Broccoli Rising and How to Keep Your Cool
I hope the weather’s brisk and refreshing where you are, with local produce bursting forth in exuberance. It isn’t here. After a spring with milder than usual temperatures, Miami’s suddenly clicked into record-breaking heat.
We’re all feeling it, not just people, but plants. Around Miami, mangoes which should be starting to show off, are dropping early from trees, undersized and inedible. After last year’s bumper crop, this looks to be a very lean harvest.
My little raised bed garden’s gotten mighty scraggly too. Arugula and dill burned up weeks ago, kale and collards, sturdy greens which usually shrug off the heat, are ready to call it quits. The grape tomatoes, a surprise which came thanks, I think, to birds, are offering up their last fruits, the rosemary, basil, and dandelion greens are hanging on but not happy.
But the sage and the chile won’t be stopped.
Sage, with its fuzzy, silvery leaves and tantalizing notes of mint, to which it’s related, gets trotted out in the fall and winter. It’s in your Thanksgiving dressing, or in a warming bean soup like this one from my friend and James Beard award-winning cookbook author Anna Thomas.
But sage offers goodness all year, and well beyond the kitchen too. Its official name is salvia officinalis, from the Latin word, salvere, which means "to be saved.” It’s a sacred herb widely used in Native American healing with modern science to back it up. Sage is antibacterial, antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and is associated with lower risk of diabetes, Alzheimer's, and cancer.
Like sage, chile is anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial and antibacterial and may lead to longer, healthier lives.
Ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan says chile with an e refers to the pepper itself, whereas chili means dried powdered chile or the big bowl chili and beans and it’s used in. I see the word chile and still want to pronounce it with a southern drawl, as in, that’s crazy, chile. But I’m learning.
Okay, ethnobotanists and chile-heads — can you identify this specimen? My money’s on Thai pepper, I got a seedling thinking it was a Datil pepper. It turned out not to be. But it thrived and generously produces these red, sweetly fiery chiles.
I’m not sure if I buy the spicy food keeps you cool concept, but I love chile, and just a little zings up this spring into summer salad. With beans, corn, chile and tomatoes, you could slow cook it all together and get chili with the extra i or this Native American stew, but assembled as a salad, it’s fresh, everything sings together, yet each ingredient stays distinct.
Summer Salad with Chile, Sage, and Avocado Crema
The sugar snaps are not essential, but keep things cool and green. If you make the beans ahead — or all right, if you buy a can of beans — all components can made done ahead and then arrayed or tossed together right before serving. The salad keeps its looks, its flavors and its cool for hours.Enjoy it as part of a lazy Sunday brunch or Memorial Day picnic.
Broccoli Confidential subscribers can find the recipe for summer salad with chile sage and avocado crema at the end of the newsletter. If you haven’t upgraded your subscription yet you can do it now!
Extreme heat isn’t just happening in Florida. Last year was Earth’s hottest ever on record decade (2014–2023).
Let’s keep our cool and keep the planet from further heating up. Go vegan. A plantbased diet could reduce carbon emissions by fifty to ninety percent within just a few years, save oceans’ worth of fresh water and provide enough grain so every one of us would have enough to eat.
These spring and summer salads are significant enough to be main courses but with ingredients and flavors that lift and cool.
Some last bites:
ICYMI, I was honored and giddy to be in conversation with Joan Nathan for her Miami book event. A big thanks to Books and Books, and Temple Beth Am for hosting and for the many Joan fans who attended.
Last Monday was International Hummus Day. There’s a hummus recipe and a little history in Joan’s new book, My Life in Recipes: Food, Family and Memories, but I’m also glad to share this stellar recipe from James Beard award-winning chef Michael Solomonov.
This Wednesday, May 22, is the last day for a free download of my e-book Beans: A Handful of Magic through Beans is How.
Grateful + humbled = grumbled. I am grumbled by your cheer and support following some recent yuck.
Many people — maybe including you — face a lot worse. That doesn’t make what happened to me all right, but I won’t give in to hate. There’s better things to do with my time. I want to connect, to feed people. And a lot of people in Miami are hungry. Over 10% identify as having food insecurity. So I was glad to be part of the joint initiative from the Miami Chapters of Repair the World and OneWorldOneHeart and feed some of them.
Both these NGOs are vaguely faith-based, but there’’s a time for preaching and a time for potatoes (it’s in Ecclesiastes. Maybe). Feeding people isn’t sectarian. It’s humanitarian. It’s empathy, It’s recognizing and acknowledging someone, doing it with an open heart and without judgement, making eye contact, sharing a smile or a joke, offering some pasta or a sandwich, a chunk of fresh melon, a cookie. It’s not that hard. In fact, it’s healing — for everyone.
Meal distribution setup is in downtown Miami in a parking lot beneath the overpass. It happens every Thursday, y‘all, whether you need a meal or want to help serve.
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