Winter Tablescape

A winter sunset is brilliant. Lavenders, oranges, blue grays, and tinges of gold and silver illuminate the sky as the deep orange sun sets this time of year. The woods are filled with gorgeous browns, greens, grays, and the air clean and clear. Bizarre as it may sound, winter has a serene beauty that the other seasons lack…all this coming from a lover of the richness of fall, brightness of spring, and depth of summer greens. Stripped of leaves, bare branches and trunks are quite architectural against the sky. The green of pine and magnolia resonate through the gray and brown forest and even the tiniest articles from nature – pecans, pine cones, antlers, and sticks – can inspire an entire table setting.

I believe every host and hostess should have a great neutral dinnerware. Whites, creams, and bone colored dishes are easy to mix with other pieces. Even a fun color, such as lavender, can be a great neutral, complementing so many colors found throughout nature. Take a “color challenge” and look for the tints, shades, and hues of a color you love within nature…it is amazing how the shades of a color will come forth from your studying of your surroundings. Lavender is my color I always find in the sky and other natural canvases.

So, white, gray, green, brown, and crystal clear stemware set the tone for a winter tablescape. A walk through the woods inspired this scheme… antlers, gathered pecans, branches of quintessential magnolia and pine… the elements from my walkabout were now a part of my table top!

White plates and bowls, placemats made of sticks, gray linen napkins, pewter brown flatware, and a rusty iron planter billowing with branches of magnolia and pine became the characters for this table setting. I then garnished with pine cones, pecans, and antlers. The day was a beautiful winter day and the tablescape was reminiscent of winter’s colors and textures.

Silver rimmed chargers juxtapositoned with the bone white plates and woven stick placemats were complementary in texture, visually and tactilely. Remember candlelight is the key to atmosphere - I used some antlers that have been converted into candelabras to continue the natural, woodland feel. Pine cones etched on the glasses also gave a nod to the natural vibe.

If you still need a splash of color, try mixing some green and white transferware, china, or stemware within your scheme. Green is still natural and quite neutral.

This Farmer took inspiration straight out of nature…do the same for your tableau and wow your guests with your congruence with nature. Here are a few tips from my table to yours…

· With nature as your inspiration, keep natural materials on hand. Terra cotta dinnerware, silver flatware, linen napkins, fresh greenery and stems…all natural materials for your nature infused event.

· Your sideboard can be the springboard for your table’s palette. Stack your plates, flatware, and stemware to amass your theme in a central locale, setting the tone for your event.

· Garden urns make wonderful centerpieces and dividers between table settings. If your table is large and your crowd is not, make double use of your table. A large centerpiece can separate dining and serving ends of the table, and keep the dinner party warm and intimate. Also, little arrangements down the table is a great conduit to keep a theme flowing.

· Take an inspiration point, such as a color or a certain element, and thread it through the schematics of your table design. The grayish, toupee brown of pecans lead to thoughts of pine cones and antlers... the antlers lead to dinnerware color and brown kept appearing in various and sundry shades, even on the back on the magnolia leaves. Rust on the planter just fit right in!

· With a simple, natural palette, simple arrangements work best. Pine, magnolia, and cherry laurel – all picked right off the property – were all this table setting needed. Embellishments from and for the said greenery are quite apropos i.e. pine cones.

· With a winter tablescape, it could be challenging to make it not look like Christmas…avoid red, stick to a green, gray, white, and brown, and your winter theme dinner will be non Noel.

· Keeping with neutrals for your tableware allows you to change the feel of the whole setting with what’s in bloom. This same theme could be filled with hydrangeas and shells in summer or gourds and pumpkins in the fall… basically the bones would stay the same and the accents would lend the seasonal touch.

Hydrangeas Part 2: Drying Advice

Drying hydrangeas may be accomplished with ease. Improper and premature cutting are most always the culprits as to why hydrangeas do not dry. So many times, folks have their cherished blooms crimp, shrivel, and wilt. Timing is everything with drying flowers, and hydrangea drying is of no exception.

Follow this tip for triumph with drying hydrangeas: By allowing the flowers to dry naturally on the bush, the need to preserve them with silicone gel or hanging them upside down becomes null and void. Clipping the blossoms once they no longer feel too “fleshy” but rather thicker and somewhat “papery,” rustling when you touch them, is a key to drying hydrangea success. Once your skilled “garden eye” has been honed, you will be able to scope out hydrangeas ready to be cut, arranged, and dried in place from twenty paces.

Share your garden treasures inside the home with arrangements of dried hydrangeas as wonderful accents on mantelpieces and atop shelves and cabinets.

Fun with Onions

As in a good movie with scenes of tears, laughs, and tasteful delights, your venture with onions will boast the same sentiments. Vidalia, Spanish, yellow, white and red - onions can and should be your flavor backbones in the kitchen.

Thinly sliced in a salad, fried in rings, sweated and sweetened, or adding zing to a burger or hotdog, these powerhouse bulbs have flavored meals and dishes for centuries. No other vegetable brings tears to my eyes as these subterranean roots do…I digress.

Synonymous with onion across the Deep South and country is the Vidalia – a sweet, crisp member of the genus Allium. Soil conditions in that part of South Georgia create an anomaly for these surprisingly sweet onions to grow and flourish. Yet, even if you and your garden are not in the legislatively approved section of Georgia to produce quote Vidalias unquote, growing onions and other members of their family in your home garden is easy and quite rewarding.

Here in the Deep South, zones 7 and 8 especially, onions can be planted in the winter garden for spring and summer harvesting. I like to buy bulbs and onion plants from good sources such as Bonnie Plants which can be found from hardware stores to big box stores across the South.

Onions need a loamy, rich soil that can be easily broken, prodded, and dug into for planting and harvesting onions. An old adage with planting onions in winter is “if you can poke a pencil into the soil and move it around, then you can plant onions.”

Plant your onion plants about an inch or so deep, four inches apart… just don’t plant them too deep. As the plant “bulbs” or becomes much fatter, even emerging from its mounded planting site, and develops a hearty topping of greenery, loosen the soil around the bulb for easy harvesting. Don’t forget to water and fertilize your onions with a good fertilizer such as 10-10-10 or 10-20-10. Bonnie Plants’ site and Wikipedia have awesome tips and history on onions…does this officially make me a plant nerd? Oh well…

If your garden space is limited, try gardening and growing onions and other veggies in half barrels, large pots, or raised beds; or grow smaller varieties of Alium such as chives. The onion is totally edible in its various growing stages, but those fat, tasty bulbs are the punch of flavor most desired. Leeks, shallots, and garlic are all cousins to the onion and each have a place in the garden and kitchen. A few tips on cooking with onions from this Farmer’s kitchen:

· Invest in a good chopper…crying rivers of tears over onions can be avoided with these contraptions. Plus, the tiny bits of the finely chipped and chopped onions brown fast and easily, adding amazing flavor to most any dish.

· If chopping and slicing with a knife, light a candle nearby to help reduce the fumes that cause our eyes to tear up. A fan and good air flow help too!

· Roasted onions are incredible! A red onion with carrots and potatoes is a simply elegant dish or a bed of these purple hued onions for your meat is delicious and beautiful.

· “Sweating” onions, or using heat to bring out the onion’s sweetness, is highly recommended for tasty additions to dishes or as a side in and of themselves. Butter, oil, and beer are all great vehicles to “sweat” your onions in and remember to add a dash of salt to bring out the moisture too. A lower heat and covered dish is the ticket to sweet sweated onions. Oil for temperature and butter for flavor – a cardinal rule in the kitchen!

· Browning your onions before adding them into other dishes, such as squash, meatloaf, chicken salad, or pasta, gives these bulbous veggies a sweet and salty combo that escalates any dish to top notch. The main difference between browning and sweating is temperature. Chopped onions in hot oil and flavored with butter, salt, and pepper, is a step that will make a good cook a better cook quickly!

· Your centerpieces can even be accented with onions. A bowl of peeled red onions is stunning on their own or mixed with cabbage or kales. Tiny seedlings banded with raffia make great party favors too.

· Experiment with different cousins of this fun family for different flavors and dishes. Whether you garnish with chives, sauté with shallots, or roast with Vidalias, keep onions as a main player in your cooking repertoire. Growing and harvesting and then cooking your onions are fun ways to meld the garden and home together.

Hydrangeas Part 1: Meet LEONA

The weather outside is frightful, so let’s think of something delightful…say, hydrangeas? Wintertime can be the best time to think about and plan for your upcoming garden ventures. Get ahead of the heat and plant hydrangeas and other summer loving shrubs late this winter or early spring. Here’s a highlight on hydrangeas.

Hydrangeas, hydrangeas, hydrangeas…a garden must have hydrangeas. Alone in an arrangement or mixed with other trappings from the garden, hydrangeas are a staple for the garden and the home. Many folks think of the “blue mop heads” in summer, but with the right selection, you can have hydrangeas from May through October. Let me introduce you my friend LEONA…that’s the acronym for the five types of hydrangeas that will give you blooms to arrange and enjoy for half the year or more! Limelight, Endless Summer, Oak Leaf, Nikko Blue, and Annabelle planted in the garden will provide buckets of blooms for your home and table for months.

Here in the Deep South, zones 7 and 8 especially, this acronym for the names of these five hydrangea cultivars is an easy way of remembering how to maximize the bloom times of these magnificent flowers. For those of us in zones 7 and 8, the Oak Leaf hydrangeas will start blooming first in May. Keep in mind different varieties of each hydrangea can bloom at different times as well, so you can even have a succession of successive blooms during the season. After the Oak Leaf, Nikko Blue and Endless Summer kick in along with Annabelle. Though all three bloom very close together, the Nikko’s turn green and shades of aqua after their classic blue shade and even turn shades of coral, rust, and chartreuse. Endless Summer blooms multicolored on each plant, with blues, pinks, and lavenders harmoniously covering the shrub. After their initial bloom, Endless Summer will jump start again with blossoms well into summer and finish up in the fall. I count on their russet, coral, and aubergine colored fall blooms for my autumn arrangements. Annabelle blooms hard through June and then the snowball white flowers turn chartreuse green for added summer color well into July and August. Finally, the grand finale is with Limelight. This new offspring of the
h. paniculata species kicks into high gear in July and goes strong well into August and September. The creamy white panicles or blooms turn lime green, almost like a high light from a stage, thus the name. Coral pink edging will occur and these flowers will provide your late summer and autumnal bouquets with body and texture.

Become acquainted with LEONA for May through October blooms. The back bone of your own personal floral shop, these amazing flowers can even be enjoyed year round once they are dried. When planning your garden, plan on inviting LEONA. The blossoms from this delightful new friend will fill your home and garden with multitudes of blooms.

Annabelle (white), Endless Summer (pink)
photograph by Delaney Holliman

Nikko Blue
photograph by Delaney Holliman

Annabelle

photograph by Delaney Holliman

Oak Leaf

Limelight

White Pizza…a la Farmer

True confession…I’m not a huge red sauce fan, but I do love pizza, spaghetti, lasagna, etc…just with downplayed marinara and jazzed up cream sauce or cheese. A quick meal for two, this pizza can be doubled for a group or shared easily betwixt a couple folks. Paired with a good wine, this made a fine little supper. With a white pizza, I chose a white wine, Macon-Villages Chardonnay, which paired wonderfully with the pizza (said wine has been reviewed well with cheeses and cream dishes…this pizza vouched for that!).

Simple yet rustically elegant, this little meal came together in a flash. Good ingredients, fresh herbs, and an infused olive layered upon a crispy crust hit the spot. Since I always have rosemary and parsley on hand, they were the top candidates for this pizza. The latter herb is highly underrated – parsley has a wonderfully unsullied flavor and tastes somewhat like it looks… green, crisp, and fresh.

The bakery section of my grocery store has pizza dough for sale and it’s delicious. This dough is one I say to cheat with, since they’ve already made it and it’s just waiting for you to bake it. The canned versions aren’t bad either.

For my olive oil, I used infused oil that has a mix of garlic, salt, white and red pepper, thyme, bay leaves, some coriander, and fennel. Making your own infused oil is easy…just mix up a grouping of your favorite herbs and spices, about a teaspoon of each, and let the mix “steep” in some olive oil for a bit…the longer this assembly melds together, the better it gets! Specialty food stores also carry great selections of infused oils.

Cheese, please…ricotta for the base (then the oil splashed on top), shredded mozzarella, romano, provolone, and fontina make up the lactose body of this pizza with a sprinkling of parmesan for good measure. If buying a gaggle of cheeses isn’t your cup of tea, use a blend from the grocery.

I baked it until I thought it looked done and the cheese was toasted and completely melted. As soon as I took the pizza from the oven, I sprinkled the fresh herbs on top and let the heat wilt them perfectly, adding that fresh layer only herbs can add. My rustic cutting board provided the perfect spot to serve the pizza from, and my simple little meal was served. A fine little meal I might say, and from my little pizzeria to yours, Buon appetito!

The Farmer’s White Pizza

• 1 Grocer’s bakery pizza dough…thin crust preferably.
• About 4 tablespoons of infused olive oil
• ¾ cup of ricotta cheese
• 2 cups of mixed cheeses (mozzarella, provolone, fontina, and romano)
• ¾ cup of shredded or grated parmesan
• Handful of curly leaf parsley and rosemary leaves…basil or thyme would be great in the Summertime!

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Layout the dough on a greased baking sheet and Spread the ricotta across the dough and then drizzle with the oil.

Sprinkle the mixed cheeses evenly across and bake for about 12-15 minutes…remove from oven when the dough is crispy and the cheese is toasted.

toss on some fresh herbs and servd hot with a good cold white wine…maybe even a nice little salad, too!