Keeping It Fresh
Organic gardening guru Ellen Ecker Ogden says that when you start with the best ingredients, cooking is simple.
To her fans, the legions who receive her catalog long before the planting season begins, Ellen Ecker Ogden is an ally.
The Cook's Garden: Seeds & Supplies for the New American Family Garden, now celebrating its 20th year, presents organic gardening as a realistic home option. Browsing through the catalog's pages of certified organic seeds and seedlings, many illustrated by Mary Azarian's colorful woodcuts, readers learn of possibilities: Matina heirloom tomatoes, "early fruiting" (in the language of gardeners) and full of flavor; Violette di Firenze, an eggplant described as "one of the stars of our garden market"; and Red Rubin, a "nearly 100 percent solid purple" basil. All promise a growing season of bounty and beauty. To take the dream a step further, Ogden provides recipes that use such produce -- a couscous and lentil salad with lemon basil rice, for example -- in the annual mailing.
Now she has collected these recipes and added a batch of new ones in her first cookbook, From the Cook's Garden (William Morrow). As with the catalog, the cookbook focuses on using organic herbs, vegetables, and fruits that an aspiring chef can grow. But giving a nod to today's harried lifestyle, she also advocates buying the best organic ingredients available at the local farm stand or supermarket.
Like the catalog, the cookbook presents a dream of near self-sufficiency that Ogden has lived, carving it out of rich soil in a less than hospitable Vermont climate. "We're Zone 3," Ogden explains from her home in Londonderry, a southern Vermont town in the state's so-called golden triangle, within sight of Stratton and Bromley mountains, "so we're not frost-free till the third week in June."
This season, the demands of book promotion have been taking Ogden away from her kitchen garden. Although she's been growing some produce and many herbs in her plot -- eight raised beds in a 20-by-40-foot parcel on a south-sloping hill -- she's been relying more on farm stands and markets for the organic produce she favors.
"I fill in the gaps at local farmers' markets," she says. "It's a wonderful way of connecting with the farmers who grow our food and of staying connected with where our food comes from."
The Cook's Garden celebrates this connection to the seasons and the earth. Ellen and her former husband, Shepherd Ogden, who are both still involved in the business, came to this kind of gardening as newlyweds, when they moved next door to his grandfather, Sam Ogden, a pioneer of organic farming in neighboring Landgrove, Vermont.
At that point, the garden was primarily Shepherd's responsibility. He had a large market garden and was selling to restaurants. "At the time, we really couldn't compete with the California prices for red and green leaf lettuce," says Ellen. "So we realized we had to sell something really unusual."
In the early 1980s, Californians were discovering gourmet organic produce, and the Ogdens thought that New England was ready to take the same step. They obtained interesting organic seeds through the mail and from friends who traveled, and the couple set about growing them. They planned to market the produce to restaurants and sell it at their own farm stand. But they were wrong: New Englanders didn't understand what they were offering.
"They didn't care for baby round squashes or cipollini onions. We couldn't give away arugula or mache," Ellen Ogden recalls. In response, she began cooking; she offered her recipes to go with the exotic produce, and customers began to understand. When the couple started the catalog in 1983 ("because we needed a winter business," she says), the recipes became part of the package.
"The recipes come from what I've grown," the gardening chef says, describing her cooking style as inspirational rather than specific. These days, ideas often spring from what she finds fresh at the market. "I let the ingredients dictate the recipes," Ogden says.
The resulting dishes are not only fresher, she says, but often easier to prepare. "I've realized a lot of people don't cook anymore," Ogden says. "They don't take the time."
With that in mind, her book focuses on quick recipes as well as some that can be made in bulk ahead of time. As a mother of two, 19-year-old Molly and 15-year-old Sam, Ogden finds this style of cooking fits into her own limited time as well.
Although Ogden would like to spend part of every day in her garden, she says her ideal of a daily two-hour stint has gotten condensed into weekends of weeding, planting, and thinning because of her promotional duties. The good news is that this is enough: In New England, she believes, anyone who spends one day a week in the garden can do well.
"That's the beauty of our shorter growing season," she points out. "We have fewer pest problems. And at the end of the season, if you haven't caught up with the weeds, they always die."
Her advice for gardening chefs is equally optimistic -- and home-grown.
"If you just learn a few basics, everything else works just fine," Ogden says. "If you know the basics of making a good soup, you're fine. The important thing is to use good ingredients and be inspired by what you have growing or what you find at the market."
Clea Simon is a freelance writer living in Cambridge.
