Tarragon

My home is, alas, far far away from the glory that is Stanley's market. But I was almost out of shallots and cringed at the thought of paying the ungodly $7 a pound at Whole Foods or sorting through the old ones at the Asian market. I decided that this was an enough of an excuse to head down this weekend.

Once again, it made me wish this could be a weekly venture. I picked up:

• Perfect shallots at less than $3 a pound
• Artichokes! Fer cheap!
• Avacadoes
• Fresh thyme
• Fresh basil

And the kicker? Fresh tarragon for $1. My summers throughout high school and college were spent in upstate New York with a huge and wildly enthusiastic tarragon plant growing just outside the back door so the taste of it always reminds me of summer.

I put some in the butter to go with one of my steamed artichokes and some sprinkled over asparagus. Since I'm taking a few days of slack between student teaching and returning to my old job this morning I went to the gym and then had a breakfast of an omelet; while it was cooking I added goat cheese and a generous sprinkling of fresh tarragon and then wrapped the lot around steamed spinach. Hard to beat.

Zippy Li'l Pickles

Being of good Midwestern stock, I always viewed pickling as a noble but somewhat intimidating task. Lunch when visiting my grandma in downstate Illinois was almost always accompanied by glass dishes with homemade bread and butter pickles and green tomato relish. Both were amazingly good but my own effort to make her bread and butter pickles was a three day project with lots of vats of things like brine and boiling vinegar and sterilizing baths. And then had to wait to eat them.

I recently, however, got a new bookcase and have been shuffling around my rather extensive cookbook and culinary history and food writing books. In the process I was flipping though Elizabeth Andoh's lovely Washoku which hovers perfectly between cookbook and reference guide and stumbled across a section on making pickles.

But these were not huge undertakings. These were little projects. I had some radishes from my veggie box that were getting close to over the hill and decided they'd make good candidate for pickling redemption.

The base liquid for the pickles is:

• 1/2 cup rice vinegar
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• A bit of salt
• 1 inch square of kombu

It soaks together for about 20 minutes and then you heat it, which takes no time. Meanwhile the radishes were sweating under some course salt and then were rinsed, packed in glass and the cooled liquid poured over. They cured for about 30 minutes and then they were pickles.

They were lushy and addictive. And so simple. They were soon followed by a batch of pickled "blushing" ginger (like what you get with sushi, but fresher so with a bit more bite) and another batch of radishes.