By now, the American public is pretty aware that first lady Michelle Obama grows all sorts of vegetables — sweet potatoes, chard, kale — in the backyard of the White House, but author Clara Silverstein took it a step further. She gathered recipes to show how to put those White House veggies to use. On Friday, she visited the National Archives to discuss her book, “A White House Garden Cookbook: Healthy Ideas from the First Family to Your Family.” Silverstein, a Boston food writer, came to Washington twice to visit the garden. “It’s a very lush place,” she said. “Believe me, there’s not a weed in that garden.” She then hunted for recipes using those ingredients. “The criteria was they each had to have at least one ingredient that the White House garden also grew, or had to have been made by the Obamas or another presidential administration from the past,” she said. The book includes recipes for Ronald Reagan’s hamburger soup (yes, there are veggies in that), Thomas Jefferson’s pea soup (peas were his favorite) and Michelle Obama’s holiday shortbread cookies (no veggies in that one).
She also talked about how the Obama administration is tight-lipped about what doesn’t grow in the garden. “They don’t like to talk about their failures,” she said, noting that the peas were having trouble in the first season. “I haven’t heard about anything out and out failing, but I probably wouldn’t.”
