18 2009-10-19T00:15:16+01:00 false One of the more perplexing issues I find myself wrestling with as a kitchen gardener is avoiding the monodiet. I'm not entirely certain if it's simply inevitable for the seasonal eater, or if there's been some huge planning failure on my part. So, this year I ate salads every day from April through July. I make plain salad with up to ten kinds of greens, salad with broccoli, salad with beets, salad with carrots, and so on. I can shake it up the vinaigrette with 5 different kinds of vinegar and various combinations of spices. But in the end, I'm still just making salad. Then I ate long beans every day until September (Last year I alternated between beans, green tomatoes, and eggplant, but this was a bad year for eggplants and there were only enough tomatoes for a couple of meals). I can make stir fried longbeans, longbean curry, barbecue longbeans, steamed longbeans, long bean salad--I've even made longbean sushi. And now, I expect to eat nothing but squash (squash with various seasonings, squash soup, squash pie, squash bread, and so on) until spring, when the salads will start up again. I exaggerate, but not much. I can't shake the feeling that before I had a kitchen garden, there was more diversity in my diet. I just had a balcony with no space for anything beyond herbs, a few greens, and some peppers. In addition to the things I eat now, I ate dried beans, sweet potatoes, plantains, avocados, artichokes, olives, oranges, kumquats, mushrooms, sour plums, corn, and so on. I could go weeks at a time without preparing the same dish twice. I could go days without repeating an ingredient. Some of this is regional: Farmer's markets in New York don't tend to have as many avocados and citrus as farmer's markets in California, for example. Some of this is garden size: I don't have space or inclination to grow corn. Some of this is cultural: Mushroom foraging seems to be a local pastime for many, but it scares me. And some of this is just laziness: Now that I've got all the food I can eat out my back door, I just don't have it in me to march to the supermarket and buy a plantain. I don't know if it's a good thing or not. I think it's been a year since I've made ochazuke. It's been even longer since I've made guacamole. I suppose it's natural fallout from eating locally, but I don't want to be the sort of person who only eats three things. I find myself deeply regretting the fact that another summer has gone by and I haven't managed to work a bowl of beans and rice into my eating schedule. I managed to sync up tomatoes, cilantro, peppers, and green onions for a glorious and perfect bowl of salsa, but I couldn't pull together beans and rice to go with it. We ended up walking to the corner store for some chips so we could eat it on the side of barbecued longbeans. I've been pouring over gardening catalogs lately, trying to figure out if there is something else I could squeeze into my garden that could shake things up a bit. I'm reaching the conclusion that there isn't. Aside from a few exotic things that I haven't ever eaten, I already grow at least one thing from the major categories of food that I can grow here. Maybe this is what eating seasonally looks like: local repetition with a more differentiated global form. 5 false 69774 false false false Entry 2009-10-18T05:00:00+01:00 DMY Public 2009-10-19T00:15:16+01:00 1237 Cloudy 44 F