The Kitchen Garden

It’s Not Easy Being Green

But a patch of parsley will do the trick

By Jan Leitschuh

If January finds you craving a little green, plant parsley.

Parsley’s kitchen presence ain’t what it used to be, when the culinary herb was ubiquitous. The classic lazy chef’s garnish — an afterthought to a side dish, an expected spot of green on the plate — parsley is not the first herb cooks reach for these days when tossing together a quick meal.

And that’s a shame, because parsley is simple to grow and surprisingly nutritious for a bit of verdant fluff.

That “spot of green” on the plate does equally well as a welcome spot of green in the garden in most Sandhills’ winters. Parsley is simple to grow. And in the old Simon and Garfunkel folk ballad “Scarborough Fair,” what gets first billing in parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme?

As a mildly bitter culinary herb, parsley’s clean and peppery taste can offer folks weary of rich holiday fare a fresh, healthy switch-up.

My friend Teresa’s introduction to parsley is probably typical. When she was traveling as a kid, her family would always stop at a roadside chain breakfast place on the interstate. “Seems like a sprig of parsley came on every plate as decoration,” she recalls. “I tried it and I liked it. To me, it was somewhat minty. My family would offer me theirs. My dad would always tease, ‘You want my rabbit food?’”

Because its deep taproot tolerates our winters, some local gardeners like to interplant the green herb with pansies and flowering kales. During warm spells, it grows vigorously. In cold weather, it can hold its own. I have brushed snow off a patch and harvested it. Some of the lushest outer sprigs may freeze, but the crown and core persist.

My friend Elaine grows parsley for the kitchen. “It’s in a big pot on my back porch,” she says. “I’ll probably bring it in tonight because the temperature is going down into the mid-20s, and I have a lot of it I want to use.”

Elaine, a retired nurse, likes to use it fresh in recipes. “There are some things that just taste better with fresh parsley rather than dried . . . a chicken dish, potatoes. I like tabbouleh,” she says. “The best thing I use it in, though, is a recipe for lemon-garlic roasted cauliflower rice that I got from our Jazzercize teacher, Debby Higginbotham.” Elaine shares that recipe below.

To plant, pick up a few pots of parsley at a local garden center. If you can’t find parsley for sale now, it will be available in the earliest spring, when you really need a hit of green.

Planting and care are easy. Pick a sunny spot, plant the crown at soil level, water during dry spells in winter.

Parsley is a biennial, which means it will last two years, but I treat it like an annual. The leaves are still edible the second year but can get a little bitter sometimes if it bolts — grows a seed stalk — in its second spring.

Wash fresh parsley right before using, since this tough-growing plant is fragile. Clean it just as you would spinach. Place it in a bowl of cold water and swish it around with your hands, allowing any sand to dislodge. 

Unwashed parsley stays fresh for up to two weeks, whereas dried parsley may last up to a year. To freeze, chop and layer in a plastic bag about a 1/2-inch thick. Press as much air out of the bag as possible, and freeze. Break off flat pieces as needed.

Rich in antioxidants and nutrients like vitamins A, K, and C, parsley may improve blood sugar and support heart, kidney and bone health. Also a diuretic, parsley can help increase urine output and flush bacteria from the urinary system.

It’s a superfood, but probably best not to juice in great bunches — a little goes a long way. Your tasty Argentinian chimichurri aside, WebMD says very large quantities of parsley are possibly unsafe, especially for those with kidney disease. Parsley is high in oxalates, which can contribute to kidney stones in some.

Many tasty dishes sparkle with a teaspoon or two of fresh parsley. Couscous with red onion, feta, cucumbers and parsley is a classic. Whip up a chimichurri for skirt steak. Toss your zucchini noodle salad with a parsley-pistachio pesto, instead of basil and pine nuts. Tabbouleh with tomatoes, lemon juice and parsley is a great way to use up a bunch.

Or enjoy the clean, winter eating of Elaine and Debby’s recipe:

Lemon-Garlic Roasted Cauliflower with Fresh Parsley

Preheat oven to 425. Spray the bottom of a sheet pan or cookie sheet with olive oil.

Combine about 16 ounces, (or a pre-riced bag) of riced cauliflower with a tablespoon of olive oil, 3 chopped or pressed garlic cloves and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Mix and spread on pan. Roast for 25 minutes. Halfway through, stir to prevent burning.

Transfer to a bowl, mix with a teaspoon of fresh lemon juice and 2 teaspoons of freshly chopped parsley. 

Spoon over roasted chicken, salmon or another fish. Enough for two.  PS

Jan Leitschuh is a local gardener, avid eater of fresh produce and co-founder of Sandhills Farm to Table.

Almanac

By Ashley Wahl

January cold guides us inward. You find yourself studying your hands, quietly tracing the lines of your palms when, suddenly, there is movement in the periphery. A flash — and then nothing.

The mouse is back. How he gets inside you’ll never know. And yet, the mystery keeps you smiling, keeps you guessing. You catch and release him into the yard again, and as he scurries off, heart pounding like a tiny hammer, you wait for him to turn around, maybe wink his beady eye as if to say see you ’round.

Here we are again, January. By some miracle we’ve made it. And just like the mouse, we carry with us new stories, new wisdom from our journey.

This is a time for planning and dreaming.

You order seeds.

Next month, when the first of the daffodils burst through the soil in rapturous glory, you’ll sow sugar snaps and snow peas, carrots and parsnips, lettuce and spinach, maybe mustard seeds. But for now, you’re back to quiet contemplation, thoughtfully observing the lines on the back of your hands. The etchings and wrinkles begin to resemble the rings of a tree. There are stories here, you think. Lessons in each tiny groove.

And out of the blue, Aesop’s Fables pops into
your mind.

“The Ants & the Grasshopper”: There’s a time for work and a time for play.

“The Crow & the Pitcher”: In a pinch a good use of our wits may help us out.

“The Lion & the Mouse”: A kindness is never wasted.

You think of that crafty house mouse, smiling at his persistence and how you’re not so different from him. Your needs are the same: food, shelter and warmth. No doubt you both dream of the tender kiss of spring. And like the mouse, you, too, rely on a kindly universe to smile upon you, to gently guide you along your journey, granting you stories and wisdom for your future travels.

January is a year of lessons in the making. Notice the creatures, great and small, that remind us how to live. And remember: you are one of them.

Winter Blooms

Nature always gives us what we need. And in the dead of winter, when the bleakness of the landscape nearly becomes too much to bear, she gives us flowers.

Prunus mume, commonly known as flowering apricot, blooms in January. Its delicate, fragrant flowers — pink, red or white — ornament naked branches much like the cherry blossoms of official spring. Amazingly, this small, ornamental fruit tree was virtually unknown in the United States prior to the spirited efforts of the late Dr. J.C. Raulston, beloved horticulturist and founder of the nationally acclaimed arboretum at N.C.S.U. Raulston devoted his life to growing and sharing rare and spectacular plants, P. mume among them. This month, when its vibrant flowers offer their spicy aroma and the promise of spring, surely, whisper, thank you.

Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering ‘it will be happier’ . . . — Alfred Lord Tennyson 

Looking Out, Looking Up

How will your garden grow? Per Aesop’s “Ants & the Grasshopper” fable, now’s a good time to plan ahead. This month, order quality seeds and map out a planting calendar for year-round harvest. Sure, it will take a bit of work. The ants know something about that. But educating yourself on what to plant and when is a game changer. And when you’re harvesting fresh veggies from your backyard spring through winter, no doubt you’ll be singing like a grasshopper in June. 

But while you’re planning, don’t forget to look up. Although a waning gibbous moon will try to outshine it, the Quadrantid meteor shower will peak on Sunday, January 3, from 2 a.m. until dawn. The first new moon of the New Year lands on Wednesday, January 13. Consider this cosmic reset a good time to set intentions and launch into a new project. Through darkness comes light.

Simple Life

The Winter Woods

Among the bare-branched trees, nature speaks my favorite language

By Jim Dodson

Half a century ago, a beautiful, 50-acre woodland lay just beyond the backyard of the house where I presently live, which happens to be two doors from the one in which I grew up. That patch of suburban woods was full of wildlife — birds, deer, skunks, foxes, rabbits — and a winding creek where a small universe of aquatic life thrived. As a kid, those woods were my enchanted kingdom.

The eccentric millionaire who owned those woods vowed he would never allow them to be developed. But his body was barely in the ground before his heirs sold it off to a residential developer.  The forest fell, and a new subdivision quickly rose, a story repeated endlessly across 1970s America. Fortunately, I was off to college by then and spared the sadness of watching my boyhood woods systematically plowed under.

That vanished woodland was neither the first nor last magical forest that shaped my sensibilities, however. During the first seven years of my life, during my old man’s career as a newspaper executive, our family lived in a succession of small towns across the Deep South, places where fields and woods were always a short walk away. I was drawn to them like a child from a Yeats poem.

In summer, the woods teemed with life. But curiously, it was the winter woods that fascinated me most. The quiet of the forest and the bareness of leafless trees amplified natural sounds and made seeing birds and movement easier. Even before I came to understand that life underfoot was actually busier than ever, I was drawn to the stark beauty and solitude of winter.

Scarce wonder after seven years of unceasing work as an investigative journalist in Atlanta, I took an arts fellowship in the Blue Ridge Mountains and subsequently fled to a bend of the Green River in Vermont, where I lived in a small house heated by a wood stove and fell even deeper under the spell of winter in the Great North Woods.

It was there I walked snow-covered dirt roads in blue Arctic dusks with my young dog, Amos, and snow-shoed through the forest for the first time. During that quietest of all winters, I studied trees, read the complete works of a dozen poets, plus most of my favorite childhood books for the umpteenth time.

Within five years, I’d built a post-and-beam house for my young family in a vast woodland of beech and hemlock on a coastal hill in Maine. Our closest neighbor was one-quarter mile distant. Winter nights were dark, cold and full of stars so crisp and vibrant you could almost reach up and touch them.

Come the sub-zero nights of January, when a step on a wooden porch could sound like a pistol shot, I often donned a red, wool coat and toted bags of sorghum meal through knee-deep snow to where a family of whitetail deer (and the occasional moose) waited patiently in the silver cast of the moon for a midnight feeding. In the morning, we would find thousands of hoof prints where it appeared the deer stood on hind legs and danced in the woods, or so I told our two babes with a nearly straight face. Now on the cusp of their 30s, working in faraway Los Angeles and the Middle East, respectively, they still claim to believe the deer danced in winter moonlight.

First frost was always the herald of my favorite season on the doorstep, beginning with the autumn stillness that was like that of an empty church, a cue to get my woodpile finished up and properly stacked. Ringed-neck  pheasants and flocks of wild turkey appeared in the yard, feeding on the last seeds of summer, seemingly unmoved by our presence in their woodland world.

Once, late for his winter nap, a medium-sized black bear crossed the ancient road directly in front of us, pausing only to glance indifferently at the dude in the goofy red coat with his small, astonished children before going on about his business.

I turned that bear into a bedtime story, with a character named Pete the Bear, who along with his bumbling partner-in-crime, dim-witted but good-hearted Charlie the Cub, often broke into our house whenever we were away in order to help themselves to snacks, play board games and get warm by the fire.  Pete and Charlie still reside somewhere in the forested memories of my far-flung children, not to mention their winter-loving old man.

*  *  *

And so it was a nice surprise when, earlier this year, our friends Joe and Liz invited my wife, Wendy, and me to take a Sunday afternoon walk through the Hamilton Lakes Forest, a slim patch of urban parkland less than a mile from our house.

Joe and Liz are trained foresters and ardent naturalists. Liz knows about every native plant in the wild and Joe can tell you all sorts of wondrous things about the life of trees. 

Late last winter, with traces of early spring appearing, we hiked with them up a small mountain near Asheboro, topped by giant stone monoliths that looked like columns from lost temples or bowling pins left by the gods. Joe explained that the unusual stones were visible for miles, navigational landmarks used by migratory birds and ancient native people in their annual seasonal movements from highland meadows to winter quarters in the flatlands, sacred grounds used for their spiritual observances.

There were even traces of a vanished farmstead, not unlike the hilltop where I built my house in Maine, evidenced by wild narcissus that grew in patches around a crumbling stone foundation. Daffodils reportedly found their way to the Americas via Holland about 1800, though how they found their way to that ancient hilltop in Randolph County will probably forever remain a mystery.

“Humans come and go,” Joe summed up the moment. “But the earth and forest keep their own secrets.”

Our Sunday afternoon walk through the Hamilton Forest wasn’t quite so wild, though it was revelatory in its own ways. Joe and I talked about our grown children and how to identify trees by their bark, old maples and beeches in particular, while Liz and Wendy walked ahead of us chatting about grandchildren and, well, whatever else a pair of wise and worldly female friends talk about on a winter Sunday afternoon with their husbands lagging well behind.

At one point, Joe stopped dead and tilted his head to the bare limbs above us. “Listen. Hear that?” I did. He explained it was the perfect, three-note call of a white-throated sparrow, a bird famous for its melodic winter song.

That seemed the perfect coda. On that tri-note, we shared a nip of good Kentucky bourbon.

We rounded a lake and started back as the light grew thinner and longer. As the temperature dropped, we listened to woodpeckers patiently at work, spotted squirrel nests high in the leafless forest and greeted walkers with leashed dogs hurrying the opposite way through the woods, eager to reach home and warmth.  PS

Jim Dodson can be reached at jim@thepilot.com.

Southwords

Immortal Stories

By Jim Moriarty

Toward the end of his new book, Gods at Play, Tom Callahan writes, “By now you must know, I’m the hero of all my stories.” It was one of his throw-away dinner lines I heard often enough in the evening at British Opens and Masters and places like that. It was partially — but only partially — true, like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day saying, “I’m a god. I’m not the god . . . I don’t think.”

In one of those publishing house blurbs, some marketing type once decided it was a good idea to describe Callahan’s writing somewhere between the goalposts of “lighthearted” and “airy,” which works if the guy would describe the arrow from a crossbow the same way. If Callahan ever knew the person who wrote it he would have said, “sweet writer,” like patting a 4-year-old on the head.

Callahan went to a Catholic university, Mount St. Mary’s, and the U.S. Marines. That he was a Marine was perfect for him because he always liked to play against type. He was a sports columnist at the Cincinnati Enquirer and, later, the Washington Post before becoming the sports guy for Time and then U.S. News and World Report. I got to know him when he started writing poetry for Golf Digest.

There are a couple of his stories I couldn’t find in Gods at Play, like the time he kidnapped Nancy Lopez, who was coming into Cincinnati for the LPGA Championship in the midst of her rookie hot streak. Callahan wanted an interview. Hell, the whole world wanted an interview. He was told it was impossible. So, Tom guessed what plane she’d arrive on and met her at baggage claim. She assumed the tournament had sent a driver to pick her up. Tom looks more like a chauffeur than Jeeves looks like a butler, so Nancy didn’t think much of it, and Tom didn’t do anything to convince her otherwise. He grabbed her luggage and loaded everything, plus Nancy Lopez, into his beat-up, messy old sportswriter’s car, the anti-limo. He got his interview. She still laughs about it and never has figured out why she got in the damn car to begin with. He was probably telling her a story and she wanted to hear the end.

And he only told half the truth about the time he played with Jack Nicklaus in the pro-am at Kings Island, the Nicklaus-designed course under power lines where they played the LPGA Championship for longer than any real golf tour should have. Tom’s a big guy and, when he caught a drive, it would go. On the first tee, the local boy rose to the occasion. He killed it.

“Chase that, Jack,” he said to Nicklaus, loud enough for the gallery to hear. Nicklaus outdrove him, but just barely. A yard, maybe two. Out in the fairway Callahan’s next shot was a cold, sideways shank. “I won’t be chasing that one, Tom,” said Nicklaus.

Callahan collected writers the way the Medicis collected Leonardos and Michaelangelos. He became Red Smith’s legs when the great Pulitzer Prize-winner got too old to scramble after a quote or two and, later, at British Opens he reprised his role as taxi driver for World Golf Hall of Famer Dan Jenkins, who always believed driving on the left — if it had to be done at all — should be done sparingly, and by someone else. Jenkins called Callahan Simon because he’d once had a driver by that name.

If Callahan was in L.A. he found Jim Murray. If he was at a horse race he was standing on Bill Nack’s withers. When I learned he wasn’t going to Fort Worth for Jenkins’ funeral a couple of years ago, he told me he was tired of going to them. But that was against type, too. It was more a case of “Elvis is Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Myself.” It didn’t matter, though, because he’d already supplied the harp music in Golf Digest, writing the best sendoff any sports guy ever got.

Of course, Tom didn’t get everything right. He thought O.J. was innocent until he saw the Bruno Maglis.

I can’t give you the highlights from Gods at Play. The book is 265 pages long, and if you skip any of them you’ll be poorer for it. But here’s just one story. Callahan knew Oscar Robertson from his days playing for the Royals in Cincinnati. Oscar was a tough guy. And, later, after Robertson helped Kareem Abdul Jabbar win an NBA title in Milwaukee, Callahan and Kareem, by then a Laker, had a conversation about him:

“The first time we ever spoke,” I said, “you told me you didn’t really know Oscar. But you came to know him, right?”

“And to love him,” he said. “And to love playing with him. And, probably a little too much, to love watching him play.”

“He was a bit cold-blooded for me,” I said.

“No, he had the capacity for joy that all great players have. He wouldn’t show it to you, though. Or you wouldn’t understand where to look for it. It’s not in the box score, you know.”

But it’s spilled all over the pages of Gods at Play.  PS