I was thrilled to see the featured front page article was on the rapid growth in the popularity of Community Food Initiatives’ community gardens here in Athens. Garden plots allotted this year in the West Side gardens rose sharply from last year’s 60 to 110, in part because of the worsening economy, but also because of the strong desire among Athens residents to eat local, sustainable, organic produce.

Community Food Initiatives, or CFI as it is commonly called around here, is a non-profit organization whose stated goal is to work toward food self-sufficiency among Athens county residents. Their projects include a seed saving program, the community gardens in Athens, a community composting program and various workshops to help teach and support new gardeners in the area.

I think that what CFI does is very important; as more and more Americans return to the tradition of growing their own food, there will be a great need for experienced gardeners to help teach the neophytes the ways of the spade and hoe. Without this sort of friendly educational support, the likelihood is that many new gardeners will fail in their endeavors, loose interest and stop trying to raise their own food.

Even more important than teaching gardening skills are the community-building aspects of CFI’s work.

Gardening advice can be gotten from books, magazines and the internet.

But having a living person in the garden plot next to yours teach you his traditional method of growing vegetables can lead to a lasting friendship which is beyond price.

You know, I am going to own up to something right here and right now: I utterly loathe and despise the toque, which is the proper name of the classic chef’s hat. Whether it is tall and straight sided with a bazillion pleats which mythically refer to the number of ways a proper chef knows how to prepare eggs, or the balloon-like mushroom cloud version, or especially if it is the idiotic floppy deflated-balloon version, I bloody well hate them all.

They are about the dumbest looking headgear known to humankind, and I know of very few people who look good in them.

The least objectionable ones of the lot are the tall, stiffly pleated ones like the one pictured above. Some chefs manage to look dignified while wearing those toques; however, some less fortunate persons look as if they have a tall cake perched upon their heads.

The balloon-like toques are universally ugly, I don’t care what anyone says. It looks like a fabric light bulb tucked on top of someone’s head.

And the floppy ones?

It is completely impossible to look like anything other than a goofball wearing one of those misbegotten wastes of fabric. The best one can hope for when wearing one is those is that no one will ever enter the kitchen and see you, at worst, even the most upright and handsome individual is turned into a chef from the shallow end of the gene pool. Besides, no one can take a cook or a chef seriously as a culinary professional while they have a lopsided deflated mushroom cloud on his head. Looking like a cartoon character does nothing to enhance one’s professional image.

If you watch a lot of celebrity chefs on television, or see photographs of them in newspapers and magazines, you will notice that very few of them wear the toque, even when cooking. Or, if they do wear them in the kitchen, they don’t let anyone take a photograph of them while they are so attired.

Take a look at photos of Marco Pierre White, Thomas Keller, Mario Batali, Gordon Ramsay and Eric Ripert. Do you see them wearing white monstrosities upon their heads? Not really often. Like, ever.

I wonder why that is?

Could it be because it doesn’t matter how good looking you are, or how trim the cut of your chef’s coat, you are doomed to dweebdom if you put a tall cylindrical white hat on your head?

Do you think?

I was forced to wear toques of a sort in culinary school–I say of a sort, because I don’t think that a disposable cylinder of white corrugated cardboard counts as a hat of any kind–and I hated them intensely. The faculty and staff did their best to instill in each of us a sense of pride in our uniforms, including the paper toques, telling us that we should walk with our heads up and shoulders back, because we were upholding a centuries old tradition that was sacred in its importance.

Right.

So, where did the tall toque hat come from? The story I was told in culinary school was that chefs long ago were, along with other learned persons, intellectuals and artisans, sometimes persecuted for being so smart and skilled. So as to save themselves from death, a number of them hid out with some Greek Orthodox priests. In order to not be noticed overmuch, they took to wearing the sacred vestments of these priests which included–you guessed it–really tall cylindrical hats. Now, the priests wore black, and so as to not offend God or the priests, the chefs took to wearing grey vestments and and hats.

Later, in the middle of the 19th century, great French chef Marie-Antoine Carême redesigned the chef’s uniform, making the hat and coat white to denote cleanliness.

When our chefs in school railed against the then current trend of chefs and cooks wearing chef’s jackets with baseball caps in the kitchen, saying that they should instead be wearing the traditional toque, because that was the mark of a chef, and besides baseball caps were designed for playing baseball, not cooking–well, I’d always wonder about what the toque was “designed” to do.

If the origin story is to be believed, it was designed to hide the identity of chefs in order that they might not be persecuted. They were not designed to be practical in the kitchen–if they really evolved from the traditional headgear of Greek Orthodox priests, the hat was meant to make them appear taller, so they could be seen easily from the back of a church, not to mention it gives them a look of otherworldliness.

Being as kitchens are nowhere near as big as churches and chefs have no need to cultivate the air of otherworldliness, what purpose does a toque serve, really?

Sure, it is supposed to keep hair out of food, but really, any number of other caps, scarves, hats and other headgear do that more efficiently. I find that a baker’s cap works perfectly for tucking hair up and out of the way. It also does something that most toques suck at–it absorbs sweat to keep it out of your eyes.

And, one is not doomed to utter gooberosity just by putting it on one’s head.

Bandannas work well, as do the reviled baseball caps–and all three of these head coverings do not tower over a cook’s head.

And frankly, in the close quarters of most kitchens, where there are low-hanging bits of equipment, pot racks and vent-hoods–and in the case of where I work, ceilings–a tall toque is really not practical at all.

So if the toque doesn’t really absorb sweat, and is in the way and looks utterly stupid, why in the world would any chef want to wear it?

Why, indeed.

It strikes me as really silly to cling to an ugly, uncomfortable, impractical bit of headgear as part of a chef’s uniform, just because of “tradition.” And if you look at a lot of the top chefs in the world, it seems that they agree with me, because I don’t see them wearing toques.

Of course, you notice they all wear chef’s jackets, though. That is because they are eminently practical pieces of clothing. Worn over a t-shirt, a double-breasted chef’s jacket not only looks dashing and trim (if it is well-tailored, that is) it puts a total of five or six (if they wear a bib apron) layers of cloth between the chef and the heat of the stove. If a cook or chef were to splatter hot grease upon his or her chest, or roux or a bit of boiling stock, the dangerous liquid would have to soak through all of that cloth to get to his or her skin and burn it. And, in the case of an ugly splash of sauce, the double-breasted jacket allows the chef to easily unbutton the jacket and rebutton it with a clean, new front presented to the world.

So you see, just because I argue against the use of the toque as a regular part of a chef’s uniform because it really isn’t practical, I am not completely thumbing my nose at tradition. I just happen to think that the jacket is a practical and handsome garment that I am proud to wear, while the toque–well, it just isn’t.

So, I don’t wear it.

Now that I have said all of this, I am sure someone is going to ask me what I cover my head with at work. That is a good question, since I have fairly long (down to my shoulders) hair.

Sometimes, I wear a plain black baker’s cap with all of my hair tucked under it. It goes perfectly with my black chef’s coat, black pants, black bistro apron and black Dansko clogs, while absorbing sweat, keeping my hair in control and looking mighty dashing to boot.

But the hat I wear most often at work is something that was never meant to be a chef’s hat at all. It looks basically like the prayer cap worn by Muslim men, called the “kufi.” The one I wear is from India, is grey-blue and instead of being plain, it is decorated heavily with black, gold and blue embroidery.

It absorbs sweat, it isn’t tall enough to get in the way, and it contains my hair.

All while looking really spiffy.

What more could I ask from a piece of kitchen headgear?

Last year, the Times published an anti-vegan screed by Nina Planck in which she shrilly likens feeding children a vegan diet to child abuse in response to the widely publicized conviction of two supposedly vegan parents in Atlanta of murder, involuntary manslaughter and child cruelty for starving their baby to death.

Then, on Monday, in The Opinionator, they posted about a case in Scotland where a 12 year old girl who has been on a “strict meat and dairy free diet” for her entire life has developed a severe case of rickets. Officials in the UK are calling for charges to be brought against the parents because they believe that the parents’ choice of a vegan diet for their child is the ultimate cause of the degenerative bone disease.

Now, while it is possible that the cause of the severe case of rickets, which has resulted in her developing extreme curvature of the spine (she is described as having the spine of an 80 year old woman) and several bone fractures, is caused only by her parent’s choice of diet for her, it is not likely.

Rickets is generally caused by a vitamin D deficiency. The results of rickets are bone weakness as vitamin D is necessary for the human body to absorb calcium, which as we know, is the main building block that leads to strong bones and teeth. Rickets used to be very, very common in the western world, and entire families of children could be seen with the twisted spines, short stature, bowed legs and deformed pelvises which are characteristic of this serious disorder. Malnutrition was certainly a factor in these widespread cases of rickets, but the greatest causal factor of rickets tended to be lack of exposure to sunlight. This is one of the reasons why cases in rickets rose precipitously after the Industrial Revolution, when previously rural populations moved into urban environments and instead of working in the fields in the sunlight, they worked in dark factories for long hours, bereft of sunlight.

When it was discovered later that rickets was caused by lack of vitamin D in the form of sunlight, liver, or oily fish, enterprising health officials began calling for the addition of vitamin D to all cow milk sold in both the UK and the US. Since most children at that time drank large amounts of cow milk, it was considered to be an excellent preventative measure to enrich it. And, not surprisingly, after vitamin D because ubiquitous in milk, the incidence of rickets decreased to the point that it is now a very rare disorder in the developed nations of the west.

So, with this background information in mind, let us examine this current case of the twelve year old Scottish girl. Is it true that her parents’ insistence upon her eating a vegan diet the sole cause of her disease?

Now, depending on where in Scotland the girl lives, it is quite possible that she hasn’t had enough exposure to sunlight–the highlands, especially, tend to be fairly dark and drear in the weather department.

If that is the case, then it isn’t just the diet which is the cause of her rickets.

Now, it could be said that whether the rickets came about because of lack of sunlight or diet, it doesn’t matter. Rickets is not a sudden-onset sort of disorder–it happens over a span of time and to get to the point where the spine is curved dramatically and small fractures have occurred in the girl’s bones would take years. If this is a case of the parents “not noticing” the girl’s deformity or refusing to take her to doctors who would certainly notice and attempt to divine the cause of her disorder, then what we have here is not a case of a vegan diet being to blame, but neglectful parenting is to blame.

Parents who do not notice the gradual abnormal curvature of a child’s spine, or who ignore her pain (rickets is not asymptomatic–the bones hurt and are painful to the touch–and the fractures that occur often with the disease are also painful), or who do not take the child to a competent physician for regular checkups are neglectful and ignorant at best, uncaring and abusive at worst. What they feed their child or not feed her is beside the point once they reach this level of carelessness or neglect.

So, let me reiterate once again that just because some vegan parents are ignorant, lazy, misinformed, careless, neglectful or abusive, that does not mean that all vegan parents are like them!

Just as not every omnivorous parent feeds their children diets of junk food which result in childhood obesity and type II diabetes, not every vegan is causing malnourishing their children.

So, please, let us not be like some of the commentors on the NY Times blog or the Times of London website and instantly decry every vegan parent in the world because of this sad case, and recognize that human ignorance and carelessness comes in all shapes, sizes and philosophies.

Sometimes I cannot get enough of garlic; I think it is probably my favorite member of the allium family. I use more onions by weight in my cooking than I do garlic, but that is partially because garlic manages to pack a healthy wallop of flavor in a very small package, compared to onions, so I don’t -need- to use as much of it. That said, I admit that I use a lot more garlic than a lot of people I know. I have been known to use entire heads of it at a time for a single meal, sometimes, in a single dish. Since I grew up in a household where one head of garlic was kept and used over a period of weeks–well, you get the idea.

I like garlic.

A lot.

The coolest thing about living in a town surrounded by farms, though, is that I have learned how to cook and eat garlic in many more forms than I might otherwise have experienced. There is green garlic, which is nothing but young garlic shoots, which you chop or slice up and eat from the root to the top of the leaf. It is filled not only with garlic’s characteristic bite, but also a sweet verdant taste that is reminiscent of chives. Green elephant garlic is amazing–the size and shape of leeks, with a similar flavor kicked up several notches by the redolent garlic scent. Then there is young garlic–this is immature heads harvested early when the baby cloves are filled with milky juice which is both pungent and sugary. The green parts of young garlic are also edible, but they aren’t as tender as green garlic, so I tend to add them to long-cooked dishes.

My favorite unconventional garlic bit, however, are the scapes–the slender, swan-necked, graceful shoots that emerge in early summer from hardneck varieties of garlic. These shoots which curl so much that they can form perfect spirally circles, carry seed-like reproductive parts called bulbils–essentially, little tiny garlic cloves–and if they are left on the plant, the scapes will drain energy away from the plant, because it is essentially putting all of its strength into going to seed and reproducing itself. In order to get the plant to put its energy into making nice fat garlic heads or bulbs, the grower cuts off these scapes.

And, since these graceful little shoots have a mild garlic flavor and the texture of very young bush green beans, they make a mighty fine vegetable in their own right.

Now that I know about garlic scapes, I wait for them eagerly every summer, and snatch them up gleefully, and cook and eat them until we are all tired of them–just like I do with asparagus. Last night, after work, I cooked them in a stir fry with the first broccoli of the season, fresh purple scallions, some pressed spiced tofu, some pork, fresh garlic, green garlic and ginger, and some chilies, fermented black beans and ground bean sauce for flavor. At the end, I tossed in an entire bunch of cilantro, because–well, just because I had it.

All of the vegetables and meat were local; only the tofu, the rice and condiments came from someplace other than Athens county.

And that was a good feeling.

What was also a good feeling was getting to watch Kat and Cordelia play with a young garlic stalk that had fallen to the floor.

That was entertaining–almost like dinner and a movie. Except this happened while I was cooking the dinner, so it wasn’t quite as relaxing as the typical sort of date scenario. But it was still fun, nonetheless.

The funny thing is that both Kat and Cordelia love garlic.

When I came home from the market yesterday morning, and set down my tote bags, Delia came running, along with the other cats.

This is not unusual, since I always bring the kitties home fresh catnip bouquets, but Delia went right past the huge bundle of the nip and burrowed right into the bag that had the fresh young garlic in it. She dragged out a stalk, and dashed off with it. When I caught up to her, she was chewing the ends off the leaves, purring mightily.

The other cats, being normal, were tearing apart the catnip, rolling around with leaves hanging from their mouths.

But not Delia. She was all about the garlic, and when I made dinner that night, hours later, she started pestering me not when I pulled out the pork, but when I took the young garlic and garlic scapes from the fridge and started cutting them. I ended up giving her the green top of one of the garlics to play with, which ended up with Kat taking over the game.

Which was okay–it was very amusing not only to the cook, the baby and the cat, but also to everyone else who had gathered in the kitchen to keep me company while I cooked.

So, back to garlic scapes–how do I cook them?

I treat them like young, firm green beans–I saute them or stir fry them. I prefer stir frying them, and have done them in a Thai style, but I think I like them cooked Chinese style the best. I also use them in pasta sauces where they stand in for green beans, and add their own subtle garlic fragrance to the dish.

To prepare them, I cut them into 1″ lengths up to the bulbils. The bulbils and the long, thin “whisker” that emerges from them I discard. The whisker is too tough to eat. and sometimes so is the bulbil. Then, I suppose you could blanch them, but I prefer to saute or stir fry them, as I noted above. I love using them as a vegetable, because people cannot tell what they are, that is, unless they have eaten garlic scapes at my house previously. I cook them just until they become tender and the green brightens. If you cook them until they are soft, their texture suffers, and the green dulls and looks sullen. I only cook them until they are tender-crisp, just like I do green beans.

Garlic scapes are great in any context in which one would use green beans. (Except maybe that mushroom soup and greek bean casserole thing. Garlic scapes probably would not be good in that. Although, one could use such a dish as the basis for a gratin of garlic scapes and creamy mushroom sauce. With breadcrumbs and crispy fried onions on top, I bet that would be out of sight.

While they are in season for the next week or so, look for several recipes that use my beloved garlic scapes. (Maybe even a gratin with mushrooms–we do have lots of local mushrooms coming in these days!)

And you will probably see lots of pictures of Kat and Delia playing with garlic bits and pieces as I cook, just because those two are cute beyond words.

I clicked on the link to Copyranter’s coverage of an ad that appears in the current issue of Martha Stewart Living (and probably in other women’s magazines) and was completely confused.

Yes, it does indeed say Pork & Nail Polish right there, in big print. The juxtaposition of words is–unique, to say the least.

And the pork tenderloin cutlets sliced and arranged to look vaguely like manicured fingernails–well, let’s say that nothing in this ad is appetizing to me in the least.

It becomes more surreal if you read the ad copy, which is written in a first person, confessional style. The breezy narrative begins with this faux-girlfriend revelation:

“I must confess, I always keep a bottle of clear nail polish in my bag,” the copy starts. “It’s my estrogen equivalent of duct tape. I can fix just about anything with it — a run in my stockings, a chip in the windshield, that loose knob on my dresser. I even dip those small ribbon knots on my lingerie in nail polish to keep them from coming untied.”

All right. Fine. At least there is no mention of using nail polish as a glaze to keep your grilled pork chop nice and shiny. That had me worried–and queasy–but if all we are talking about is a femmy MacGyver sort of thing, I can deal with that.

I guess that would mean that we are going to talk about home repairs using pork? (Hopefully we are not going to talk about lingerie repairs with pork. I can only imagine the following: “I must confess that I save the bones from my pork chops and then if my bra hook falls apart in the wash, I can just carve a new one out of bone….” How very One Million Years BC.)

But no. The ad copy continues:

“Likewise, I always keep a pork tenderloin in my fridge or a pork roast in the freezer.I can fix just about anything with it lickety-split, too–Asian Grilled Pork Tenderloin, Hawaiian Cobb Salad, Smoky Pork Tenderloin Tacos. The Other White Meat and clear nail polish. Two handy-dandy things I just can’t live without.”

So, I guess it is supposed to be a clever “play on words” sort of thing to use the word “fix” to mean “repair” in one context, and then meaning to “prepare” in another context.

But, I have news for whoever put this ad together.

It doesn’t work.

I am not about to go out and buy pork because of this. I am not going to want to buy pork because of it. In fact, I am more likely not to buy pork because this is just so dumb on so many levels. It isn’t clever. It isn’t well-written–what is up with the 1950’s style confession and the use of out-dated slang words like “lickety-split” and “handy-dandy?” This ad isn’t retro-hip, it is dim-witted and squaresville, daddy-o.

This ad is definitely crossing and whoever came up with it is Herbert.

I’m just happy that feminine deodorant spray was not included in the “confession.”

That would have just been too much to bear.