Some veggies offer 'a little something extra'

My Louisiana-born mother had a word she used for a little something extra thrown in. It was "lagniappe" (pronounced lan-YAP), originally from the Andean Quechua language but Frenchified in New Orleans. A lagniappe could be a little gift with a purchase, like the 13th doughnut that makes a baker's dozen or the warm-up of your coffee at a local diner. With Mother, it was often a bit added to something she cooked. So when she made egg-in-the-hole, for which a disk is cut and removed from a slice of bread and an egg is dropped into the resulting round hole and fried, she would also fry and serve the little disk alongside. "That's the lagniappe," she'd say.

Now and then a vegetable crop will give you a lagniappe in addition to the main harvest. With hardstem garlic, it's the luscious green stems, or scapes, that you cut in midsummer, long before garlic heads are dug in fall. The leaves of broccoli and Brussels sprouts, generally overlooked in favor of the more glamorous parts, are an extra as tasty as kale.

While you're waiting for winter squash to ripen, the tips of their vines can be braised or dipped in batter and fried. Chives offer a lagniappe of purple blossoms, for a beautiful and pungent garnish. Elderberries, before there are any berries, offer clusters of white blossoms for elderflower fritters.

A gardener cook in pursuit of a varied diet keeps a lookout for such unexpected bonuses. This spring I grew baby bok choy, a green best suited to the fall garden in climates where warm weather comes on fast. But a spring crop is welcome, too, if you can slip one in. So tasty are the crisp mild-flavored leaves, good in salads and stir-fries alike.

I grew the bok choy (a variety I especially like called Mei Qing Choi) in an unheated greenhouse and let it sit there a bit too long. While going to seed, it sent up straight stalks with sparse but tender leaves and a topknot of buds, like tiny sprigs of broccoli.

There are a number of crops you grow on purpose that look like that. Broccoli raab, an Italian specialty also called rapini, is a common one. Its fans, fully embracing its natural bitterness, cook it in garlicky olive oil and consume it with gusto. But the wide world of the brassicas also offers up mellower versions. One of my favorites is a vegetable called Happy Rich, a cross between regular broccoli and the Chinese gai lan. It's pale bluish-green with the sweetest little broccoli-like tips you ever tasted. It's grown specifically for those but follows up with a lagniappe of beautiful white flowers, great as filler in flower bouquets or just as an offering to the bees.

In the case of my bolted bok choy, the edibility of the topknots was an unexpected bonus. I cut a few handfuls, trimmed to about 6 inches long and sauteed them in several ways - with olive oil, with butter and with sesame oil. After just five minutes of cooking, the stems were tender, the leaves and buds without bitterness - a generous end to a favorite crop's season.