Pesto Morning

It had to be done, so this morning I girded my loins and marched to the garden after breakfast.  Plunging my arms up to the shoulder into the kale forest, I snapped off the thick bottom branches, some of which were two feet long.  When I had stuffed full a tall kitchen trash bag, I went back to the kitchen, followed by two disappointed dogs.

Wolfie and Bisou were disappointed because there is nothing they like better than raw kale stems.  In the past, I used to toss them a couple whenever I was in the garden, and I even thought it was sweet when Wolfie would snap off a leaf or two on his own and share it with Bisou.  But when this spring he pulled two baby kales up by the roots, I had to say many serious "leave it's" and make some shame inducing gestures (furrowed brow, arms at hips, torso bent over dog until tail droops and head turns aside).

I had to jam the kale leaves into the sink to wash them (found the season's first Japanese beetle), and then I put them into my big stockpot to boil for fifteen minutes, which I spent peeling garlic.  That huge bag of kale boiled down to two pounds, which I mixed with two cups each of Parmesan and olive oil, eight cloves of garlic, one cup of pecans, and some salt.

This went by stages into the food processor (a gift from the same daughter who introduced me to pesto made with kale).  How did our foremothers make pesto with a mortar and pestle?  It must have taken endless hours and brawny forearms.

When everything had been reduced to mush I had a total of...care to guess?  Eight cups of pesto.  I had hoped for something closer to maybe twenty cups, but at least it tasted divine.

How can something so good also be good for you?  I pondered the miracle of pesto as I began the final and least pleasant task:  stuffing one cup of oily, gooey pesto into each of eight freezer bags.  It was a messy business, but at least I got to lick the spatula.

But eight cups!  That's only eight meals.  If we eat pesto once every couple of weeks or so, we'll need twenty-four cups, which leaves sixteen yet to be made, i.e. two more batches just like the one I made today.  There's more than enough kale out in the garden for this.  Right now, I'm just not sure I have the courage.

You Are What You Eat

Morning At The Stove

It seems that I spend my life either taking things out of the freezer (fall and winter) or putting things into the freezer (spring and summer). The putting-into-the-freezer season is here, and I'd better get busy, if we want to eat next winter.

I harvested a big armful of rhubarb this morning.  I love those huge leaves, as big as elephant ears, and stack them on some wild rosebush sprouts that I'm trying to suffocate to death (it's almost impossible to kill a wild rosebush without using herbicides).  I chopped up the rhubarb stems and filled three one-gallon bags, each of which--with the addition of eggs, flour, oil and pecans--will make  a batch of six rhubarb bread loaves on some snowy afternoon.  When the chopping was done I was left with the trademark black fingernails that result from some weird reaction between the rhubarb juice and my skin and will take about a week to disappear.

I also picked a basketful of kale, which I tore into pieces and threw, stems and all, into the big vat of dog food that I cook every month.  In case you're wondering, this mixture of rice, veggies, eggs, oil, garlic and powdered milk does not constitute my dogs' entire diet--only about a quarter of it, the rest being a decent kind of kibble.  Wolfie and Bisou love it, though, and I feel that I'm ensuring that they will live forever....

The lavender has just started blooming, so I picked that, hoping to encourage the plants to produce more.  It's not been a good lavender year so far--lavender wants hot, dry weather instead of this chilly damp. I lost a couple of plants over the winter, and the survivors are putting out feeble little blooms.  I hung today's harvest in a bunch from the light fixture above the dining room table.  It doesn't look like much, but I can smell it every time I walk by.

I've been meaning to make arugula soup while the arugula, which does like chilly damp weather, holds out.  Also, my spinach crop has been negligible, but I should do something with it before the weather changes and it bolts.  Meanwhile, it's started raining again.  My green Vermont is so green these days that when I look out the window I almost feel like I'm swimming underwater in some woodland pond.

Plastic Nations

When I was in middle-school in Ecuador, in the late 1950s, it became fashionable among the girls in my class to carry books in transparent plastic bags.  Even among the privileged classes--many of my classmates' families owned huge tracts of land and had dozens of servants--plastic was scarce and prestigious.

You know how it is at that age--whatever the cool kids are doing, you want to do it too.  We were in the country only temporarily, owned no land and had only one live-in maid (in Ecuador even maids had maids in those days).  For months I longed for a clear plastic bag until my father happened to buy a ready-made shirt and let me have the bag it came in.

I thought I was just being cool at the time.  I didn't know I was recycling.

The other day I learned that Americans throw away 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour.  Even if some of those are recycled, that is a lot of bottles.  So many in fact that, along with assorted debris and contributions from other nations, they are forming big islands of floating garbage in the oceans.  UNESCO recently announced its plan to recognize one of these islands as a new state, "Garbage Patch," just to make a point.

A while ago I took stock of the plastic consumption in our house.  We didn't use many bottles, and most of those could be recycled.  But plastic bags--that's where we sinned.  I'm not talking about the occasional bag that we put our groceries in when we forgot to take along the New Yorker canvas tote, but about the dozens of thick plastic freezer bags that I used while carrying out my most earth-friendly endeavor:  preserving veggies from my garden.

Every year at harvest time I used to buy several boxes of freezer bags in pint and gallon sizes.  And whenever I took spinach or chard or kale out of the freezer, I would throw the bag away, until I realized that there was no reason to.  Only veggies blanched in water go into these bags--no oils or grease or meat.  Why couldn't I reuse them?  I began rinsing the bags thoroughly, drying them, crossing out the old labels, and storing them in a drawer until summer.  I've done this for the past year, and we haven't died of botulism yet.

Every few months I make a six loaves of zucchini or rhubarb bread, which I freeze in gallon bags.  After I take one of these loaves out of the freezer, I put the empty bag back in, crumbs and all, to await the next batch of bread.  The bags stay constantly frozen, and it hasn't done us any harm to reuse them in this way.

Recycling, I often think, is the last moral act left to those of us who who haven't sold all we have to go feed starving babies in Haiti.  I try to remember this every time we load up the car with a couple of months' worth of consumerist detritus and make our way over rutted back roads to the nearest dump.  I imagine myself on my death bed, looking back on my comfortable and essentially selfish life.  And I hope that I'll be able to take consolation from knowing that I did my best not to add to the territory of those floating plastic nations.

Greens

The spring avalanche takes me by surprise, year after year.  Only yesterday I was putting sheets over the apple trees, to protect them from frost.  Now they are covered with little offspring, as is everything else around here.

Today I saw that the spinach was developing those pointy leaves that, like a teenager's discontent, portend its imminent bolting.  This evening, as soon as the air cooled down a bit, I took defensive action, harvesting four big bags of spinach and mustard greens.  But you know how greens are.  By the time I got through rinsing and blanching and cooling and draining, the original six pounds had dwindled to five.

When I freeze vegetables, I always wish I had four, or even six, sinks instead of only two.  While one batch is blanching on the stove, another is being put through its two rinses of cool well water;  another is draining in a colander and dripping all over the counter;  the one that's just been blanched is cooling in a bowl filled with ice water;  and yet another is waiting impatiently, in yet another colander, to be put into freezer bags.

This year, I'm recycling freezer bags.  All winter long, as I used the veggies from our freezer, I rinsed out, dried and stored away the bags.  Now I am refilling them with this spring's harvest, relabeling them, and putting them in the freezer for next winter.  As I crossed out last year's dates, I noticed that this spring's avalanche isn't unique.  One year ago I was doing exactly what I am doing now--freezing spinach, mustard, and the first heads of broccoli--and feeling as rushed and harassed as I am now.

Besides recycling bags, I'm doing another weird "green" thing this year:  instead of yanking out the lamb's quarters that sprout in the vegetable beds, I'm letting them grow among the lettuce, spinach and mustard.  I'm snipping off those tender, buttery little leaves and putting them in salads, and even freezing them along with the greens.  I remember noticing in the past that when I threw a bunch of weeds into the chicken yard, the hens would go right for the lamb's quarters.  They knew what they were about.

(If you decide to try this, do not confuse lamb's quarters, which have roughly triangular small leaves growing along an upright stem, with lamb's ears, the low-to-the-ground, fuzzy gray ornamental.  I have no idea what lamb's ears taste like, but lamb's quarters are terrific.)

Memorial Day is around the corner, a date made especially significant in these latitudes because it is the time to finally put in the hot weather crops:  tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, pumpkins and squash.  I'm going to get those transplants tomorrow, and the day after that, whether the spinach has bolted or not, they're going into the spinach beds.

Bacon, My Favorite Health Food

If you are a health-conscious almost-vegetarian but share your table with a devout carnivore, bacon is a gift from the gods.  

It is the one food that will allow you to satisfy your partner's perennial longing for the muscle tissue of animals while assuaging your own concerns about preserving health, eating low on the food scale, living frugally, and saving the planet.

This is possible because bacon has an extremely strong taste.  One tablespoon of bacon fat can make an entire vat of kale not just tolerable but irresistible to even the most determined vegephobe.

To keep my conscience at a dull roar, I buy bacon from a nearby farm where pigs live out their lives on pasture, under the same sky and breathing the same air as I.  Yes, it's more expensive than supermarket bacon, but because a mere whisper of it goes such a long way, it is not expensive compared to other meats.


 I cook a pound of bacon at a time, then drain and blot it, wrap it in paper towels and store it in a plastic bag in the fridge, where it feeds us for a long, long time.  (The fat goes into the fridge as well, in case I should have a vat of kale to deal with, but mostly to flavor the dogs' food and give zest to their lives.)

The stuff is so strongly flavored that the slightest soupcon (why can't Blogger give us cedillas when we need them?) turns a too-healthy-tasting vegetable into a main dish with gravitas. That pound of bacon in my fridge gets doled out a slice at a time, chopped into tiny bits and stirred into rice, lentils, pasta, soup, chard, kale, green beans or  potatoes, all of which it magically deepens and enhances with its sweet, salty, earthy, bacony flavor.  

One thing I never serve bacon with is...eggs.  That is simply overkill, dietary excess, and living high on the hog.  Besides, the egg by itself is so delicate, so subtle, that to clobber it with a couple of slices of bacon is a kind of sin.

Otherwise, bacon is the answer to the contemporary cook's nutritional, economic, and ecological dilemmas.  And all because it is one of the few foods (along with, maybe, heavy cream) where moderation tastes like extravagance. 

Pumpkin Season, Deer-Hunting Season

I'm not sure when deer hunting season begins, but people around here are starting to talk about it. Pumpkin season, on the other hand, is at its height.

This year, before they perished from mildew, my vines produced seven medium-size ripe pumpkins, and seven green ones. The green ones are still sitting on the patio table, in the vain hope that the season's vanishing sun will turn them orange.

The ripe ones are in the freezer, and it is of them that I wish to speak. I have in the past tried storing pumpkins and squashes in the basement. The temperature there is just right, but the mice are not. This year I decided to cook the pumpkins and then puree and freeze them.

But first, I had to kill the pumpkins, which were lined up in their orange glory on my blue kitchen counter. And as I got out the big chopping block, I began to think about deer hunting.

Compared to killing a pumpkin, killing a deer is a piece of cake. All you do is discharge a firearm at a comfortable distance and voila, the deed is done. Killing a pumpkin is more of a gladiatorial combat kind of thing, where I attack the fruit with my newly-sharpened Chinese cleaver as it hardens itself against my blows.

Bang! Bang! goes the cleaver, sounding not unlike the hunters in our woods. In my case, it takes a number of attempts before I can slaughter the thing, and even then the pumpkin, like Till Eulenspiegel, has the last laugh, as one half of it goes skittering across the counter and onto the floor.

Then comes the part where you “dress” your prey, i.e., eviscerate it, though why this should be called “dressing” I don't know. In the case of a deer, as I understand it, you make a ventral slit and more or less scoop out the innards. Dorsal or ventral doesn't signify with a pumpkin, but the scooping is really something. The inside of a pumpkin is chock-a-block with seeds, and these seeds are attached to the flesh by a gooey, stubborn, slithery mesh of orange threads.

I have tried scooping out the pumpkin's innards with a spoon. It doesn't work: seeds and goo tend to come apart suddenly and scatter everywhere. I have tried rubber gloves, to put some distance between myself and the pumpkin gore, but they don't work either. The only thing that works is my bare hands, and my fingernails. This is slippery, sticky work, and only marginally preferable to field-dressing a deer, because there is no smell.

I save the pumpkin's innards for the chickens. This ensures that the seeds, which pass undigested through their GI tracts, will eventually end up in our garden, to rise again in spring as thousands of volunteers, only a few of which I will select for the next crop.

Now comes the easy part: I chop up the pumpkin carcases roughly and steam them until they are soft. I put them in the blender and reduce them to a mush, which goes into plastic bags and in the freezer.

Bright-colored veggies are supposed to be good for you. The fruits of my labors, with a little salt and butter and curry powder, will go into soups and side dishes. They'll look nice on our plates, come winter. Now if we just had some deer meat to go with them....