Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [90]
A pounding all-day rain on the seventh kept me indoors, urging me to get reacquainted with my desk where some deadlines were lurking around. When evening came, for a change, I was not too worn out from garden labor to put time into cooking up a special meal. We used several pounds of cucumbers and tomatoes to make the summer’s first gazpacho, our favorite cold soup, spiced with plenty of fresh cilantro. To round out the meal we tossed warm orzo pasta with grated cheese, lots of fresh-picked basil, and several cups of shredded baby squash. After three months of taxing our creativity to feed ourselves locally, we had now walked onto Easy Street.
The squash-orzo combination is one of several “disappearing squash recipes” we would come to depend on later in the season. It’s a wonderfully filling dish in which the main ingredient is not really all that evident. Guests and children have eaten it without knowing it contains squash. The importance of this will soon become clear.
By mid-month we were getting a dozen tomatoes a day, that many cucumbers, our first eggplants, and squash in unmentionable quantities. A friend arrived one morning as I was tag-teaming with myself to lug two full bushel-baskets of produce into the house. He pronounced a biblical benediction: “The harvest is bountiful and the labors few.”
I agreed, of course, but the truth is I still had to go back to the garden that morning to pull about two hundred onions—our year’s supply. They had bulbed up nicely in the long midsummer days and were now waiting to be tugged out of the ground, cured, and braided into the heavy plaits that would hang from our kitchen mantel and infuse our meals all through the winter. I also needed to pull beets that day, pick about a bushel of green beans, and slip paper plates under two dozen ripening melons to protect their undersides from moisture and sowbugs. In another week we would start harvesting these, along with sweet corn, peppers, and okra. The harvest was bountiful and the labors were blooming endless.
However high the season, it was important for us to remember we were still just gardeners feeding ourselves and occasional friends, not commercial farmers growing food as a livelihood. That is a whole different set of chores and worries. But in our family’s “Year of Local,” the distinction did blur for us somewhat. We had other jobs, but when we committed to the project of feeding ourselves (and reporting, here, the results), that task became a significant piece of our family livelihood. Instead of the normal modern custom of working for money that is constantly exchanged for food, we worked directly for food, skipping all the middle steps. Basically this was about efficiency, I told myself—and I still do, on days when the work seems as overwhelming as any second job. But most of the time that job provides rewards far beyond the animal-vegetable paycheck. It gets a body outside for some part of every day to work the heart, lungs, and muscles you wouldn’t believe existed, providing a healthy balance to desk jobs that might otherwise render us chair potatoes. Instead of needing to drive to the gym, we walk up the hill to do pitchfork free weights, weed-pull yoga, and Hoe Master. No excuses. The weeds could win.
It is also noiseless in the garden: phoneless, meditative, and beautiful. At the end of one of my more ragged afternoons of urgent faxes from magazine editors or translators, copy that must be turned around on a dime, incomprehensible contract questions, and baffling requests from the IRS that are all routine parts of my day job, I relish the short commute to my second shift. Nothing is more therapeutic than to walk up there and disappear into the yellow-green smell of the tomato rows for an hour to address the concerns of quieter, more manageable colleagues. Holding the soft, viny limbs as tender as