Northwest Vegetables

What the plate gets wrong

The picture was generated, and these are its errors of fact, checked against the kitchen and the Lexicon. Read the plate with them.

• Cabbage prints “September to November”. Northwest cabbage stands in the field and in storage through the winter, so the season should run September to March. The plate's own Seasonal highlights box lists Cabbage under Winter while the card stops in November, and the Lexicon puts the cabbage family in the cold season's vegetable aisle, October to March in the north, with green cabbage built to sit in storage for months.
• Mushrooms prints “September to November, drawn as brown-capped cremini and portobello”. The September to November window belongs to the Northwest's wild mushrooms such as chanterelle, porcini, matsutake and hedgehog; the cultivated cremini and portobello drawn on the card are farmed year round and have no season. The card's art shows brown Agaricus caps with thick pale stems, and the Lexicon's Wild Mushrooms entry opens with the line that cultivated mushrooms have no season while the Floor Deck's Cremini card says it is farmed year round.
• Fennel prints “Tunnel”. The card heading should read Fennel; there is no vegetable called tunnel. The drawing shows white fennel bulbs with feathery fronds and the flavor line reads Anise, crisp, aromatic, the anethole scent the Lexicon's Fennel Bulb entry describes.
• Leek prints “September to November”. Leeks are a fall and winter crop in the Northwest, harvested from September into March, so the season should run September to March. The plate's own Seasonal highlights box lists Leeks under Winter while the card stops in November, leeks are frost hardy and overwinter in Washington and Oregon fields, and the Kale card on the same plate already runs September to March.
• Sweet Potatoes prints “Sweet Potatoes, September to November”. Sweet potatoes are not a Northwest crop and do not belong on a plate whose region line is Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. Ipomoea batatas needs a long hot frost free season and warm soil, and the American crop comes from North Carolina, California, Mississippi and Louisiana, with no commercial acreage in the four Northwest states.