Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [153]
While declining to return to the canned-pear-half-with-cottage-cheese cookery I learned in high school Home Ec, I’ve reconsidered some of my presumptions. Getting over the frozen-foods snobbery is important. The broccoli and greens from our freezer stand in just fine for fresh salads, not just nutritionally but aesthetically. I think creatively in winter about using fruit and vegetable salsas, chutneys, and pickles, all preserved back in the summer when the ingredients were rolling us over. Chard and kale are champion year-round producers (ours grow through the snow), and will likely show up in any farmers’ market that’s open in winter. We use fresh kale in soups, steamed chard leaves for wrapping dolmades, sautéed chard in omelets.
Another of our cold-weather saviors is winter squash, a vegetable that doesn’t get enough respect. They’re rich in beta-carotenes, tasty, versatile, and keep their youth as mysteriously as movie stars. We grow yellow-fleshed hubbards, orange butternuts, green-striped Bush Delicata, and an auburn French beauty called a potimarron that tastes like roasted chestnuts. I arranged an autumnal pile of these in a big wooden bread bowl in October, as a seasonal decoration, and then forgot to admire them after a while. I was startled to realize they still looked great in January. We would finally use the last one in April. I’ve become a tad obsessive about collecting winter squash recipes, believing secretly that our family could live on them indefinitely if the world as we know it should end. My favorite so far is white beans with thyme served in a baked hubbard-squash half. It’s an easy meal, impressive enough for company.
With stuff like this around, who needs iceberg lettuce? Occasionally we get winter mesclun from farming friends with greenhouses, and I have grown spinach under a cold frame. But normal greens season is spring. I’m not sure how lettuce specifically finagled its way, in so many households, from special-guest status to live-in. I tend to forget about it for the duration. At a January potluck or dinner party I’ll be taken by surprise when a friend casually suggests, “Bring a green salad.” I’ll bring an erstwhile salad of steamed chard with antipasto tomatoes, crumbled goat cheese, and balsamic vinegar. Or else everybody’s secret favorite: deviled eggs.
In our first year of conscious locavory (locivory?) we encountered a lot of things we hadn’t expected: the truth about turkey sex life; the recidivism rate of raccoon corn burglars; the size attained by a zucchini left unattended for twenty-four hours. But our biggest surprise was January: it wasn’t all that hard. Our winter kitchen was more relaxed, by far, than our summer slaughterhouse-and-cannery. November brought the season of our Thanksgiving for more reasons than one. The hard work was over. I’d always done some canning and freezing, but this year we’d laid in a larder like never before, driven by our pledge. Now we could sit back and rest on our basils.
“Driven” is putting it mildly, I confess. Scratch the surface of any mother and you’ll find Scarlett O’Hara chomping on that gnarly beet she’d yanked out of the ground. “I’ll never go hungry again” seems to be the DNA-encoded rallying cry for many of us who never went hungry in the first place. When my family headed into winter my instincts took over, abetted by the Indian Lore books I’d read in childhood, which all noted that the word for February in Cherokee (and every other known native tongue) was “Hungry Month.”
After the farmers’ market and our garden both closed for the season, I took