Measure Free Hippie Cook

Serendipitous Starters from a Hippie Garden & Hippie Kitchen

11 July 2008 by Jean Johnson

Cooking Beyond Measure is poised for its debut, so I’ve done the sensible thing and started the next cookbook: Hippie Kitchen. That’s why it was so perfect when I met Rosanna at a writer’s confab. Long hair properly grayed for her age and era, tied back stylishly. Birkenstocks. A simple white t-shirt and pair of Levis. Writing a book on honey bees. (Credentials? A doctorate in biology, don’t you know.) Yes. This was a person I wanted know better.

“Come over for dinner and share some pages?”

“Sure. Cool.”

I did a yeast dough and got some rolls to rising. There was plenty kale in the garden for a warm salad, and I brined some shrimp for the grill. But nary an olive in the house for starters. Then in walked Rosanna with the bounty pictured above.

“Do you have hens?” I said, fingering the eggs that she’d boiled and admiring her first rate garden produce.

“No but my friend, Helga, out in Oregon City sells them for one of her friends She’s actually responsible for some of the snow peas, too.”

We sliced the eggs in half so their bold yellow yolks showed prettily against coarse salt, pepper, and paprika. Then we chunked up the radishes and put a handful of peapods on the plate.

Out to the deck. We had starters from a hippie garden and a hippie kitchen. We shared pages. We got acquainted. It was cool.

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