From the Editor's Archives: Howard's End

Originally written in September of 2014 featured on JillCooksHere, a food blog written by Editor Jill Melton.

You might call my brother-in-law an accidental renaissance man.  By day he is a successful executive and money man at AT&T.  Conservative and diligent, he appears to color inside the lines, living a calm orthodox life in the suburbs with 2 kids, a wife and a dog. But his interests have always veered to the eccentric. He loves the esoteric and the "off the beaten path"--  from hidden diners, to rocks, to travel to beer making and now, to gardening. Not that gardening is eccentric, but Howard's way is always a tad bit eccentric.

As it turns out, he doesn't just have a green thumb, but 2 green hands. His garden is astounding. They live in Chicago (not exactly the central valley of California)  and over the past 4 years it has grown by leaps and bounds. He started with gourds and tomatoes and upon my last visit, he had 3 flourishing raised beds with all manner of summer vegetables in their infancy, but also lettuces, kale, chard, green onions and spinach ready to pick.  (Next to the raised beds he also had 10, 50-pound bags of rich dirt gestating with fingerling potatoes.)  They clearly had more greens than they could use, so I promptly cut as much as I could, stuffed it into plastic bags, then a cooler he unearthed from the garage, and set home to Nashville.

Four weeks and many salads later, the lettuce was gone,  but I had some kale left, which had aged unbelievably well, but was ready for pesto--my "go to" recipe when arugula or any greens are on the verge of "going." I toasted some walnuts real quick and tossed them in the food processor with garlic, coarse salt, a squeeze of lime, olive oil, the kale and a few sprigs of parsley and basil from my garden. It tasted so good at that point, that I left the cheese out and decided to just add it to the pasta at the end.