Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [150]
DRIED TOMATO PESTO
2 cups dried tomatoes 1 cup coarsely chopped walnuts
¾ cup olive oil
1/3 cup grated Parmesan
¼ cup dried basil
4 cloves garlic
2 tablespoons balsamic or other good vinegar
½ teaspoon salt
Puree all ingredients in a food processor until smooth. Add a little water if it seems too sticky, but it should remain thick enough to spread on a slice of bread.
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18 • WHAT DO YOU EAT IN JANUARY?
“January brings the snow…,” began the well-thumbed, illustrated children’s book about the seasons that my children cleaved to as gospel, while growing up in a place where January did nothing of the kind. Our sunny Arizona winters might bring a rim of ice on the birdbath at dawn, but by midafternoon it would likely be warm enough to throw open the school bus windows. Tucson households are systematically emptied of all sweatshirts and jackets in January, as kids wear them out the door in the morning and forget all about them by noon, piling up derelict sweatshirt mountains in the classroom corners.
Nevertheless, in every winter of the world, Arizona schoolchildren fold and snip paper snowflakes to tape around the blackboard. In October they cut out orange paper leaves, and tulips in spring, just as colonial American and Australian schoolchildren once memorized poems about British skylarks while the blue jays or cockatoos (according to continent) squawked outside, utterly ignored. The dominant culture has a way of becoming more real than the stuff at hand.
Now, at our farm, when the fully predicted snow fell from the sky, or the leaves changed, or tulips popped out of the ground, we felt a shock of thrill. For the kids it seemed like living in storybook land; for Steven and me it was a more normal return to childhood, the old days, the way things ought to be. If we remembered the snow being deeper, the walks to school harder and longer, we refrained from mentioning that to any young person. But the seasons held me in thrall.
And so those words from the Sara Coleridge poem, “January brings the snow,” were singing a loop in my head as I sat at the kitchen table watching the flakes blow around in one of those featherweight boxing-match snowstorms. It was starting to drift at bizarre angles, in very odd places, such as inside the eaves of the woodshed. The school bus would likely bring Lily home early if this kept up, but at the moment I had the house to myself. My sole companion was the crackling woodstove that warms our kitchen: talkative, but easy to ignore. I was deeply enjoying my solitary lunch break, a full sucker for the romance of winter, eating a warmed-up bowl of potato-leek soup and watching the snow. Soon I meant to go outside for a load of firewood, but found it easy to procrastinate. I perused the newspaper instead.
Half the front page (above the fold) was covered by a photo of a cocker spaniel with an arrow running entirely through his poor fuzzy torso. The headline—A MIRACLE: UNHARMED!—stood in 48-point type, a letter size that big-city newspapers probably reserve for special occasions such as Armageddon. Out here in the heartland, we are not waiting that long. Our local paper’s stance on the great big headline letters is: You got ’em, you use ’em.
The rest of it reads about like any local daily in the land, with breaking news, features, and op-eds from the very same wire services and syndicates that fill the city papers I also read. What sets our newspaper apart from yours, wherever you live, is our astounding front-page scoop—the unharmed transpierced dog, the burned-to-the-ground chicken house, the discovery of an unauthorized garbage dump. That, plus our own obituaries and a festive, locally produced lifestyle section.
We newspaper readers all have our pet vexations. Somewhere in one of those sections is the column we anxiously