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

Mind-Numbing Weather

Like the inhabitants of a castle preparing against an attack, my spouse and I have shut every window, drawn down the shades, opened the basement door, and hefted the room air-conditioner onto one of the upstairs windowsills.  Hot weather is on the way.

It's the weather that I moved to Vermont to escape, the kind of heat and humidity that reduce me to molluscan status.  Every summer the heat gets stronger and stays longer. If and when the kudzu vines and the cave crickets arrive from the lower latitudes, I'm moving north.

Meanwhile, all I want to do is hibernate or rather, estivate ("a state of dormancy or torpor during summer").  This is unfortunate because, now that the ridiculously long spell of cool weather is over, the garden is exploding.

Instead of writing, I should be out there picking kale to make into pesto.  I should be picking and freezing chard, pulling up the bolted lettuces and planting something else in their space.  Straightening the tomato cages that the daily storms have felled. Weeding the front flower beds, the back flower beds, the vegetable beds.   And pruning the four big lilacs before the job gets too big for me to handle.

But these days the only job I like is picking lavender.  In the morning, after the dew has dried but before the sun unleashes its full fury, I go out with my basket and cut the spears where a single cobalt bud has opened.  It hasn't been a good year for lavender, for although the winter was cold there wasn't enough snow cover.  I lost a couple of bushes, and the survivors aren't flowering well.  But I'll take whatever they give me.

I leave the lavender in its basket on the dining room table, where it releases clouds of scent into the humid air.  I should be tying it into bunches and hanging it up to dry, but that seems like a big effort right now.

Instead, I go and sit blankly by the indoor pond and watch the goldfish play in the fountain stream. Don't ask me to lift a finger, express an opinion, or make any sense.  I'm estivating.

P Is For Pesto

P is for Pesto, which makes all things palatable--even kale.

I have gone on at length before about the industrial quantities of kale that each year burst forth from a single 4'x4' bed.  I should count myself lucky.  Nutritionists adore kale, richest of all foods in vitamins, minerals, and the moral satisfaction that comes from eating what is good for you.

But, nutritionists aside, I haven't met many people--and nobody under age 35--who like kale.  I haven't even succeeded in talking myself into liking it, not even enhanced with that all-purpose enhancer, bacon.  Not even made into cream soup.  Nothing, not a long boil, or my blender, or my teeth, is able to break down the mighty cellulose in those cell walls.  At best, kale's flavor reminds me of inferior broccoli.  And yet kale keeps on growing, spring through fall, undeterred by frost or wind.

Undeterred by bugs, too.  Squash bugs destroy the squash;  the caterpillars of the white cabbage butterfly devastate the broccoli.  But nothing, not even Japanese beetles, goes near the kale.  What does that tell you?  But I should amend that:  Wolfie and Bisou love kale.  Every afternoon Wolfie breaks off a couple of leaves, gives one to Bisou, and I can hear them out there crunching on the stuff.  I think they think the leaves are a kind of bone.

But my relationship with kale changed the happy day when I heard about kale pesto.  With the help of massive amounts of garlic, olive oil, pine nuts and Parmesan, kale becomes a barely-there vehicle for those infinitely superior flavors.  A vehicle full of vitamins and yes, moral satisfaction too.  Who says that virtue has to taste bad?

L Is For Longing

These days my longing--and I'm not the only gardener to feel this way--is for a killing frost.  The vegetable garden is in its late-summer, decadent, disheveled, yet curiously productive stage.

The squashes that I managed to save from the squash bugs are curing in the shed.  The vines, with their cargo of killer eggs, nymphs, and adult bugs are returning to the Earth somewhere out in the front field.  Meanwhile the  pumpkin vine, which somehow escaped the bug plague, is succumbing to a different scourge.  This one turns the green leaves first silver, then brown, but doesn't bother the pumpkins.

I have, for the first time in my gardening life, given up on the broccoli.  The thirty-two plants that I bought in a blizzard in March have not stopped to take a breath since I put them in the ground.  I have frozen all the broccoli that my freezer can hold.  I have given away pounds of the stuff.  Now I'm just letting it bloom its heart out, and as soon as I can spare five minutes I'll pull out all the plants and give them to those magicians, the hens, who will transmute them into eggs.

The tomato plants have died of some mysterious disease that killed them from the bottom up.  That has not, however, prevented them from producing quantities of fruit, many of which are still clinging to their parent's cadaver and ripening slowly. 

The beans, which as usual I planted late, are just starting to set fruit, and there is frost in the forecast for later this week.  I know I should leave the beans to meet their fate on their own, but my maternal nature  rebels against letting those tender babies freeze to death.  Since they're in a 4'x4' raised bed, it should only take me a couple of minutes to throw an old shower curtain over them.  And remember to take it off in the morning.  And put it on again at night, and take it off....

The coming frost, unfortunately, will not help where the kale and chard are concerned.  These will continue to haunt me well into November, demanding to be picked and washed and chopped and blanched and disposed of somehow.  Thank heaven for the local food bank, which gives meaning and raison d'etre to the otherwise absurd productivity of my nine 4'x4' beds.

I cannot figure out how so much food can come out of so little space--and no particular thanks to my gardening talents.  All I do is throw the used hen house litter on the beds in the fall, bung in some seeds and transplants in the spring, pull a couple of weeds while the plants are young, and then harvest until my arms give out.

Yesterday I gathered seventeen pounds of veggies for the food bank.  (Wolfie helped by breaking off a number of kale branches for himself and Bisou to munch.)  You think that finished my harvest season?  Alas, I barely made a dent.  I finally had to stop picking because of the mosquitoes, who were bent on storing up my blood for the winter.  As I walked towards the house I could hear behind me the whisper of the kale and chard, growing new leaves.

Greens, Endless Greens

We're deep into stick season here--you know, the weeks after the maples and the sumac and the Virginia creeper drop their leaves (sic transit gloria mundi) and all you see is gray sticks under gray skies.


In the vegetable garden, the beans, tomatoes and other fair-weather friends are long gone.  The raised bed frames have been installed, though, alas, not yet filled with dirt and compost.  All the raised bed frames, that is, except for the three that are supposed to go on the beds where stuff is still growing.

And what stuff is still growing so lushly and relentlessly that you'd think it's midsummer instead of stick season?  The two immortals, of course:  chard and kale.

Every week since June I have given the local food bank between five and eleven pounds of c and k.  I have shared the bounty with my friends and my dogs (the latter love to gnaw on raw kale).  I have blanched and frozen quarts of the stuff.  And still it keeps coming.

And because I know that any night now the winds will howl and it will get really cold--like, into the teens--and there will be no more fresh home-grown vegetables until next April, I feel compelled to keep harvesting while I may.

So it's chard or kale, kale or chard, every night.  I blend the green du jour into soups, fold it into omelettes, mix it with cheese in quiches.  Slather it with bechamel and hide it in casseroles.  Boil it with rice and feed it to the dogs.
  
Out of recipes as well as patience, I echo the exasperated cry of Henry II, who'd had it up to here with Thomas a Becket: "Will no one rid me of these turbulent greens?"

Any volunteers out there?

Pesto Morning

Sunny, bright, chilly, perfect weather to finish filling the third raised bed in the vegetable garden, which we did. It's too late in the growing season to plant anything, so I will let the compost do its thing and sometime in early March, before the snow melts, I'll plant spinach in it.

Because the kale was crying out to be harvested, I made kale pesto. (Thanks, Alison, for that first recipe, which I lost twice.) The garden produces tons of kale, and it's just about the most nutritious thing you can put in your mouth, but alas, I don't much like it. I'm crazy about pine nuts, though, and garlic and olive oil and Parmesan cheese, so pesto is a good solution to my kale dilemma.
For half a pound of kale without stems you'll need half a cup of olive oil, a quarter cup of nuts (pine nuts or walnuts or pecans), two garlic cloves, some salt and half a cup of Parmesan. Cook the kale for about fifteen minutes. (Don't throw out the water! Save it for soup, or pour it on the dog's food, or give it to your house plants--it's good stuff.) Put the drained kale and other ingredients except the Parmesan in the blender or food processor and blend until smooth. Mix in the Parmesan. Serve this on some pasta and I guarantee that you won't leave the table hungry.

I had two pounds of kale to dispose of, so I quadrupled the recipe and blended it in four batches. The blending part is a pain, since you have to stop and start the blades over and over. I suspect a food processor is easier, but I don't have one of those.

After mixing in the Parmesan I divided the whole into ten portions of about 3/4 cup each. This stuff is so rich that that amount poured on some spaghetti is more than enough for the two of us. I took my pesto-filled freezer bags down to the freezer and thought how nice it will be, on ten cold winter evenings, to linger by the wood stove with a book, knowing that dinner is practically taken care of.

Woman Overwhelmed By Kale