Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 29, 1992 TAG: 9203300237
SECTION: HOMES PAGE: D-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Otherwise known as broccoli, that lowly vegetable that has withstood even a presidential smear, brassica leads this year's insider list of Trendy Veggies.
It would hardly be out of fashion this season to grow a single broccoli variety - even the common Green Comet, for example - but to be truly trendy, look for the latest in colors and shapes. For broccoli need not be any just an ordinary vegetable. Thompson & Morgan seed catalog (P.O. Box 1308, Jackson, N.J. 08527) offers no fewer than a dozen choices, with a range of colors that include burgundy, violet, cream and lime as well as the familiar deep blue-green hue of supermarket broccoli.
Heads no longer are just the round flat kind. Now some varieties are made up of dozens of separate, conical florets; others have sprouting habits that produce many sweet, edible shoots all over the plant.
So fashionable are brassicas today that a whole new member has been bred - broccoflower, now frequently seen in supermarkets. Dubbed "green cauliflower" in mail-order catalogs, this melding of broccoli and cauliflower adds to the cauliflower color range one more hue, following white, cream and violet.
Broccoflower has the color of sprouting grass and combines the mild buttery flavor of cauliflower with the sweet crunch of broccoli. Johnny's Selected Seeds (Foss Hill Road, Albion, Maine 04910) carries seeds of green cauliflower Alverda, the most widely planted variety of broccoflower.
Occasionally, a new variety comes out that earns a nearly permanent place on the list of Trendy Veggies by virtue of its intrinsic qualities. Such was the Sugar Snap pea, which to this day remains a must-grow in every fashionable vegetable garden. This year, a new strawberry is a candidate for such honor: It combines in one plant the joy of a flower garden with the pleasure of sweet berries.
Called Pink Panda, this perennial blooms continuously throughout the summer and is the first strawberry variety to produce pink, rather than white, flowers. It makes a beautiful ground cover, window box or hanging basket, and the bonus is a June harvest of small red berries rather like Alpine strawberries, which have been high on the list of Trendy Veggies in past years. Park Seed Co. (Cokesbury Road, Greenwood S.C. 29647) carries Pink Panda plants.
A few years ago it seemed a little odd to eat flowers along with our fruits and vegetables. No longer. Now the fad has gone mainstream and even the casual gourmet and the most reluctant trend follower can include flowers as garnishes or part of a dish without appearing pretentious. If you shunned edible flowers in the past as being just a bit too much, rest easy, for now they are trendy and the pressure will be on to grow some if you want to hold your own at a summer dinner party.
The litany of edible flowers has become all too familiar. You'll be a fashionable step ahead when you can discern which among them holds up best under what treatment. Thus you should know, for instance, that nasturtium blooms keep their shape in a tossed salad while cosmos turn to mud; that calendula petals make a stunning garnish sprinkled on chilled soup, but the whole flower is overpowering; that violas can be floated in cool summer drinks and frozen in ice cubes; that red and yellow blooms look stunning on platters of freshly carved meat trimmed with green parsley.
Many catalogs carry edible flower varieties, which are just ordinary flowers that happen to be edible. They include marigold, calendula, viola, cosmos, hyssop, chive blossom, nasturtium, borage and the blooms of squash and cucumber. Shepherd's (6116 Highway 9, Felton, Calif. 95018) offers a collection of six edible flowers and recipes for using them.
by CNB