The Rose Garden at the White House sets the backdrop for official ceremonies, but it can’t compete with the heads of lettuce, clusters of herbs, and raspberry canes just a few hundred yards down the hill. The White House Kitchen Garden, the patch of earth that First Lady Michelle Obama enthusiastically helped transform from a plain grassy lawn, has become the most famous part of the presidential grounds.

Planted in the spring of 2009, the garden has attracted visits from policymakers, dignitaries, chefs, and sports celebrities. Mrs. Obama invited schoolchildren from Washington, D.C., to help her plant the first seeds, and has continued to work with young assistants ever since.

I visited the White House Kitchen Garden last October, during the Fall Harvest Celebration. The 1,100-square-foot garden was swarming with about 30 kids, who squatted, lifted leaves, and shook plants as they searched for ripe vegetables. Fifth-graders from the Bancroft and Kimball elementary schools dug up sweet potatoes and pulled up fennel bulbs with the First Lady. White House Food Initiative Coordinator Sam Kass, plus White House chefs and kitchen staff, helped other children pick tomatoes, sweet peppers, turnips, and tomatillos.

I was there to do research for my recently published book, A White House Garden Cookbook (Red Rock Press), which follows the first year of the garden and offers recipes that feature the vegetables and fruits grown at the White House. Additional recipes come from community and school gardening groups around the nation, including a few in New England.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

In its first season, the White House Kitchen Garden grew 55 varieties of vegetables, herbs, and fruits, producing more than 1,000 pounds of food. Along with familiar vegetables and herbs, such as tomatoes, lettuce, and mint, the garden grew more exotic kohlrabi, okra, and Thai basil. White House Executive Chef Cristeta Comerford and Executive Pastry Chef Bill Yosses use some of the produce for official meals and private First Family dinners, and much is donated to Miriam’s Kitchen, a local soup kitchen that serves meals to the homeless. The garden also became a starting point for the First Lady’s “Let’s Move” campaign to encourage children to eat a healthier diet and to exercise more.

As part of this campaign, and her goal to end childhood obesity, Mrs. Obama has developed the new “Chefs Move to Schools” program. I returned to the White House garden this past June, along with more than 500 chefs from around the country, to attend the kickoff. Several New England chefs were there, including Dan Dumont of Wentworth by the Sea Hotel and Spa. The program encourages chefs to adopt individual schools in their communities and contribute their enthusiasm and expertise to help children plant gardens, cook with fresh ingredients, and make healthy choices in the lunch line. Mrs. Obama told the chefs, “In the end, it’s all about helping kids build healthy habits that are going to last a lifetime.”  With her willingness to slip on gardening gloves and pick up a shovel, Mrs. Obama has become the public face of the White House garden. Kass is often called on to link the garden to the First Lady’s message of healthy eating. Chefs Comerford and Yosses also work with school groups.  The White House Kitchen Garden has even inspired Comerford, the mother of a school-age daughter, to start a garden at her own home. “You can talk as much as you want but if you don’t walk the talk, you’re not going to be effective,” Comerford told Northwestern University students this spring at an event sponsored by a Filipino student association. Comerford grew up in the Philippines, where her grandparents gardened.

Yosses told me that he walks down to the garden nearly every day to pick fresh ingredients for White House desserts. “I just picked some rhubarb to use in a cobbler with an oatmeal crust,” he said in late May. Fruit pies have become his signature dessert for the Obamas. President Obama nicknamed Yosses the “crust master,” and Yosses lived up to his billing by baking several pies for Obama’s birthday celebration last August. Yosses and Comerford are bipartisan chefs—both also cooked for George and Laura Bush. Comerford, the first woman executive chef at the White House, has been working there since the Clinton administration.

Cultivating Celebrity

The White House Kitchen Garden has become a media star. Mrs. Obama planted carrot seeds with Elmo on Sesame Street, assuring Big Bird she likes to eat vegetables. An episode of The Biggest Loser showed contestants picking onions, tomatoes, basil, and lettuce from the garden and then making a salad with Kass. “The President loves broccoli. He loves anything green,” Kass told the contestants. The Food Network’s Iron Chef America made the White House Kitchen Garden its secret ingredient in an episode that filmed last fall and aired in January. It was part publicity stunt and part desire to show how chefs could take advantage of the most famous garden in the nation. “It’s awe-inspiring to see what four master chefs can create from locally grown ingredients in the heat of Kitchen Stadium,” said Bob Tuschman, senior vice president of programming and production for the Food Network.

Before the competition, Mrs. Obama personally greeted the show’s master of ceremonies, Alton Brown, and chef-contestants Bobby Flay, Mario Batali, Emeril Lagasse, and the White House’s own Comerford. The First Lady described “an abundance of seasonal vegetables and fruits” and told the chefs to “take as much of it as you need.” They then traipsed down the hilly South Lawn into the garden. Dividing into teams of Flay-Comerford and Batali-Lagasse, the chefs emerged with baskets of tomatillos, sweet potatoes, fennel, radishes, and more. (Later it was revealed that these vegetables weren’t actually used in the show, which was taped in New York a week later—other vegetables ending up standing in. The honey used did come from White House beehives, established around the same time as the garden was planted.)

In Kitchen Stadium, the challenge was to produce five dishes that both showcased the ingredients selected from the garden and represented the ultimate American meal. Lagasse-Batali’s meal included an oyster and salad trio with three remoulades; sweet potato ravioli; and carrot beignets with Creole-style Café Brulot. Comerford-Flay produced fennel and apple salad with oysters; broccoli clam chowder; a barbecue pork dish with seven vegetables in side dishes, including pickles made from pink-and-green-tinged watermelon radishes; and sweet potato pie with a honey meringue topping.

As the chefs handed over the dishes for tasting, Nigella Lawson, one of the judges, declared “deep, deep envy for the garden” at the White House. The judges voted Comerford-Flay the winners, and everyone came away with new appreciation for sweet potatoes and broccoli.

First Garden History

The current White House Kitchen Garden is the first to star in television cooking competitions and White House–created videos posted on YouTube, but vegetable gardening at the White House dates back to Thomas Jefferson. John Adams, the first president to live at the White House, planned a garden but left office too soon to see it started. Jefferson did extensive experiments with agriculture at Monticello, his home in Virginia, and used that knowledge to plant vegetables at the White House. His favorites at the dining table: lettuce, cabbage, and peas.

“Thomas Jefferson, more than any one man, changed the way we eat in this country and the way we grow food. He’s the first person to start seasonal growing. That is something that people are coming back to now, thinking about ways to use a diversity of crops and keep growing throughout the year,” Kass said in an official White House video about the garden. The current White House garden has a bed devoted to heirloom cabbage, lettuce, bean, and artichoke varieties that Jefferson grew, sown from seeds and sprouts sent from Monticello.

Other presidents, including John Quincy Adams and Abraham Lincoln, also maintained kitchen gardens at the White House. Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were the last to grow vegetables on the lawn (as part of a Victory Garden during World War II) until the Obama administration.

The responsibility for the preservation and upkeep of the White House grounds was given to the National Park Service in 1961 by Congress. Jim Adams is chief horticulturalist at the White House and in charge of what’s planted in the kitchen garden. He previously was the horticulturalist at the British Embassy in Washington and curator of the National Herb Garden at the U.S. National Arboretum.

Growing Health

Mrs. Obama has made health the focus of her garden since the beginning. She wanted to see her daughters, Sasha and Malia, eat more fruits and vegetables, and realized that food they helped to grow in their backyard would taste better. “What I’ve learned as a mom, in trying to feed my girls, is that it is so important for them to get regular fruits and vegetables in their diets, because it does have nutrients, it does make you strong, it is all brain food, ” she told children at a garden planting event last April.

Mrs. Obama also wanted the garden to be an example of how the nation could eat a more healthy diet—starting with children, who have a chance to develop healthy habits at a critical time in their lives. From the garden also grew the idea of the “Let’s Move” campaign to fight childhood obesity.

The garden, Mrs. Obama said, “allowed us to begin a conversation about the importance not just of healthy eating—eating right, eating the good food—but also about getting exercise into our lives. The kids during that whole year of planting and harvesting showed so much enthusiasm, so much excitement about that garden and about the potential of the topic that we realized there was an opportunity to do much more, because they were so open.”

Despite all the potential policy spin-offs, the garden itself remains Mrs. Obama’s passion. As children helped her launch the 2010 spring growing season, she told them that before she planted the garden in 2009, “I wasn’t really a gardener, and I’ve had so much fun. No matter where you live or what age you are, you can grow stuff. And also it’s pretty fun being outside here with all of you guys. I look forward to being outside in the sun. It’s getting a little hot now, but it’s good digging in the dirt, getting a little dirty, getting dirt under your nails.”


RECIPES

Broccoli Clam Chowder
Makes 6 servings

Bobby Flay and White House Executive Chef Cristeta Comerford won the Iron Chef America competition that featured the White House Kitchen Garden as the secret ingredient. The pair developed a green variation of New York–style clam chowder. It’s lighter than the New England traditional version—no cream, no potatoes.
Adapted from Cristeta Comerford on the White House Blog.

36     clams
1     cup water or white wine
Clam juice as needed
1     tablespoon butter
6     cloves garlic, sliced
4     shallots, sliced
1     leek, white part only, sliced
1     small onion, sliced
1     sprig thyme
2     heads broccoli
1     bay leaf
1     stalk lemongrass, smashed
Salt to taste
Freshly ground black pepper to taste
2     tablespoons olive oil
6     fingerling potatoes, sliced
1     bunch broccoli rabe
16     grape tomatoes, each cut in half

1. Scrub the clams and rinse well. Place them in a large pot with a tight-fitting lid, along with the water or wine. Cover the pot and bring to a boil. Steam about 5 minutes, until the clam shells open. Remove the clams and set aside to cool. When cool enough to handle, remove from shells and discard shells. Discard any clams that don’t open. Strain the cooking liquid and measure; add clam juice as needed to make 8 cups liquid. Reserve.
2. In a medium saucepan, melt the butter. Sauté the garlic, shallots, leek, onion, and thyme until fragrant. Slice the stems from the broccoli and cut them into smaller slices, reserving
the green florets. Add the stem slices and sauté until softened. Pour in the reserved broth. Add bay leaf and lemongrass.
Bring to a boil, then lower heat and simmer, covered, for
about 20 minutes.
3. In the meantime, blanch the broccoli florets in boiling, salted water for about 1 minute, until they turn bright green. Drain, then plunge the florets in a bowl of ice water to stop them from cooking. Drain again. Puree the broccoli in a blender or food processor, then place the puree in a bowl and set aside.
4. Remove the lemongrass and thyme sprig from the soup and discard. Puree the soup in a blender or food processor, working in batches if necessary, or use an immersion blender. If you want a smoother consistency, strain the soup through a fine-mesh sieve. Stir in the pureed broccoli florets and season with salt and pepper. Cover and keep warm over very low heat while you prepare the remaining vegetables.
5. In a large skillet, heat the olive oil. Add the potatoes and cook until they begin to soften. Add the broccoli rabe and sauté until softened. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Add the tomatoes and clams and continue sautéing until heated through.
6. To serve, divide the vegetables and clams among 6 bowls.
Ladle the broccoli chowder around. Serve warm.


White House Zucchini Quesadilla
Makes 4 servings

The White House offered these quesadillas as a lunch option during a Healthy Kids Fair on the White House lawn last October. Michelle Obama set the tone for the day by hula-hooping with children from seven Washington-area schools.
Adapted from A White House Garden Cookbook.

1     tablespoon canola oil
1     small onion, finely diced
1     medium zucchini, diced small
½     teaspoon ground cumin
½     teaspoon chili powder
1     tablespoon chopped parsley (optional)
1     (15 ounce) can white or navy beans, rinsed and drained
1½     cups shredded reduced-fat Cheddar cheese
6     (8 inch) flour tortillas
3/4    cup mild salsa

1. Preheat oven to 400°F. Spray a baking sheet with vegetable cooking spray or line with foil and spray the foil.
2. Heat the oil in a nonstick skillet. Add the onion and sauté for 1 minute. Add zucchini, cumin, chili powder, and parsley if using and cook until the zucchini and onion soften. Add beans and half the cheese and continue cooking until the cheese is melted.
3. Place three tortillas on prepared pan. Divide filling among the three tortillas, spreading evenly. Top each with ¼ cup salsa and another tortilla. Sprinkle with the remaining cheese. Bake until the tortillas are crisp and the cheese is melted. Cut into quarters and serve warm.


Radish and Green Bean Salad
Makes 8 servings

Children’s gardening groups usually devise interesting ways to use fresh vegetables. This salad from Kids Can Grow at the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension in Dover sets up a colorful contrast between green beans and red radishes.
Adapted from A White House Garden Cookbook.

2     pounds green beans, washed, ends trimmed
1/3     cup olive oil
1     tablespoon apple cider vinegar
Zest and juice of 1 lemon
2     cloves garlic, finely chopped
¼     teaspoon salt, or to taste
¼     teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, or to taste
8     radishes, ends trimmed, cut into thin slices
2     tablespoons thinly sliced parsley leaves

1.     Bring a large pot of water to a boil over high heat. Place a bowl of ice water near the sink.
2.     When water boils, sprinkle with some salt, then add the beans and blanch for 2 to 3 minutes, or until the color brightens. Drain the beans in a colander in the sink, then immediately place them in the ice water to stop them from cooking. When they’re cool, drain again.
3.     In a large bowl, whisk together the olive oil, vinegar, lemon zest and juice, garlic, salt, and pepper. Add the beans and radishes to the bowl and toss to coat with dressing. Taste and adjust the seasoning as needed. Add parsley, and toss again. Serve room temperature or chilled.

Stately desserts
Bill Yosses has created cookie plates, fruit crisps, rich cakes, and other sweet treats at the White House since 2006. Now we have the chance to eat dessert like a president—Yosses has written a cookbook with Melissa Clark, The Perfect Finish: Special Desserts for Every Occasion (W.W. Norton), which offers 80 of his dessert recipes.

Divided into seven chapters, the book lives up to its subtitle. There are Apple and White Cheddar Scones for brunch; “Deepest, Darkest” Chocolate Pudding to bring to a dinner party; and Spiced Orange Doughnuts for the holidays. Yosses explains each step thoroughly so that those who may not be accomplished bakers can follow along. What else would you expect from a chef who also co-authored Desserts For Dummies (For Dummies, 1997) and has taught cooking in schools through the “Spoons Across America” program?

Yosses told me he likes working with fresh fruits and other garden ingredients because of the “spectacular” fresh flavors. His recipe for Blackberry Buttermilk Bundt Cake with Orange Glaze (below) takes advantage of some of the natural qualities of the fruit. “I love the pop of the berries,” he said. “They bleed into the batter and make a nice purple.”

Before arriving at the White House, Yosses, a native of Toledo, Ohio, who holds an M.A. in French from Rutgers University, apprenticed in France. He worked for several years in New York at Joseph’s Citarella, Bouley, Montrachet, and under chefs Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller at Polo Restaurant. He assisted in the opening of Paul Newman’s Dressing Room in Westport, Connecticut. The Bushes hired Yosses as Holiday Pastry Chef in 2006, then offered him the position as Executive Pastry Chef, and the Obamas asked him to continue.

Blackberry Buttermilk Bundt Cake with Orange Glaze
Makes 1 Bundt cake, 10 to 12 servings

This recipe balances the sweetness of the berries with tangy buttermilk. Yosses recommends using a wooden spoon to fold the berries into the batter because it incorporates the berries without crushing them.
Adapted from The Perfect Finish.

22/3     cups all-purpose flour
1     tablespoon baking powder
½     teaspoon salt
½     teaspoon baking soda
1     cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened, plus additional for the pan
13/4     cups sugar
4     eggs, at room temperature
2     teaspoons vanilla extract
½     cup buttermilk
2     pints blackberries
½     cup freshly squeezed orange juice (from about 1 medium orange)
½     cup confectioners’ sugar

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Spray a Bundt pan with vegetable cooking spray. Use a paper towel to make sure the spray is well distributed. You don’t want this cake to stick!
2. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking powder, salt, and baking soda.
3. In a large bowl, use an electric mixer on medium-high speed to cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating until incorporated before adding the next. Beat in the vanilla.
4. Add half the flour mixture. Mix on low speed just until incorporated, then mix in the buttermilk, then the remaining flour mixture. Mix just until incorporated. Add blackberries and gently fold in using a wooden spoon.
5. Pour batter into the prepared pan. Bake about 1 hour, until a cake tester inserted
in the center comes out clean. Let the cake cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then invert onto a serving platter.
6. While the cake cools, combine the orange juice and confectioners’ sugar in a small saucepan. Simmer over low heat until the sugar is dissolved.
7. Using a skewer or a long, thin knife, prick deep holes all over the surface of the cake. Pour half the glaze over the cake, letting it seep into the holes. Let cool for 20 minutes more. Pour the remaining glaze over the cake and let set for 10 minutes. Slice and serve warm or at room temperature.