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Daisy Martinez is host of Viva Daisy! on the Food Network and author of Daisy Cooks! Latin Flavors that Will Rock Your World. She will present a cooking demonstration on Sunday, The Edible Garden’s final weekend.
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When I was a little girl, I used to marvel at how my mother and her mother could grow anything and everything in their garden. Mama Clotilde, my maternal grandmother, would grow medicinal herbs in her garden along with a variety of beans, a banana tree, a prolific breadfruit tree, mangoes, achiote, grapefruit, yucca, and avocados. She would send us out to the garden before dinnertime to collect whatever she needed to create delicious meals. When my family moved to Staten Island in 1964, it was no small wonder that Mami’s first order of business was to set up her vegetable garden in the backyard…and what a garden it was!
Mami, like her mother before her, was born with a green thumb. I mean, the woman just has to wave her hand over anything green and she charms it like a snake charmer! In no time flat (and after a trip to a nearby stable to pick up some manure), Mami had rows of lettuce, tomatoes, beans (against the backyard fence), eggplant, sweet peppers, ajicitos dulces, cilantro, culantro, basil, rue, scallions, zucchini, sugar beats, radishes, and even watermelon! We had a peach tree in the yard that yielded juicy, delicious yellow peaches, and a plum tree that yielded sweet little black plums that we would eat by the dozen!
Mami would tend her garden with everything from coffee grinds to eggshells and involved me in the weeding, harvesting, and pest control (pie plates full of beer for slug control, anyone?). And although I assumed that I would pick up a lot of her skills through osmosis, when I got married and felt the need to start my own garden, I found that I did not inherit the green thumb that my mother, and her mother before her, had waved in my face with impunity! Not to be outdone, I headed to my local botanical garden and library, and although I cannot compete with my grandmother’s or Mami’s garden, I find that I can fend for myself these days.
I grow my own herbs, of course: I keep thyme, lemon thyme, cinnamon basil and regular basil, cilantro, chiles, sage, and parsley. This year I grew jalapeno, Madagascar hot chiles, plum tomatoes, and sweet fennel. I have a couple of blueberry bushes that my children hit up around breakfast time everyday during the summer, and my raspberry bushes aren’t too shabby either. It is a humble, if inadequate homage to Mami and Mama Clotilde’s gardens of paradise, but an homage nonetheless. I can only hope that my simple little garden serves to inspire my daughter (and sons!) to one day have one of their own.
Coq au vin, Quiche Lorraine, and vichyssoise—nowhere in the world have culinary artists developed such a reputation for precision, passion and talent as in the French kitchen. From perfectly crusty baguettes to finely flavored vinaigrettes, the art of French cooking seems at first glance like an unachievable alchemy of herbs, creams, and knife skills. But as a green thumb enamored with the precise and beautiful public parks throughout Paris (and a compulsive Googler of Versailles’ vegetable gardens), I became obsessed with the idea that French food could be done well, yet with ease.
