In Hard Times, Plant a Garden

Patricia Rose finds joy, cooking ideas in herbs and veggies

When our friend Patricia K. Rose brought us some organic fennel seed and lemon grass from her garden last December, I was excited. I’d seldom used either of these spices and immediately started googling recipes.

After talking to Patricia this week for my Ruth Talks Food podcast (click here to listen), I spent some time on her website, Fresh Food in a Flash, and found many recipe ideas for those ingredients, including Lemon Grass-Crusted Tuna with Cucumber Salsa and Peanut Sauce , and fennel seed-enhanced Italian dishes, such as Home Made Spaghetti Sauce, which she uses for pizza, pasta, and chicken parmesan. The colorful photos and step-by-step directions are a godsend to home cooks who might worry that certain recipes are stretching their abilities to the breaking point.

Patricia, an accomplished LA-based chef, cooking teacher and blogger, is a Minnesota native who discovered her passion for cooking and teaching after a career in magazine advertising sales. Click here for more about Patricia.

For Patricia, being “stuck” at home because of a pandemic is anything but boring. To spice up her life and her cooking, she has planted a garden bursting with herbs, including rosemary, thyme, oregano, lemon grass, summer savory, mint, basil, and, of course, fennel. For those with limited room for planting, no problem, Patricia says. “Growing herbs is the best use of your garden space,” and many are perennials, returning again and again.

She has also found how practical bartering ingredients can be in this time of scarcity. With her LA neighborhood under order to shelter at home to minimize the spread of the coronavirus, “we’ve all been sharing our produce,” Patricia said. When a neighbor offered to trade kale and spinach for some lemons from her tree, Patricia was happy to accept. The result? Her aptly named Sheltering at Home Vegetable Lasagna.

“It sort of teaches you how you could do this any old time,” she said.

As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. Lasagna may not be new—but making it with bartered produce is new to many of us.

Many things that may have seemed old and impractical just a few weeks ago seem relevant again—example: the resurgent interest in the ancient art of making sourdough bread—and in baking in general, particularly old-fashioned recipes. Again, making do with fewer ingredients is the order of the day.

Patricia’s post, Weeknight Gingerbread Cake with Strawberries and Caramel Sauce, a recipe that skimps on scarce baking ingredients like flour and eggs, would have resonated with my mother, who lived through the Great Depression and World War II rationing. It also looks delicious, especially with the seasonal strawberries and mint!

Please check out my podcast with Patricia K. Rose.

Feel free to like, share and leave a comment @ruthtalksfood on Twitter. And, if you have suggestions for future podcast guests, I’d love to hear from you!