Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [42]
On Wednesday he went out again, and came back through the kitchen door with a conspicuous air of conquest. Triumphantly he held up his mesh bag: a few dozen fawn-colored, earthy, perfect morels. It wasn’t a huge catch, but it was big enough. By the weekend there would be more, enough to share with our neighbors. I grinned, and went to the refrigerator. A little while earlier I’d gone up to the garden and returned with my own prize lying across my forearm like two dozen long-stemmed roses: our most spectacular asparagus harvest ever.
We put our Mollies in a bowl of salt water to soak briefly prior to cooking. I’m not sure why, but our mushroom-hunting friends say to do this with morels, and I am not one to argue with wild mushroomers who claim the distinction of being still alive. I sat down at the kitchen table with Deborah Madison’s gorgeous cookbook Local Flavors, which works from the premise that any week of the year can render up, from very near your home, the best meal of your life. Deborah’s word is good. We cooked up her “Bread pudding with asparagus and wild mushrooms” for a fantastic Wednesday supper, seduced by the fragrance even before we took it out of the oven. Had I been worried that cutting the industrial umbilicus would leave us to starve? Give me this deprivation, any old day of the week.
On Saturday the weather was still cold and windy. I pulled my seed potatoes out of storage to check on them. Not a pretty picture: sick to death of the paper bags in which they’d been stored since last fall, they were sending long, white, exploratory sprouts into the darkness of the bottom drawer of the refrigerator.
We decided for their sakes that the wind had dried the ground enough for us to till the potato patch with the tractor. A few weeks ago we’d tried that too early, and the too-wet ground behind the tractor rolled over in long curls of thick, unworkable clay clods. Today the soil was still a bit too clumpy to be called perfect, but “perfect” is not the currency of farming. I followed behind the tiller breaking up clods with a hefty Italian grape hoe, the single piece of equipment I rely on most for physical fitness and sometimes therapy. We hoed out three deep rows, each about seventy feet long, in which to drop our seed potatoes. If that seems like a lot for one family, it’s not. We do give some away, and save some for next year’s seed, but mostly we eat them: new potatoes all summer, fingerlings in the fall, big indigo blues and Yukon Gold bakers all winter. In my view, homeland security derives from having enough potatoes.
On the same long day we dropped peas into furrows, seeded carrots, and set out more of the broccoli we’d planted in succession since mid-March. My baby onion plants (two hundred of them) were ready, so I tucked the string-bean-sized seedlings into rows along the cold, damp edge of the upper field: Stockton Reds, Yellow Sweets, Torpedos, and a small, flat Italian favorite called “Borretana cipollini.” I was anticipating our family’s needs, knowing I would not be purchasing vegetables from the grocery store next winter. Two onions per week seemed reasonable.
Onion plants can take a light frost, so they don’t have to wait until the full safety of late spring. Their extreme sensitivity is to day length: “short day” onions like Vidalias, planted in autumn in the deep South, are triggered to fatten into bulbs when day length reaches about ten hours, in May or so. By contrast, “long day” onions are planted in spring in the north, as early