Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [151]
I’d worked on our relationship, moving through the stages of bafflement, denial, and asking this guy out loud, “Where do you live, the moon?” I knew the answer: he didn’t. He was a local fellow writing just for our region of bountiful gardens and farms, doing his best I’m sure. But no one was ever keener on outsourcing the ingredients. The pumpkins of his world all grow in cans, it goes without saying. If it’s fresh ingredients you need, you can be sure the combinations he calls for won’t inhabit the same continent or season as one another, or you. On this cozy winter day when I was grooving on the snow that stuck in little triangles on my windowpanes, he wanted to talk pesto.
To lively up anything from pasta to chicken, he said, I should think about fresh basil pesto this week. How do I make it? Easy! I should select only the youngest, mildest flavored leaves, bruising them between my fingers to release the oils before dumping them in my blender with olive oil to make a zingy accompaniment to my meal.
Excuse me? The basil leaves of our continent’s temperate zones had now been frozen down to their blackened stalks for, oh, let’s count: three months. Sometimes at this time of year the grocery has little packages containing approximately six leaves of the stuff (young and mild flavored?) for three bucks. If I hauled a big bag of money out to my car and spent the next two days on icy roads foraging the produce aisles of this and the neighboring counties, I might score enough California-grown basil leaves to whip up a hundred-dollar-a-plate pesto meal by the weekend. Gee, thanks for the swell idea.
Okay, I know, it’s a free country, and I’m a grouch. (Just two weeks later this chef took off for other work in a distant city where he remains safe from my beetle-browed scrutiny.) But if Arizona children have to cut out snowflakes in winter, maybe cooking-school students could be held to a similar standard, cutting out construction-paper asparagus in springtime, pumpkins in the fall, basil in summer. Mightn’t they even take field trips to farms, four times a year? In our summer garden they’d get a gander at basil bushes growing not as a garnish but a crop. When the leaves begin releasing their fragrance into the dry heat of August, we harvest whole plants by the bushel and make pesto in large batches, freezing it in pint-sized bags. At farmers’ markets it starts showing up by the snippet in June and in bulk over the next two months: fresh, fragrant, and inexpensive enough for nongardeners to put up a winter’s supply.
Pesto freezes beautifully. When made in season it costs just a fraction of what the grocery or specialty stores charge for pestos in little jars. It takes very little space when frozen flat in plastic bags, then stacked in the freezer like books on a shelf. A pint bag will thaw in a bowl of warm water in less time than it takes to boil the pasta. Tossed together with some pecans or olives, dried tomatoes, and a grind of Parmesan cheese, it’s the best of easy meals. But the time to think of bruising those leaves with our fingers to release the oils would be August. Those of us who don’t live in southern California or Florida have to plan ahead, not just for pesto but for local eating in general. That seems obvious. But apparently it isn’t, because in public discussions of the subject, the first question that comes up is always the same: “What do you eat in January?”
I wish I could offer high drama, some chilling tales of a family gnawing on the leather uppers of their Birkenstocks. From childhood I vividly