Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [157]
Growing sunflowers and beans is like that, for some of us. Cooking is like that. So is canning tomatoes, and making mozzarella. Doing all of the above with my kids feels like family life in every happy sense. When people see the size of our garden or the stocks in our pantry and shake their heads, saying “What a lot of work,” I know what they’re really saying. This is the polite construction in our language for “What a dope.” They can think so. But they’re wrong.
This is not to say family life is just la-di-dah around here. Classes and meetings and deadlines collide, mail piles get scary. Children forget to use their inside voices when charging indoors to demand what’s for dinner. Mothers may also forget to use them when advising that whoever’s junk is all over the table has three seconds to clear it up or IT’S GOING TO THE LANDFILL. Parent-teacher night rises out of nowhere, and that thing I promised to make for Lily’s something-or-other is never, ever due any time except tomorrow morning, Mama! Tears happen. On the average January weeknight, I was deeply grateful that I could now just toss a handful of spaghetti into a pot and reach for one of the quart jars of tomato sauce that Camille and I had canned the previous August. Our pantry had transformed. No longer the Monster Zucchini roadhouse brawl (do not enter without a knife), it was now a politely organized storehouse of healthy convenience foods. The blanched, frozen vegetables needed only a brief steaming to be table-ready, and the dried vegetables were easy to throw into the Crock-Pot with the chicken stock we made and froze after every roasted bird. For several full-steam-ahead weeks last summer, in countless different ways, we’d made dinner ahead. What do we eat in January? Everything.
But when the question comes up, especially when winter is dead upon us, I feel funny about answering honestly. Maybe I’m a little embarrassed to be a dweeby ant in a grasshopper nation. Or I’m afraid it will come as a letdown to confess we’re not suffering as we should. Or that I’ll sound as wacky as Chef January Pesto, to folks trying to eat locally who are presently stuck with farmers’ markets closed for the season.
If you’re reading this in midwinter and that is your situation, put the thought away. Just never mind, come back in six months. Eating locally in winter is easy. But the time to think about that would be in August.
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Getting Over the Bananas
BY CAMILLE
Many summers ago my best friend Kate, from Tucson, came out to visit our farm in Virginia for the first time. She was enamored of our beautiful hills, liked working in our garden, and happily helped pick blackberries from the sea of brambles that skirt the surrounding fields. She did her part, carrying with us the armloads of beans, cucumbers, squash, and tomatoes that came out of our garden on a daily basis. But one day, on a trip to the grocery store, we hit a little problem. When my parents asked if there was anything in particular she would like to eat, she replied, “Let’s get some bananas!”
My parents exchanged a glance and asked her for another suggestion.
“Why not bananas?” she asked, feeling really baffled by their refusal. My mother is not the type to say no to a guest. She waited until we were in the car to explain to Kate that it seemed wasteful to buy produce grown hundreds of miles away when we had so much fresh fruit right now, literally in our backyard. We’d picked two gallons of blackberries that very morning. She didn’t want to see them get