Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [95]
The turkey poults had recently figured out how to fly out through this hatch and were enjoying the sunny days, returning to the indoor coop only to roost at night. Although most people think of chickens and turkeys as grain-eaters (and for CAFO birds, grain is the best of what they eat), they consume a lot of grass and leaves when they’re allowed to forage. Both chickens and turkeys are also eager carnivores. I’ve seen many a small life meet its doom at the end of a beak in our yard, not just beetles and worms but salamanders and wild-eyed frogs. (The “free-range vegetarian hens” testimony on an egg-carton label is perjury, unless someone’s trained them with little shock collars.) Our Bourbon Reds were skilled foragers, much larger than the chickens now, but a bit slower to mature sexually. It wasn’t yet clear how our dozen birds would sort themselves out in that regard. Frankly, I was hoping for girls.
My kids find this hard to believe, but when I was a child I’d never heard of zucchini. We knew of only one kind of summer squash: the yellow crooknecks we grew copiously in our garden. They probably also carried those down at the IGA in summertime, if any unfortunate and friendless soul actually had to buy them. We had three varieties of hard-shelled winter squash: butternuts, pumpkins, and a green-striped giant peculiar to our region called the cushaw, which can weigh as much as a third-grader. We always kept one of these on the cool attic stairs all winter (cushaw, not third-grader) and sawed off a piece every so often for our winter orange vegetable intake. They make delicious pies. And that is the full squash story of my tender youth. Most people might think that was enough.
Not my dad. Always on the lookout for adventure, he went poking into the new Kroger that opened in a town not far from ours when I was in my early teens. Oh, what a brave new world of culinary exotics: they carried actual whole cream pies down there, frozen alive in aluminum plates, and also vegetables of which we were previously unaware. Artichokes, for example. We kids voted for the pies but got overruled; Dad brought home artichokes. Mom dutifully boiled and served them with forks, assuming one would eat the whole thing. We tried hard. I didn’t touch another artichoke for twenty years.
But our lives changed forever the day he brought home zucchinis. “It’s Italian food,” he explained. We weren’t sure how to pronounce it. And while the artichokes had brought us to tears and throat lozenges, we liked these dark green dirigibles a lot. The next year Dad discovered he could order the seeds and grow this foreign food right at home. I was in charge of the squash region of the garden in those days—my brother did the onions—and we were diligent children. I’m pretty sure the point source of the zucchini’s introduction into North America was Nicholas County, Kentucky. If not, we did our part, giving them to friends and strangers alike. We ate them steamed, baked, batter-fried, in soup, in summer and also in winter, because my mother developed a knockout zucchini-onion relish recipe that she canned in jars by the score. I come from a proud line of folks who know how to deal with a squash.
So July doesn’t scare me. We picked our first baby yellow crooknecks at the beginning of the month, little beauties that looked like fancy