Strawberry Shortcake & Plant Nerd Night
Fruity Spring Tradition; Nerding Out on Plant Parts & Edible Plants
Hello Strawberry Lovers and Garden Geeks!
This week I bought a plethora of strawberries, because they’re fresh and local and in season.. why not? It was seemingly an amount I wouldn’t be able to use with the family, but we just kept going with it.
I’ve been thinking a lot about recipes. I listened to a Cherry Bombe podcast episode with Sohla El-Waylly and she mentioned how she doesn’t use recipes. But she IS a cookbook fan. Of course there’s a huge learning curve involved with not using recipes, or you just have to grow up that way. I think perhaps she meant her-day-to-day cooking of meals, reserving the careful experimentation and examination of recipes for trying out new things.
Here’s a quick 5 of some things I don’t use a recipe for anymore:
French onion soup
Caesar salad / dressing / croutons
Lasagna
Pancakes
Crepes
So, do you recipe? While I’m writing this article I’m wondering to myself about whether or not the photo of the strawberries above is enough to inspire you to go out, buy strawberries, and google a recipe for Strawberry Shortcake or bring up a cooking app (for example, the NYTimes cooking archive is huge). Or would you want me to provide the recipe here?
Do you stick with particular authors, making their recipes when you have time, religiously checking in and bookmarking things when they interest you? So curious!
Plant Nerd Night
Who needs an excuse to go out and learn about plants? I don’t!
I found out that KQED—our local Bay Area NPR station—was hosting a plant nerd night hosted by Alexis Madrigal. I invited my friend Ashley to a night out and we walked towards the Mission district on a gorgeously warm evening.
The best part of the night was just the general feeling of being curious and basically playing around with investigating the plants. When I was little, I used to make “soups” with my sister and neighborhood friends out of acorns, water, grass, and other plants we found in our backyards to pretend we were feeding everyone on the block. I used to really pick up flowers that dropped from trees in the spring and gently pull off each petal, until there were stamens and anthers, then down to the pistil and ovaries. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking at, but I was curious. That’s the feeling I got from Plant Nerd night, except that these people were scientists now dedicated to being curious for a living.
What have you been up to in your garden? Do you actually use recipes or do you use them (and their photos) for inspiration?