Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [138]
Who can decide? A sucker for seed-catalog prose, I ordered six varieties and planted about a dozen cloves of each. Buried under the soil with a blanket of straw mulch on top, each clove would spend the winter putting out small, fibrous roots. The plant begins working on top growth in early spring, as soon as air temperatures rise above freezing. By midsummer it will have from eight to a dozen long leaves, with one clove at the base of each leaf nestled into the tight knot of a new head. I pull them in late June, and tend to think of that moment as the end of some sort of garden fiscal year. It never really stops, this business of growing things—garlic goes into the ground again in October, just as other frost-killed crops are getting piled onto the compost heap. Food is not a product but a process, and it never sleeps. It just goes underground for a while.
October ceded to us the unexpected gifts of a late first frost: a few more weeks of tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and basil. Usually it’s late September when the freeze comes to knock these tender plants down to black stalks—a predictable enough event that still somehow takes us by surprise every time. The late evening newscast predicting it will create a mild hubbub in the neighborhood, sending all the gardeners out in the chill to scoop up green tomatoes and pull peppers in the dark.
Both peppers and eggplants are tropical by nature, waking slowly to summer and just getting into full swing in late September. We were happy for the October bonus, bringing in bushels of blocky orange, red, and yellow peppers at our leisure instead of under siege. In the evenings we built fires in the patio fire pit and lined the peppers up shoulder-to-shoulder on the grill like sunbathers on a crowded beach. The heat makes their skins sear and bubble. Afterward we freeze them by the bagful, so their smoky flavor can lively up our homemade pizzas all winter. If it’s the scent of burning leaves that invokes autumn for most people, for us it’s roasting peppers.
My most nostalgic harvest rituals from childhood are of the apple variety. My parents took us on annual excursions to a family-owned orchard in the next county where we could watch cider being pressed, and climb into the trees to pick fruit that the clay-footed adults couldn’t reach. We ate criminal quantities of apples up in the boughs. Autumn weather still brings that crisp greenish taste to the roof of my mouth. I realized other members of my family must share this olfactory remembrance of things past, when our October gathering spontaneously rallied into a visit to an apple orchard near our farm. We bought bushels, inspired to go home and put up juice and apple butter.
I don’t know what rituals my kids will carry into adulthood, whether they’ll grow up attached to homemade pizza on Friday nights, or the scent of peppers roasting over a fire, or what. I do know that flavors work their own ways under the skin, into the heart of longing. Where my kids are concerned I find myself hoping for the simplest things: that if someday they crave orchards where their kids can climb into the branches and steal apples, the world will have trees enough with arms to receive them.
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Splendid Spuds
BY CAMILLE
Dietitians seem to love or hate potatoes. This vegetable is a great source of quality carbohydrates that will keep you feeling energized and satisfied. Or else, it should be avoided because its sinful starchiness will make you gain weight like crazy.
So which is it? First, it’s not safe to generalize. The Idaho spuds at grocery stores are just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve eaten potatoes ranging from gumball to guinea-pig size, golden, brick red, or even brilliant blue. When you dig those out of the ground they look almost black, but after a good scrub they have a deep purplish shine you would expect in a jewelry store, not under layers of caked mud.