Eating From the Garden

One morning earlier this week I harvested 5 pounds of tomatoes.  Not an unusual harvest; I have a larger assortment of tomatoes sitting on my counter this morning, waiting to be turned into crushed tomatoes and tomato puree.  But on that particular morning I was in the mood for something more immediate.  As it happened,  I also had somewhat over 2 pounds of cucumbers in the fridge. The combination triggered thoughts of gazpacho.  The ratio of tomatoes to cucumbers felt perfect for gazpacho making, and so, with the addition of some pimientos de padron and basil, also from the garden, the taste of summer materialized in my blender.

The garden has shaped my eating habits and changed me; the garden and the farmer’s market because I never intended to be fully self-sufficient, and I believe in supporting local farmers.  But this year, what was once a belief held more in the abstract than always in practical reality, has burrowed deeper, helped me to redefine who I am and what I think is important, important to me alone perhaps, but nonetheless important to my life.

Much summer eating is simple, has always been simple.  Produce at its peak does not ask for much.  I have been eating fresh tomatoes and shishito peppers daily for at least six weeks now.  I am not yet tired of either, and I am certain I will miss them when the season ends.   Cool weather crops are figments of memory, although there are still herbs, scattered greens, a few miscellaneous vegetables here and there.  I fell behind after my fall.  But I am fortunate.  I do not depend on my small patch of earth to live.  Compared to grocery store produce, freshly picked vegetables are a carnival of flavor.  I already knew that.  I have supported local farmers and markets for years,  but it has also been years since I walked outside and picked my dinner.

I have always loved to cook.  When I was young I worked my way through Julia Child and Marcella Hazan. I made complicated things but I increasingly learned to love simple things as well, but it was a different kind of simplicity than the simplicity of my childhood, a simplicity based on taste, on respect for the ingredients, and increasingly, for me at any rate, on connection to the earth that nourishes us. 

As a result of my love of cooking, of food, and my burgeoning appreciate of taste, my first gardens were vegetable gardens.  I was not interested in flowers. I was interested in unusual, at the time, European produce and heirloom vegetables.  I saved seeds.  Because the nights often cooled down in early August when I was living further north, I had been known, during particularly cool seasons to dig up and pot pepper plants, growing them on a hot, glassed in sun porch, using a child’s paintbrush as a pollinating aid.

But this season is different. Gardening in Tennessee is the same, and yet different, than gardening in New York.  This year was always an experiment.  I decided early on that I would not fret over my failures, but celebrate abundance and the opportunity to learn.

What I suspect I did not count upon was the way I would change.  Perhaps it is not so much change but a refining, a rediscovery of more youthful passions combined with years of experience.  I love going out and wandering in the garden, picking a salad.  I have always thought that simple things, a salad, a roast chicken, fish, were often the most telling.  But the salads of my 60s are not the salads of my 20s.  I love picking herbs, flowers, garden plants.  I love tasting, combining colors and flavors.  I love the way even something as simple, as innocent even, as a salad reveals the ever evolving sense of terroir.

For a long time in this once-again single life I did not cook much.  Cooking for one did not seem to be as much fun as feeding other people.  I still loved to entertain.  But cooking, like everything else worthwhile in life, is a skill that blossoms with practice.  It feels so good to be in the kitchen again, whether I am simply layering herbs and greens, blistering peppers, making pickles and relish, grilling a steak, making soups, ratatouille, or moussaka.  I perfected gluten-free biscuits, going so far even as to develop a gluten-free, dairy-free, vegan version, that I find quite good — an accomplishment for a woman who finds that all dairy-free plant-milks have an off-putting mouth-feel and aftertaste.

Mostly the garden has rekindled my sense of play.  I have rediscovered my kitchen confidence, my sense of taste, but also of community, and a kind of creative exploration that rolls over into everything else in my life.  When I can throw parties again it will be easier because my footing is more sure.  This connection to earth and its own cycles, to the air, the water, is necessary to nourish body and soul, to nourish creativity.  It is not about just being in nature, but participating with it.  I have found that convenience is a form of disconnection.  I need less on my plate, not more.  

I am different than I was six months ago.  We are all different, each one of us, and truthfully this is always the case, even in non-pandemic years.  The tomato I pick today is not the same as the tomato I picked yesterday, its own terroir is different than that of its sibling on the same plant.  But this year, this year of uprooting, of tragedy, this year offers an opportunity as well as an unsettling. 

I am finding that I have about half the energy I think I used to have.  That too may be a myth, I may not have had as much energy as I believe.  At the moment, expect one post a week.  I barely made this week, but at least I am still here.