Deliciousness

There has been some recent deliciousness occurring in my kitchen. The cause: This summer, I am participating in a local farm share, a privileged activity of the socially-conscious green (and maybe, young and urban) professional, which was recently featured in the NYTimes. You pay in advance for produce. Every week, one person picks up that week's allocation of vegetables harvested from the farm. We then struggle to consume the fresh produce without having any of it rot. It is wonderful.

I like the farm share for two primary reasons.

First, it reminds me of when I was growing up and we subsisted from my father's vegetable garden.

From the first time I can remember (until the age of 12 or so), we were living well below the poverty line. We got by with hand-me-down clothes, exchanged labor, a wood stove, hoarded food stamps from the time before they were issued with an expiration date, government surplus milk and butter, bulk macaroni and cheese, and our backyard garden. For several years, we literally lived off of our land. In fact, the garden (and our verdant property) is one of the things I remember and identify with most strongly about growing up. That garden was serious business. When my mother wasn't waitressing, she was canning, pickling and stewing things, dehydrating bushels of peaches from the local orchard and cajoling me to eat ratatouille (p'toui, ratatouille). She was the benevolent mistress of the kitchen: mixer; canning rig; juicer; food processor; knives and berry-grinder. My father, on the other hand, forced us to labor in the garden: hoeing; weeding; planting; picking; digging beds; aerating and turning the compost pile; and he was a serious killjoy whenever I tried to use the tiller.

Every piece of that 1/2 acre was pivotal to me, whether I loved it or hated it. My sisters and I didn't really appreciate what the garden did for us (let us eat unlimited fresh vegetables for the cheap cost of labor). Yet, I still remember it vividly. My sisters and I slacked off and whined about having to weed and played 'King of the Hill' on a giant pile of horse manure. The neighbors stole our tomatoes and we kept deer away with bone meal, marigolds, snippets of human hair and a pistol. Papa loved to grow chili peppers, but invariably, these huge wreaths of dried peppers just ended up hanging on the kitchen wall, adorning his 'Life is Hell' calendar. I used to sneak out to the corn patch and eat ears of sweet corn raw and would then make dolls out of the silk and husks. The sole year we had a popcorn crop, we had to sit outside for hours to pop and pry all the dried kernels off the ears into mason jars. My thumbs were blistering and bruised, the mosquitoes were biting me, Papa wouldn't let me stop to go inside and read even though I was trying hard not to cry, and I hated the experience so much that I was still resentful several months later when Mom finally made kettle corn. We once planted the flowering vines where the compost pile had been the year previously. That resulted in a bumper crop of cucumbers and zucchini so massive that Mom had nightmares about pickling and we couldn't give them away fast enough. Papa chewed huge wads of Juicy Fruit gum (to stretch it out over gopher holes). One of my first lies of omission was over that garden. I used to eat all of the dill plants before they bloomed and would decimate our mint plants, even after overhearing my mother complain to my father that something kept eating all the herbs out of the side garden. I tried abstaining, Mom. Really, I did. New dill shoots and mint leaves are just so much tastier and tender than mature leaves. We tried to grow our own fruit, but our peach tree got a bark infection in its first year, while our apple tree bore mealy, nasty-tasting fruit. The grapes were sour green wine grapes (not eating grapes). The strawberries were worth every sunburn. I was perennially confused by our walnut tree. Specifically how the hell one turned the fresh green tennis-ball-like lumps (that dyed everything yellow or brown) into those things Mom used in Christmas cookies. I tried hammers, screwdrivers, my shoes, my teeth, all to no avail. We usually defaulted to spending a day every summer trying to pry walnuts out of those husks before giving up and pitching them at semis. Memories. I loved every inch of that garden - from the coreopsis I wasn't allowed to pick, to the black raspberry thicket where I used to hide, and the accursed patch of horseradish that always seemed to kill our pumpkins. Living in the city, I've really missed both the experience of a garden and the deliciousness of its produce.

My parents joked that we had to have a garden because I ate so many vegetables and they were worried about pesticides... and that's what I told my schoolmates who accused us of being too poor to buy groceries. It turns out that both claims were truths. I didn't appreciate how poor we were then, not until recently, but that doesn't diminish my pride in our garden. Self-sufficiency is absolutely not a mark of social deficiency. However, while I am in full support of my parents' ingenuity, I have been completely unable to emulate it. I am a spendthrift, particularly with regards to food, and that often feels obscene, particularly with the rising cost of groceries (and its impact on lower- and moderate-income families). So! The farm share is my first serious attempt at forcing myself to make do with what we get each week, to avoid over-buying groceries and letting them go to waste, and to get used to cooking on a regular (and irregular) schedule rather than going out to dine and literally eating my money.

Second, nothing is more delicious than fresh vegetables, fresh out of a garden. Unless it's being in the garden, and eating fresh cherry tomatoes off the plant.

Now for the summary (where I repeat myself and hope I'm sounding clever). If you are lacking the time (or more importantly, RoHS-compliant soil) to grow your own food, a farm share is the next best thing. You pay (in my case $150) in advance for what turns out to be about 4 months worth of vegetables. That's $10/week for enough vegetables to stuff yourself silly on. Onions. Beets. Turnips. Carrots. Chinese cabbage. Lettuce. Spinach. Tomatoes. Kale. Garlic (and skates). Squash. Zucchini. Cucumbers. You get all of the joys of the earth without any of the labor, birds, cutworms, deer, mites, droughts, storms, winds or thieving neighbors. It's then an exercise (in my case, a serious learning exercise) to learn how to cook what you have, make it tasty, and most importantly, just eat or preserve all of it. We've had good luck with all our recipes this week... so far.

Saag/Korma Hybrid (a.k.a. I disavow any knowledge of regional Indian cuisine):

1. Saute finely chopped onions with pressed garlic in a fair amount of rapeseed/canola oil and butter (as a substitution for clarified butter or ghee).
   
2. Once the onions are translucent, fold in about a pound of washed, finely chopped spinach.
3. Add delicious spices, such as coriander, ginger, cumin, fennel, cinnamon and chili powder. Saute. Do not steam.
   
4. Separately, wash and dice up summer squash (we had a variety that half-hybridized with zucchini and was quite sweet).
   
5. Fry the summer squash in hot canola oil, and as they start to cook spice them with mace, paprika, salt and cinnamon.
   
6. Add yogurt to the spinach-onion-spice mix. Reduce.
7. Fold in the spiced fried squash. Reduce until creamy.
8. Serve over rice.
   

Beet and Cucumber Soup (a.k.a. I love cold cucumber bisque):

1. Start out peeling the beets (save the greens). Dice a cup's worth of them and cook in boiling water.
   
2. Juice half a lemon into a blender. Add some salt, some pepper and a handful of chopped onion.
   
3. Peel a large cucumber, and cut into medium-sized pieces. Add this to the blender.
   
4. Add the cooked beets (drain the water).
   
5. Blend!
6. Add a cup of sour cream to the mixture. Blend!
   
7. Add milk and blend until the texture is appropriate.
8. Serve chilled with sour cream.
   

Vegetable Ragout (a.k.a. One eats what there is to eat.):

1. Saute chopped onions with pressed garlic in a fair amount of olive oil.
   
2. As the onions are partially cooked, add vegetables in the order of most flavorful/slowest-to-cook (mushrooms, carrots, broccoli, celery, peas, corn, peppers, whatever you have on hand). We added broccoli, beet greens and lemon juice. Saute.
3. Add tomato sauce and spices (thyme, rosemary, oregano, salt, pepper) (and optional things like tomatoes and meat). Stir, then cover and let steam. If you need more liquid, add vegetable stock or bullion and water.
   
4. Fold in chopped cabbage and cover.
   
5. Serve as is, with rice, or over pasta.
   

To make Nee-chan's step-boyfriend's peasant-food recipe, start with the ragout, skip steps 2 and 3, go straight to 4 (folding cabbage into sauteed onions and steaming) and then add a pile of cooked lentils. It doesn't look like much, but it is very simple, tasty and filling.



Fig 1. Hybridized Zucchini-Squash