A picnic to honor my father's 80 years

This month, my father turns 80. To reach one's eighth decade (correction, thanks to the quick mind of Deb Robson: he's entering his ninth decade) seems to me a milestone very much worth celebrating. My dad always says he has everything he needs, but I know he loves a family gathering, especially if it involves food. He and my mom live two and a half hours away over the mountains, but right now they are traveling in Norway with my brother, sister-in-law, and youngest niece. The latter three live far away in Washington state, but they're stopping in Colorado on their way back home to visit my sister-in-law's dad. So for something like 48 hours I have a chance to gather this part of my family for a birthday celebration to honor Dad's upcoming 80th, and I'm grabbing that moment.

I'm planning a picnic, most of which I'll prepare here at home. Then Richard and I will pack up this summer meal for eight, and drive it over three mountain passes and down onto the Plains and into the city, where we'll pick up my parents, and carry them to the town an hour away where the rest of the family will be. There we'll celebrate my Dad's life and his eighty years.

I'll be away at a writing workshop until the day before the picnic, so it's going to be a bit of a challenge to prepare all the food. I realize that I could simply buy some picnic food at the deli of the grocery store I regularly walk to, and pay their bakery to create a cake, but making the food myself is an act of love. If I'm honoring my dad and his life, what better way to do it than cooking something special to share? And if I'm going to cook something special, I want it to include a taste of our terroir, our own soil, with food we've grown right here in our garden.

So I've come up with a menu rooted in very local food.

It starts with shrimp, which do not come from our valley, but will be delicious dipped in a spicy cilantro-mint chutney made with herbs we grew ourselves, and green chiles from a farm downriver.

Then we'll tuck into the main dish, a quinoa salad (the quinoa, that marvelous nutty and earthy grain from the Andes, grown by an organic farmer in the San Luis Valley, just south of us). It'll be topped with steamed beets and whole sugar snap peas picked fresh from our garden, and sprinkled with feta cheese and chopped walnuts. The combination of deep purple beets and bright green fresh peas will be spectacular, and the sweetness of beets and peas will be balanced by the salty feta, the earthy quinoa and the rich and slightly astringent walnuts.

Along with that I'll serve a simple tossed salad of mixed lettuces and other salad greens picked fresh from the garden and dressed with orange-infused olive oil (this from Stonehouse Olive Oils, an olive oil maker in California, which also isn't local, but the stuff is delicious and at least comes from this continent) and balsamic vinegar. The salad greens--Monet's Garden and French Market mixes from Rene's Garden Seeds--come in eye-pleasing combinations of smooth and ruffled and lacy and lobed, and a whole range of greens and burgundy and reds.

(I believe in food that is beautiful to look at, without being too contrived or fussy, so that it nurtures the spirit as well as the body.)

We'll have bread on the side, not Richard's beautiful sculptural loaves made with local organic whole wheat flower, but some bread made in the Denver area since Richard won't have a chance to bake with his two-day levain process between the time we get home and leave again for the picnic.

And for dessert, a cake--of course! I'll bake a sourdough chocolate cake with local eggs whose rich orange yolks show that the chickens have been outside, eating bugs as they naturally do. Instead of icing I'll top it with some of the eight quarts of fresh cherries that Richard pitted last weekend, and over those dark and juicy globes of fruit, a thick layer of creme fraiche, sweetened with honey from a beekeeper friend's hives and a bit of special aged port brought to us by visiting friends.

So we'll celebrate my father's 80th birthday with the gifts of food, family, and lots of love in the growing, cooking, and eating together.

(As always, the photos above are my own: a native blazingstar that seeded itself just inside the corrugated tin fence of our bedroom courtyard, my lettuce mix ready to harvest, and the climbing roses on the arbor Richard built me several Mother's Days ago.)

Summer in the garden: sunflowers and tomatoes

Summer has finally come to our garden here at 7,000 feet above sea level in the south-central Rockies. By that I mean that the sunflowers in every possible permutation have opened their yellow and rust and brown faces, and the tomatoes are laden with fruit. I always plant a row of sunflowers somewhere in the garden, trying for as many varieties as possible (though I eschew those bred to lack pollen, because that cheats the bees and beetles, who depend on the pollen to feed their young).

Every year sunflowers pop up in different spots around the kitchen garden and yard on their own, and surprise us with their charming variety, their genes a mix of the wild Helianthus annus, the native annual sunflower, and whichever variety the bees crossed them with. Their heads grow heavy with seeds, much to the delight of the goldfinches, those warbling songsters of the yard, and the pine siskens and chickadees too. We even see yellow warblers and other insect-eaters gleaning their hairy stems and rich heads for tasty insects. The sunflowers make better habitat for the birds in our yard than feeders, because they're spread out and the spilled seed never rots or breeds disease organisms. (It's also not concentrated enough to attract the local squirrels, deer or black bears, all "pests" at seed feeders.)

And the tomatoes: all six varieties of tomatoes are finally ripe. The first ones to ripen are always 'Pompei,' a heritage Roma-type tomato, long and narrow and great for cooking because they have a rich flavor and not much juice. (That's them in the left-center of the bowl in the photo.) They're also delicious sliced in a salad of fresh garden greens, especially when they're just-picked and still warm from the sun. We savor the first Pompei in early July.

Next to ripen are the yellow pear tomatoes, thumb-size, pear-shaped as their name and sunny yellow (in the center below), perfect for eating fresh like the fruit that they are. Sometimes we find our friends in the garden, standing next to the raised bed with the tomatoes and eating the yellow pears right off the vines. They are great with crackers and cheese and a glass of wine, or halved on a fruit salad.


This year the chianti rose ripened next, their fat and round and juicy fruits a gorgeous shade of pinkish-red that really does look like wine. (The pink, round tomatoes on the right hand side of the bowl.) Another heritage variety, these may be my favorite for their sweetness and silky texture, and the fact that they seem to have no acid at all. They're not the prettiest tomatoes - their skin is so thin that they always split - but they take the size prize. I harvested one that weighed in at nearly two pounds this summer. Cut into wedges and served with fresh basil and mozzarella cheese drizzled with a little olive oil and balsamic vinegar, they are heaven!

Next to ripen were the cost0luto, which win the prize for looks: these small, somewhat flattened tomatoes are scarlet and ribbed with smooth, slightly shiny skin, as if they've been waxed. (The costolutos are in the lower left quarter of the bowl.) They have the richest, most intensely tomato flavor of any variety we've ever grown. Then came the persimmon, small orange globes as bright as their name and bursting with bright flavor too: they are citrusy and perfect for eating fresh or cooking.

The last of our six heritage varieties of tomatoes to ripen are the perhaps the best: black Krim, a black-russian type tomato, named because their tops stay a dark green shade that looks black, while the lower half of these beefsteak tomatoes ripen to a dark ruby red color. (The two black Krims are in the upper left, the one on the right bottoms-up.) Their flesh is smooth and velvety, and their flavor instense and sweet. And they are huge, almost as big as the Chianti rose tomatoes.

We're only about a month from the first hard frosts, which usually comes in late September. But in that time, I plan to savor the summer tastes of tomatoes eaten fresh from the vine, and the sight of sunflowers in every shape and color pivoting their heads to follow the sun as it moves across the cloudless sky. Here in the mountains, we revel in summer, perhaps because it doesn't last long. Here's to tomatoes and sunflowers!

And thanks, as always, to seedswoman and cook Rene Shepherd of Rene's Garden Seeds for the fabulous varieties of fruits, herbs and vegetables that delight and sustain us from the kitchen garden.

Addenda to Eight Random Facts meme

The first tomato is turning ripe! It's the size of my fist, and it's a Chianti rose, a cross between a heritage Italian tomato and a Brandywine that ripens pink and sweet and low-acid. (Seeds from Rene's Garden - thank you, Rene Shepherd.) My tomato vines are loaded with fruit and I can hardly wait to pick that first sun-warmed fruit and bite in - oh, yes.

The hot weather has finally come to south-central Colorado, and my garden is taking off. Now if we would just get some rain. . . .

And I'm finally tagging my eighth blogger: Velda Brotherton, you're it!