Dry and bitter

The high yesterday was 90 degrees. Today it hit 94. The forecast for tomorrow anticipates 92, and 95 for the day after.

Living where we live in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains, hot often also means humid. The air gets thick, and my normally straight hair starts to look thick and curly. The extra moisture in the air has an effect of softening my normally dry skin, but it also brings out the mosquitoes and saps away both my energy and my appetite.

Fortunately, the high heat of summer in our part of the Adirondack foothills is brief. Usually, by mid- to late August, I'm back to wearing a long-sleeved jersey at night. And during this season of high heat, I have found a way to enjoy home-cooked dinners. The secret passwords are dry and bitter.

Let me explain. If you follow my blogs, you know that my husband and I grow a lot of our own food. The high heat of summer also is the time when much of what is in our gardens begins to blossom into real food. As a result, many of our days are spent outdoors in the sun, pulling weeds, hand-pollinating corn, and planting -- still planting -- seeds for the plants that grow fast and thrive in this kind of summer sun. Toward the end of the day, as the sun starts to head down the western horizon, we harvest, mostly for our night's dinner but also to store for the winter.

Which brings me to roasted and bitter.

Turnips and radishes are very pickable now, as are peas, beets, kale, collards, Swiss chard, and increasingly garlic (of which we'll be doing a mass harvest this weekend). Turnips and radishes are especially good because they come with a bonus: Their rough, sometimes prickly green tops also are quite good to eat. I have begun to think of these green tops as a "throwaway crop", simply because so many people with gardens simply cut off and throw away or compost these greens. I don't blame people for doing this because the greens are a bit of a chore to clean. Turnips and radishes are root veggies, which means that the tops are often dusty with soil. Each turnip and radish also has a pretty hefty handful of leaves, which can make consuming ALL of them a challenge.

So what does this have to do with roasted and bitter? When it's hot, my body starts to crave flavors that I can best describe with those two words. Usually, these are spices that come in the form of a seed such as black mustard, fenugreek, and cumin. However,  also have found that turnip and radish greens also fit this category.

I have an flat Indian-style skillet known as a tawa. It is like a griddle, but it is made of cast iron, which means it needs to be seasoned with oil every so often to keep the iron from oxidizing. What this means is that there's almost always a thin coat of oil on the tawa, which makes it perfect for roasting spices listed above.

About a year ago, I had a thought: If I could roast spices on an almost dry cast-iron pan, I should be able to roast bitter tasting greens, as well. I had just pulled some turnips, so I cut off the greens and washed them very very well. I then drained them in a colander and shook off as much of the excess water as I could. When the greens were about as dry as I could get them to be, I sliced them into thin ribbons and gave them another rinse. I then let them dry further, while I heated the tawa and began roasting the cumin, mustard, and fenugreek. Once the spices began emitting a fragrant odor, I tossed the sliced greens onto the tawa, mixing them into the spices with the help of two wooden spoons.

The greens wilted rapidly, so I didn't cook them for more than 2 minutes. I removed them from the tawa and put them into a serving bowl, making sure to scrap the tawa to get all of the spice essences. The taste of the greens was amazingly heady. Without oil to coat them, flavors that were simultaneously sweet, spicy, and fragrant blended together in a roast that I can only describe as dry and bitter.

We eat bitter these days about three or four times a week. I have found that radish green tops taste as good cooked in this way as turnip greens. Because they cook fast and dry, the clean up is minimal. And, I have found that unlike many other garden grown greens, these ones will not wilt and lose their flavor if you clean them well and leave them in a wire strainer basket or some sort of similar device in the refrigerator's vegetable bins. Eating them eases the heaviness of the humidity and adds much spice to the high heat of summer.