the like. Harvesting with the hard stems makes them more of an event to be savored.

Despite the name, garlic chives actually have a very mild, really sweet flavor. It can be added to salads, raw, or cooked in rich dishes, where it adds light overtones of garlic, luscious sweetness, and, if not overcooked, pleasant crunch. The garlic character really comes out more in the scent than the flavor.

I should mention Allium cernuum, or nodding onion, is almost exactly the same as garlic chives, except for the flavor. Whereas garlic chives are so mild and sweet, with garlic overtones, nodding onion has a robust onion flavor, and scent which can even smart the eyes as you’re harvesting.

Otherwise, the two are exactly the same in spreading themselves, time of harvest, character of the stems as the main crop, and the fact so many gardeners have mistaken for a mere ornamental what are truly delicious gastronomic delicacies.

Taste of chaos

Years ago, a hillside was tidied up. An apple tree growing there was pruned, grass around it ripped up. At the roots of the tree, clear plastic was laid, a layer of black plastic was laid over this,  on top of this was laid colored woodchips

Alone, surrounded by short, browning grass in the heat of summer, its lower limbs sawed off, the apple tree died.

The owner changed. A new hand touched the wounds on this mortal tree, felt sorry, pulled back the layers of plastic, let the grass grow wild.


It was chaos. Briars and thorns grew up amidst the grass. Alongside these were fruit trees, vines, and shrubs.

Today I walked up the stone steps of this hillside, followed the meandering path that cuts through the long grass, and grasped one of many rusty-red peaches dripping from my trees.

Several of the peaches are fruiting abundantly this year. Because I have several kinds, some are ripe now, others a couple of months from now.


A fruit here, a fruit there has been the norm for years. This year there are just loads of fruit, beyond fresh eating, from goumi, gooseberry, saskatoon, currant. I often emerge from the food forest with fruits and berries for others to try.  Some look at the fruit, look at the food forest, look at me puzzled and ask: “Where did you get those?”

I have actually done the least in the food forest this year than any year before. I haven’t even mowed much of it. The rose bushes and blackberries I let grow up in the back of the food forest actually provided some fine mulch when I trimmed them back.


The amorpha and comfrey provided some very nice mulch also. I mainly mowed beside the road in order to mulch a new bed. Yet, as I walk around, plucking clusters of shining sweetness, I‘m quite pleased to see my beds are expanding themselves. Within the beds, several plants have achieved some of the most lush growth yet, with the turnip rooted chervil way above my head, and forming new patches in new beds.

To bite into the dewy sweetness of a fruit warm with sunlight here is unlike that of anywhere else. All fruit is a process. It is the workings of a place, coming to such a refined state as food. To bring in a fertilizer here, and bring in a spray there, is like making a patchwork of places and processes, in my mind. I much prefer fruits with vibrant flavor from comfrey mulch growing at the trees’ feet,  (comfrey mulch and tea does produce a notably rich flavor in garden vegetables too) and the spice of essential oils wafting around the air from such pest confusers as oregano or Spiraea.


I’ve had the privilege of working with chaos after letting it back into the garden. I think it’s got the idea of what I’m after. At this point in the food forest’s development, I am sure the chaos quite eagerly gets to work as I walk away from Mortal Tree, a fresh pit of a peach at its roots.

To cook a dahlia -Edible dahlias part 2

Preparations of dahlia tubers I saw in magazines or online were anything but exciting. Most I would avoid if it was any other root in a similar recipe -various low fat mayonnaise covered salads. There were also profuse warnings about the variance in dahlias flavor from variety to variety, and basic edibility, so be cautious. I see far more potential for these little gem mines.

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The heirloom dahlia I raised for tubers.

When harvesting the dahlia flowers, there is a lovely cucumber-like smell, when digging the roots, the most delicate, lightly sweet, almost celestial carrot sensation. This was the initial characteristic that drew me into the idea of eating them.

On a bright November day, the coveted patches of dahlias now seas of writhing black slime from the frosts, the time had come to bring the precious tubers to light. The big dig took the whole morning just to unearth, let alone fuss over, the tubers. I unearthed mine in the food forest as an afterthought.

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I just tossed these tubers in one of the flowerbeds by the house to freeze in the coming cold. I had read they develop more sugars after long, cool storage. Not interested in waiting that long, I’d let the freezing cold speed things up.

Now in December, I retrieved the frozen tubers and let them thaw before peeling, and throwing them halved into boiling water.

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This is the method I’ve used for sunchokes (Helianthis tuberosum) per the cookbook recommendations I’ve found. It works, although the simple preparation of boiling doesn’t break down the inulin they contain, which on my digestion is unpleasant. Dahlias are also said to contain inulin, so I wondered if I shouldn’t try something more drastic like the long bakes over hot coals used by Native American tribes to break down sunchoke inulin. To have more accurate comparison, I decided to just go with the sunchoke preparation I was familiar with.

Usually I add some lemon juice to the sun chokes water, so did the same for these dahlias -just a tablespoon worth in about a quart of water. This keeps sunchokes from turning blackish brown from their high iron content, which I wasn’t sure these dahlias had. They were already a light tan. But I did it anyway. It adds some flavor.

After five minutes, I pulled a smaller piece out and tasted. The raw piece I tasted before cooking had the exquisite light carrot flavor I so love, but was mealy, had a bitter element, and a hollow, though dusty center flavor that I can only describe as dirt.

Cooked, it was a little nicer in terms of texture -more crunchy. But that dirt flavor was still rumbling at its base.

After some figuring, I sliced the tubers into julienne, and sautéd them in butter. I sprinkled them with allspice, some hickory smoked salt, and just a dash of cayenne. When some nice golden brown patches appeared on their edges, I removed them, tasted, and they were suddenly very good.

The salt was pleasantly prominent. The richness of the hickory filled in the dirty core flavor, transforming it to a much more pleasant earthiness. The allspice added a beautiful depth and complexity to the carrot flavor.

I knew just what would cinch it though, so poured some maple syrup into the still hot pan, tossed in a couple of raw, unsweetened cacao chips, a few drops of vanilla tincture, and stirred.

The heat wasn’t enough to melt the cacao, but enough to infuse the syrup with its flavor. Lightly poured over the rich, salty, carroty tubers, it transformed them from inedible hunks of dirt I spit out between bites, to worthy of consuming the plate.

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I wouldn’t exactly call this preparation a dessert. Even with the sauce, it could still work as a side dish to a main meal because, among all the complexity, the sweetness didn’t stand out much. Others who tasted thought it was the natural sweetness of the dahlias.

The one drawback was its texture, which was still a little spongy. I think further sautéing at a lower heat until fully crisp would help reduce this.

I think it would also improve the digestibility. Compared to sunchokes, these were much better on my digestion, even if a bit heavy. I might try baking dahlias for a long time (I’ve seen suggestions of doing this in a clay pot) and see if they improve, both in digestibility and flavor. The long heat that breaks down the inulin is also supposed to make sweet flavors more prominent.

Overall I like them, and think there is great potential for them as a highly sought delicacy. I just need to figure out how to more efficiently grow them.

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