Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [33]
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GREENS SEASON MEAL PLAN
Sunday ~ Greek roasted chicken and potatoes, chard-leaf dolmades with béchamel sauce
Monday ~ Eggs in a Nest
Tuesday ~ Chicken salad (from Sunday’s leftover chicken) on a bed of baby greens
Wednesday ~ Pasta tossed with salmon, sautéed fresh chard, and dried tomatoes
Thursday ~ Dinner salad with boiled eggs, broccoli, nuts, and feta; fresh bread
Friday ~ Pizza with chopped sautéed spinach, mushrooms, and cheese
Saturday ~ Spinach lasagna
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4 • STALKING THE VEGETANNUAL
If potatoes can surprise some part of their audience by growing leaves, it may not have occurred to everyone that lettuce has a flower part. It does, they all do. Virtually all nonanimal foods we eat come from flowering plants. Exceptions are mushrooms, seaweeds, and pine nuts. If other exotic edibles exist that you call food, I salute you.
Flowering plants, known botanically as angiosperms, evolved from ancestors similar to our modern-day conifers. The flower is a handy reproductive organ that came into its own during the Cretaceous era, right around the time when dinosaurs were for whatever reason getting downsized. In the millions of years since then, flowering plants have established themselves as the most conspicuously successful terrestrial life forms ever, having moved into every kind of habitat, in infinite variations. Flowering plants are key players in all the world’s ecotypes: the deciduous forests, the rain forests, the grasslands. They are the desert cacti and the tundra scrub. They’re small and they’re large, they fill swamps and tolerate drought, they have settled into most every niche in every kind of place. It only stands to reason that we would eat them.
Flowering plants come in packages as different as an oak tree and a violet, but they all have a basic life history in common. They sprout and leaf out; they bloom and have sex by somehow rubbing one flower’s boy stuff against another’s girl parts. Since they can’t engage in hot pursuit, they lure a third party, such as bees, into the sexual act—or else (depending on species) wait for the wind. From that union comes the blessed event, babies made, in the form of seeds cradled inside some form of fruit. Finally, sooner or later—because after that, what’s the point anymore?—they die. Among the plants known as annuals, this life history is accomplished all in a single growing season, commonly starting with spring and ending with frost. The plant waits out the winter in the form of a seed, safely protected from weather, biding its time until conditions are right for starting over again. The vegetables we eat may be leaves, buds, fruits, or seeds, but each comes to us from some point along this same continuum, the code all annual plants must live by. No variations are allowed. They can’t set fruit, for example, before they bloom. As obvious as this may seem, it’s easy enough to forget in a supermarket culture where the plant stages constantly present themselves in random order.
To recover an intuitive sense of what will be in season throughout the year, picture a season of foods unfolding as if from one single plant. Take a minute to study this creation—an imaginary plant that bears over the course of one growing season a cornucopia of all the different vegetable products we can harvest. We’ll call it a vegetannual. Picture its life passing before your eyes like a time-lapse film: first, in the cool early spring, shoots poke up out of the ground. Small leaves appear, then bigger leaves. As the plant grows up into the sunshine and the days grow longer, flower buds will appear, followed by small green fruits. Under midsummer’s warm sun, the fruits grow larger, riper, and more colorful. As days shorten into the autumn, these mature into hard-shelled fruits with appreciable seeds inside. Finally, as the days grow cool, the vegetannual may hoard the sugars its leaves have