How to Roast a Lamb_ New Greek Classic Cooking - Michael Psilakis [12]
As was his manner, my father laid out the garden in a very specific and practical way. The rows ran from right to left from fence post to fence post. First were the cucumbers. We used many of them, so there were always at least three rows. Then came three rows of tomatoes, also a common ingredient in Greek cooking, followed by rows of peppers, eggplants, string beans, and the melons: watermelon, cantaloupe, and honeydew. Around the perimeter, we had herbs: mint, oregano, dill, amaranth, basil, and parsley.
My father had created a trough system that ran down the right side of the garden and branched off to each row so that he could water the plants efficiently. And while the trough system was ingenious, perhaps the pièce de résistance was the string-bean trellis made from an old swing set that my father had rigged, minus the swings, with two crossbeams and countless vertical poles. To my father, gardening wasn’t a hobby. It meant sustenance and nourishment. It was the circle of life: birth, tending and growing, harvest, and a life-giving death when the fruits of the garden nourished family and friends.
Indeed, gardening was of vital importance to my whole extended family. We had the luxury of a yard, but some of my uncles did not. So they’d use every green space available to them. Outside their homes, tomatoes sprang up on the thin lane of soil that ran between the two cement tracks intended to be a driveway. They’d plant secret gardens in public parks, safely hidden from view behind bushes. They’d even seek out clearings beyond the trees that lined the Northern State Parkway, a four-lane highway with no shoulder. They’d just pull off onto the grass on the side of the highway, walk into the woods, and search until they found a hidden spot to plant that year’s garden. To them, a tomato, cucumber, or watermelon meant life.
Every day I would wait for my father to return home from work, change into his old clothes, and step outside and into the garden. I would proudly show him that I was doing the things he had taught me. As a young boy that meant pulling the weeds and trying to screw the garden hose up to the trough by myself or, when I was older, tilling the soil and watering the plants in just the way he had shown me. I never viewed it as a chore. It was precious time alone with my father. Gardening was important to him, so it became important to me. It gave him peace, and in turn I found peace in it too.
And those vegetables! I can still remember the vivid tastes, smells, and textures. “Smell this,” my father said as he held a ripe tomato under my nose. “What do you smell?”
“Dirt,” I answered.
“Earth,” he corrected me. “You smell the earth.”
We’d eat from the garden on a daily basis. While my father and I were working in the yard—mowing the lawn, trimming the trees, weeding the garden—my mother would take the vegetables we had just picked and soak them in an ice water bath. When they were almost as cold as the ice itself, she would pull them out, peel and chop cucumber, red onion, and feta cheese in a bowl, liberally douse them with red wine vinegar, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with oregano and salt, and toss it all together. With great ceremony, my mother would bring the salad and a loaf of bread to our old beat-up picnic table outside and we would all gather around to savor the bounty that we had each had a part in creating.
The taste of that salad, after working in the hot sun, was reward enough. The crisp, icy, cold snap of those cucumbers and the sourness of the vinegar had me scrunching my face in a pucker, but, as soon as I recovered, I’d be back for more, the next time with a piece of bread to dip in the mélange of flavors that had collected in the dressing at the bottom of the bowl.
On weekends,