bok choy in the white house garden

 photo credits: Associated Press, me

I opened up the Drudge Report this morning and saw this headline: FIRST LADY BACK TO GARDEN: BOK CHOY ON THE MENU...

Michelle Obama has gotten people talking about gardening which is something I really enjoy. When I was in middle school, my dad rented an industrial plow and tilled a huge area of the backyard. I think he told my mom it was going to be a small garden but he couldn't help himself once he got started. After the yard was torn up, he got his friend up the street who owned a horse barn to fertilize the whole area with horse manure that he spread from the back of a giant tractor.  A month or so later we had more cherry tomatoes than we could eat (so Mary Kate and I invented tomato fights), mammoth cucumbers, green beans, and a dozen other kinds of vegetables. As the garden grew, my dad put his biology degree to work and taught us all about the plants and bugs in the garden. I watched my mom collect the vegetables each day and make salads, vegetable spreads, pickles, and lots and lots of things with cherry tomatoes.

My only negative memory of the garden was my dad demanding that my sister and I had to weed the whole thing by hand. Everyday after school we liked to sit on the couch watching Saved By the Bell or Oprah but when we heard the engine of my dad's '87 Caddilac Deville drive up the road we raced out in the backyard and started weeding like crazy. Not surprisingly, the garden was overrun by weeds at the end of the summer.

According to the article about the new White House garden, Michelle Obama decided that the garden was not big enough so she had it enlarged. She is growing all sorts of veggies, one of them being bok choy. In my opinion, bok choy is an underused vegetable in America, maybe because people don't know how to cook it. Here's a recipe we posted for baby bok choy awhile ago.

I'm inspired by Michelle to garden this spring myself. It's difficult in New York City to find a sunny corner of your apartment to grow something, but I just moved into an apartment here in Beijing that has a sun room. The previous tenant left a bunch of pots with potting soil in them and I'm going to see what I can grow. I don't think bok choy will grow in the small pots but maybe I'll try green onions, some herbs, or garlic. It will be fun to incorporate the fresh veggies into our dishes while we're cooking for our book. I'll keep you posted on how it goes. 

Mary Kate and I are busy cooking and testing a ridiculous amount of Chinese food for our book, sometimes late into the night.

-Nate