F is for Fruit Salad

E is for Eggplant

 

I don't have any pictures of eggplant, so I'm showing the pictures
 of what's blooming in yard right now starting with this lone crocus.
It has colors of purple and white the colors of eggplants. How's that for a stretch?

The first thing that popped into my head for E was eggplant. Eggplant is not something I regularly cook or eat so I don't know much about it. I do know that it's a member of the nightshade family (Solanaceae) and I like the purple color of the fruit. It wasn't until recently that I knew that one of the varieties was white and shaped like an egg, thus the name. 

This forsythia likes bright sun just like eggplant. 

I also know that eggplant likes to grow in hot weather, and we tried growing it once when we lived in Houston. From our experiences before in New Orleans, we knew that gardening in the south was very different than the gardening we were familiar with further north. New Orleans and Houston, both, had long, HOT summers that turned out to be stressful to many vegetables we were familiar with.

Nevertheless, when Wally and Theo were little, we decided to try some vegetable gardening as a fun and educational activity for the family. Ward built a raised bed for square foot gardening in the backyard that we filled with a load of garden soil from a local landscaping company. We planted okra, tomatoes, and eggplant - all vegetables that like hot weather. Everything came up, but nothing thrived. While things grew, most things were stunted and funny colors taking on various shades of purple. We weren't sure what was going on, so we had the soil tested. It turns out that the soil was too nutrient rich--enough so that it was harming the plants and the only thing to do was to keeping planting things in the beds until the excess nutrients were used up. We tired that for a few years with little to show for it and eventually gave up. However, all was not lost on the gardening front. Wally still talks about the prolific cantaloupe plant that grew from the compost pile one year.

When we moved to Maryland, we tried our hand at family gardening with more success, but that's a story for another time that does not involve eggplants.  

Eggplant would not grow well under the shade of this ornamental plum

These daffodil will be long gone before any eggplant will ripen here.

So will this one.

White eggplant, like the color of these blossoms on this Bradford pear,
is less bitter and smaller than purple eggplant.

D is for Vitamin D

 or You Won't Get Your Vitamin D from Fruits and Vegetables

"Just the facts, ma'am just the facts." 

--Vitamin D helps with calcium absorption and the building of strong bones. It also plays major roles in the life cycle of human cells.

--Our skin synthesizes Vitamin D with exposure to UVB rays in sunlight. (A window filters these out, so laying in a sunbeam with your cat in the living room won't work. Don't ask me if I've tried it.)

--We can also get Vitamin D from dietary sources including eggs, fish, and meat, as well as fortified foods and supplements. 

--It is not found in plants except:

    -Microalgae - fishes' diet of this is thought to be one of the reasons that fish are high         in Vitamin D

    -Mushrooms (technically not a plant, but a fungi) - especially wild ones that have been             exposed to sunlight.

    -Yeast - another fungi

    -Nightshade family plants (tomato, potato, eggplant, etc.) - it's been found in trace amounts in the leaves, but not in the parts we eat.

So basically, the only way you are going to get Vitamin D from fruits and vegetables is being in the sun while you are growing, picking, or eating them.

Disclaimer: This is a very simplified version of Vitamin D information. For example, there are two kinds of Vitamin D (D2, D3) that are formed and act in different ways. There have been many health claims for Vitamin D that have not panned out in studies, but may in future studies. Vitamin D in flora and fauna is a very complex subject which would be best understood with a good knowledge of organic chemistry and plant processes, neither of which I have. So I tried to stick to generalities to avoid confusion - mostly mine. :)

And one last thing. Ward and I tried to get a little Vitamin D recently, but unfortunately, we didn't beat the rain.

We visited High Rock which is on the Appalachian Trail in northern Maryland.  Ward had visited there before during a hike, but I hadn't. It has a beautiful overlook and is a popular hang gliding spot, but we saw no one trying to do that in the rain and fog. Now about the graffiti. I'm not sure how it started, but it is definitely covered in it. I am opposed to graffiti, especially on natural features, but if I'm being honest, I found it colorful and pretty.

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Sources:

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324590#getting-enough-vitamin-d

https://www.grassrootshealth.net/blog/can-vitamin-d3-come-plants/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3651966/#s1title

C is for Cucumbers

These English cucumbers actually have Asian origins.

Yesterday, I said that I was going to talk about a vegetable today--or maybe not. Cucumbers fit that bill since they are one of those items of produce that can be considered a fruit or a vegetable depending if you use a botanical or food use definition. But did you know that by law, cucumbers are vegetables? That's based on a Supreme Court decision in the Nix vs Hedden case in 1893 involving the Tariff Act of 1883 which placed a tax on imported vegetables but not fruits. The case focused on tomatoes and whether they were a fruit or vegetable. The court decided that the common use of the tomato as a vegetable would be the definition for the tariffs not the botanical definition. They also clarified the standing for cucumbers, beans, squash, and peas as vegetables. (Are peas and beans seeds or vegetables?)

And since I was on the subject of cucumbers, I decided to see if I could clarify the whole burping subject. It turns out that the naturally occurring, bitter chemical cucurbitacin in cucumbers is the culprit. Cucurbitacin causes stomach distress in animals to serve as a deterrent from being eaten before it has time to produce seeds. Over the years, cucumbers have been bred to contain less cucurbitacin and be milder tasting and friendlier to the digestive tract. Cucumbers advertised as burpless produce less cucurbitacin especially during hot and dry weather when production of it increases. (Note to self: Make sure to water cucumber plants when it is hot and dry.) Also, cucurbitacin tends to concentrate in the ends, so cutting them off may help with the bitter taste.

One last thing for this cucumber post, below I've copied a post I did a couple of years ago about cucumber soup. Soon the cucumbers will be everywhere and this might be a way to use some of them up. Enjoy.

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Cucumber Soup

Sunday I posted about cucumbers I had been given and the the cold soup I made from them. Anne at Cooking and All that Jazz asked for the recipe. I almost decided that the posting could wait for another day when I wasn't so wrung out from the heat. But there's not a break in the weather in the foreseeable future, so now is as good of a time as tomorrow or the next day, or the next day.  Too bad my husband finished the rest of the soup, because some cool cucumber soup would hit the spot right now. And I would have had a picture for you.  Oh, well. It was very easy, so I'll make some more. Here's the original recipe that came from Epicurious.com. I've cut and pasted so spacing, etc. may look a little wonky.

YIELD

 

Serves 6

INGREDIENTS

1. • 5 cucumbers
   • 1/2 cup chopped parsley
   • 6 scallions, chopped
   • 2 tablespoons chopped fresh dill
   • 1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
   • 1 quart buttermilk
   • 1 pint yogurt
   • Salt and freshly ground pepper

   • PREPARATION

     1. 1. Peel cucumbers and cut them in half, scraping out seeds. Sprinkle the cucumbers with salt and let them stand 30 minutes. Drain excess water.
        2. Chop the cucumbers coarsely and put the pieces in the blender along with scallions, dill, lemon juice, buttermilk, and yogurt. Blend at high speed. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Chill well before serving.

My sister gave me this recipe. She and I both modified it with the these results. 

She used two small onions instead of 6 scallions. This had little effect on the taste, but the green tops were not there to add color. She left out all of the parsley. That did change the taste of the soup, but it did not suffer. It was just different. She used 7 oz of Greek yogurt instead of 1 pint of plain yogurt. These are roughly equivalent and didn't change things much. She did not add the whole quart of buttermilk.  She only added about 1 1/2 pints of buttermilk because she thought the soup was already too thin. Her version was very good and was both refreshing and filling at the same time.

I changed a few things, also. My husband doesn't like onions, so I left out the scallions/onions altogether. However, I did add in all of the parsley. The parsley was pretty strongly flavored so it more than made up for the lack of the onion. In fact, I may add just a bit less next time I make it. It did add a nice light green color to the soup. I also did not add all of the buttermilk. I think that would have cut down on the cucumber taste too much and made the soup too thin.

My sister used her food processor to blend things and I used my blender. Both worked well.

I think this would be a fairly forgiving recipe to tweak with what you have or what you like.

I do know that I am going to make some again very soon. As soon as I get more cucumbers.

B is for Blueberries

Did you know that blueberries are the only naturally occurring blue food? You probably did. But did you know they were native to North America? I didn't, but I had never wondered about that before. Sometimes the world I live in is very limited. :)

We are very lucky that we get to pick from Uncle Billy's blueberry bushes every year. Over time he has carefully tended to them so he has several large, prolific ones. Blueberry season here starts at the end of June and goes for several weeks. During that time, we have blueberries for snacks, with our cereal, and some go into the freezer. However, my favorite way to eat them is in a pie mixed with sour cherries. I love a fruit pie.

I have also gone blueberry picking in Maine with Mary Ellen's family. We picked wild blueberries which were much smaller than the cultivated ones we find at Uncle Billy's house. Some of us were picking individual berries and others were using a blueberry rake which "grabs" the berries and leaves the stems and leaves. That was fun to use. I have also eaten wild blueberries while hiking. They were an especially welcome treat and a good excuse for me to get others to stop when I was tiring out before they were.

No discussion of picking blueberries in Maine would be complete without a mention of Wally's favorite book when he was little, Blueberries For Sal by Robert McCloskey. A favorite of mind, too. One reason is that I like to say, "kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk,"  when Sal drops berries into her bucket. :)

That's about it for today. See you tomorrow when I will switch from fruits to a vegetable. Or will I...