Edible Rainbow Garden. Rosalind Creasy
purple tulips
‘Purplette’ scallions
Plants under one foot
‘Easter Egg’ radishes
Johnny-jump-ups
‘Blue Princess’ violas
‘King Henry’ purple violas
interview
Renee Shepherd
Renee Shepherd and I have been friends and colleagues for years. Both of us are fascinated with colorful vegetables. Researching this book gave me the excuse to ask her to share her views. “Before I even get them in the kitchen I enjoy these vivid vegetables,” Renee began. “Picking a basket filled with many colors is beautiful. Food in vibrant colors is more exciting. I enjoy simple cooking. And simple dishes made with diverse colors seem more complex. For example, if I cook up green snap beans and sprinkle them with crumbled feta cheese, it’s interesting. However, if I cook both yellow and green snap beans together, the recipe becomes exciting.”
“Then there is the satisfaction of growing all these special exotics from seeds,” Renee continued. “Growing three varieties of a vegetable instead of one extends my interest in the crop. It’s like taking a theme and adding a variation. I find it hard to imagine why someone wouldn’t want to grow vegetables in many colors.”
Renee is the owner of a new seed company, Renee’s Garden. Her seed packets are perfect for the rainbow gardener. For instance, she offers a trio of cayenne peppers in one package: a purple variety, a red pepper, and a yellow one. The beets come in three colors as do the tomatoes, zucchini, snap beans, bell peppers, lettuces, etc. So the gardener doesn’t need to buy three different seed packages of the same vegetable to get the rainbow effect. Further, the gardener needn’t research whether the vegetables will ripen at the same time. Renee has done all the work for you.
“I was flying cross-country when the idea came to me,” Renee explained. “Then I puzzled over how to color-code the seeds so gardeners could tell which color they were growing. No rainbow gardener wants to start seeds from a multi-color package and end up with four red bell pepper seedlings, one yellow variety, and no orange. There had to be a way to mark the seeds. Easter egg dyes came to mind because they are nontoxic and readily available. As soon as I got home, I tried spritzing the seeds with different colors. Sure enough, the dye dried quickly and left just enough stain so you could tell the different colors apart.”
Renee’s colorful menus are famous. I remember the time she roasted bell peppers of many colors and drizzled them with olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and melted anchovies (see recipe, page 76). Then there’s her exotic salad made with multicolored ‘Easter Egg’ radishes combined with the sweetness of fennel and apples (see recipe, page 70). Renee adapted her Aunt Alice’s braised summer squash recipe with dill. Rather than using only one color of summer squash like her aunt, Renee combines yellow, dark-green, and light-green summer squash and carrots in the chicken broth (see recipe, page 78). She also likes to make a confetti of dry red and yellow cayenne flakes to sprinkle over pizza. Asked how she serves tomatoes of many colors, Renee said, “I love the different colored cherry tomatoes—I call them garden candy. They’re so sweet and jewellike. I stir fry them lightly until they start to burst, then add herbs and garlic and serve them as a warm salad. Sometimes I arrange large colorful tomatoes slices over a tart or I hollow out tomatoes and stuff them with an orzo pasta stuffing. Another of my favorite ways to feature their colors is to make two sauces, one of red and the other of orange tomatoes, and create a pool of color and flavor on the plate for roasted vegetables.”
Renee Shepherd, seeds woman extraordinaire, has long been enamored with colorful vegetables. Her latest seed company, Renee’s Garden, offers a rainbow in a package. For instance, she sells red, yellow, and orange bell pepper seeds all in one package. The gardener can tell the colors of the pepper varieties apart because Renee has dyed the seeds.
Renee has done a great deal to expand the home gardeners’ seed choices by offering her seeds in many retail nurseries and homestores. Rainbow gardeners no longer have to mail away for colorful varieties. I, for one, am very grateful.
the rainbow
vegetable
encyclopedia
‘Fire Dance’ cabbage is one of many varieties of red cabbage that can brighten a garden corner.
The vegetable varieties I have chosen for this encyclopedia are those that are the most colorful, whether it be in the garden, in the kitchen, or both.
For me, vegetable gardens are beautiful and the addition of especially colorful varieties often makes them even more lovely. Further, given their beauty, many of these plants are suitable for edible landscapes—in a flower border say, or in containers on the patio.
Growing colorful vegetables is a rather new phenomenon, and unlike their more common relatives, some “rainbow” vegetable varieties are hard to obtain, available only from one or two seed sources, say. I have noted sources for many of the unusual varieties.
In the average kitchen there are already many colorful vegetable varieties—red beets and orange carrots come to mind. In this encyclopedia, however, I have ignored the familiar ones, my emphasis instead is with vegetables that by today’s standards are considered eccentric or to be unusually colored. (As an aside, food color biases change from culture to culture and with the times, so for example, 200 years ago in Europe instead of red tomatoes and beets, people preferred yellow varieties and instead of white cauliflower they favored purple.)
The colors in vegetables are the result of different pigments. The presence of particular carotenoids, for instance, will cause a carrot to be orange and certain anthocyanins are responsible for a cabbage being red. Some of these pigments are stable, others are destroyed by heat or are water soluble, and in the latter cases the vivid color disappears. Further, some vegetables turn brown when cut and exposed to the air. As the emphasis in this book is to feature vivid colors on the table, where possible, I have included this type of information.
The color of a vegetable often correlates to its nutrition content and I have included some of this information as well. For an overview of how pigments and the color of vegetables respond to cooking, see the section on “Cooking with Colors” on page 64, and for more information on the nutrients in vegetables, see page 62.
For the basic information on soil preparation, mulching, composting, irrigation, and organic controls for pests and diseases see Appendices A and B on pages 90 and 96.
AMARANTH
Amaranthus hypochondriacus, A. cruentus, A gangeticus, A. tricolor
‘Illumination’ amaranth
Amaranth is beautiful in the garden and nutritious in the kitchen. The leaves and seed heads can be red, purple, green, cream, or a combination. Use the tall varieties in the back of vegetable and flower beds and the shorter ones in the middle of the border.
How to grow: Amaranth glories in warm weather. Start seedlings after any danger of frost has passed. Plant seeds ⅛ inch deep, 4 inches apart, in full sun, in rich, well-drained soil. Plant the large-grain amaranths in blocks with the rows 1 foot apart to