life and death in the garden

Learning to love what you grow [RECIPE]

My people are not gardeners.

My father used to say that my great grandparents were so bad at farming that even the animals looked at their potatoes and cabbage and said feh; you can keep it.

I did find out a few years ago that my mother helped plant her uncle's victory garden in Brooklyn back when she was a very young girl; she told me that she dug and dug and planted and planted, and when I asked her what it was she grew, she couldn't tell me.

"No idea," she said, shrugging.

"Did you eat any of it?" I asked.

"No idea," she said, shrugging.

Which makes sense because to this very day, not a single vegetable passes my mother's lips on even a bi-annual basis.  She’s not like my late mother-in-law, who grew up on a small subsistence farm and ate absolutely everything that her mother grew, absolutely all the time, and who was able to give me five recipes for What to Do With Rutabagas off the top of her head, even at 93. So why did my mother grow something if she didn't actually eat it? She was from Brooklyn. She was a city girl. For her, it was the childlike act of planting and getting dirty; and it was the joyous thrill of seeing something she had stuck in the ground turn into something edible. Even if she hated it.

I remember those days myself, back when Susan and I were first together. We built gigantic garden boxes in her sun-drenched backyard; I'd sit in the dirt out there, in a moronic city girl outfit I cobbled together for myself --- Banana Republic overall shorts and red rubber clogs --- digging around, pulling weeds, staking up tomato plants. The first summer we were together, after my dot com went belly up and I was living up there almost full time, we planted everything we could think of: summer squash, winter squash, cucumbers, radishes, kale, four different kinds of lettuce, wax beans, sugar snap peas, two different kinds of gorgeous, ruby red beets. Even though I hated ---I loathed --- beets, and I still do.

One morning, we went down to the garden to discover that something or someone --- birds, chipmunks, deer, woodchucks --- had eaten all of our beets, and our beet greens. Little chewed-on spindly nubs sat in the boxes where the lush vegetables had once lived and grown nearly to full vegetablehood. I went into a rage. How could this happen? I was like Ripley in Alien only with a rake, even though I couldn't actually stomach the things that were being eaten.

Sometimes, Susan said, stuff just dies. It gets gorgeous, it looks perfect, everything is fine and great, and then other things decide that it's just as gorgeous as you think it is, and they get there first, usually the morning you're planning on going out with your little basket. It is what it is.

And then she went back to weeding.

I realized, when she said that, why my family had never been fond of gardening: it was a huge amount of work under relentless threat of disappointment, of losing something you worked so hard to create, of trotting down the stairs in the morning, tra la, and seeing it ravaged. And there not being a damned thing you could do about it.

The following year, when I left the city and Susan and I were living together full time, I had become a full-fledged, dyed-in-the-wool vegetable gardener. I'd tossed the idiot overalls and the clogs and the fancy leather gloves and instead worked in an old pair of khakis that I picked up at Goodwill, and rubberized gloves that Susan's mother had found somewhere for $2. I had even become adept at composting, the definition of which is taking dreck and turning it into more dreck. Because vegetables, I discovered that summer, really love dreck. Waste not, want not.

"Look at you, Miss Gardener," my father said when he and my stepmother came up to visit on my birthday, arriving while I was in the front yard, deadheading the roses in a straw hat. I looked like Lillian Gish in The Whales of August.  He gave me a check for my birthday, with which I promptly bought a rototiller.

"What's next for you---a John Deere?" he asked, laughing. It was; a few months later, I was driving around the backyard on a green and yellow lawn tractor instead of pushing the mower around haphazardly, and carving out crop circles that probably could have been seen from outer space.

The night that my father and stepmother visited, our dinner was simple: we pulled masses of tiny summer squash and snap peas from their vines, and ate them gently boiled for a few seconds, showered with rich green olive oil, and handfuls of fresh herbs and sea salt. We made a pot of bouillabaisse and ate it with a loaf of French bread, and it was one of the best birthday dinners I'd ever had.

One Saturday morning a month or so later, on August 3rd, Susan and I were out in the garden, up to our knees in dirt; it was a hot, sweaty morning --- the kind where everything sticks to you, and you look down at your filthy, disgusting legs and they look like the filthy, disgusting legs of you as a child after a day of running around outside --- and we were both soaked to the skin in damp, compost-covered tee shirts and shorts. We went into the house to get a glass of water when the phone rang.

Please come now, my stepbrother said. There's been an accident.

I don't even remember hanging the phone up; maybe I didn't. We left the tools in the garden and grabbed the car keys, and not bothering to change, raced to New York, where my father and stepmother had been in a car accident which, for him, ultimately was fatal: he died a week later, twenty-one years ago tomorrow. When we got to the hospital that day and I sat with him for an eternity in the emergency room, I looked down at my hands, my nails, my legs, my feet, my shirt, caked with mud and the lifeblood of the sweet and earthy food we'd shared with him a few weeks before, for my birthday dinner.

I was a gardener, at last, and though I knew that he found the idea ironic, it heartened me to know that the last time I'd seen him, he'd enjoyed — really enjoyed — the fruits of my labor. I continue to miss him every minute of every day.

 Boiled Baby Summer Squash and Snap Peas

I know it sounds crazy, this idea of boiling vegetables when you stopped going down that road years ago, after leaving your mother's home. Because, if you grew up in the 60s and 70s the way I did, odds are you ate vegetables that were boiled beyond all recognition. But you'll have to trust me: the act of boiling very fresh vegetables quickly and carefully works beautifully for two reasons. Providing you pay attention to them and don’t walk away while they’re cooking, giving them a warm bath cooks them perfectly, and then when you plunge them into ice water to shock them, they hang onto their delicate flavor and retain their crispness. On the other hand, water boils at 212 degrees, while steam — and many of us favor steaming for purely psychological reasons; we think it's a gentler method, which, in fact, it's not — can reach temperatures far higher than that, which results, if you steam your vegetables, in mushy, slimy, floppiness. This recipe, which was inspired by nothing more than what was growing in our garden at the time I made it, is simplicity at its most delicious. Feel free to increase the amount of vegetables as desired; just increase the amount of herbs and oil proportionally.

Serves 3-4 small portions

5-6 small yellow summer squash

1/2 pound sugar snap peas, tipped and tailed

3/4 cup of chopped or lightly pounded herbs (I prefer parsley and thyme here)

excellent quality extra virgin olive oil

coarse sea salt, to taste (I prefer Maldon)

Place a large bowl filled with ice cubes in your sink; fill it with water, and set it close to your stove.

Bring a large pot of water to a boil over high heat. Add the summer squash and cook for three minutes. Add the sugar snap peas and continue to cook for another two minutes. Using a spider or a long-handled sieve, lift out the vegetables and plunge them into the ice water for a minute.

Remove the vegetables to a serving platter and shower them with the herbs, tossing well to distribute them. Drizzle with as much or as little good peppery olive oil as you like (I vote for more), sprinkle with salt, and serve at room temperature.

Options

• Using a vegetable peeler, shave long, wide strips of Parmigiana Reggiano, or better yet, an aged sheep's milk cheese, over the plate

• Toss the vegetables with pitted, black, oil-cured olives

• Toss leftovers with excellent quality Ventresca tuna and a handful of soaked and drained capers

• Coarsely chop leftovers and toss them with al dente pappardelle, or any wide, ribbony pasta, fresh lemon juice, and feta, and serve at room temperature

• Sweat the leftovers in a large cast iron pan, toss with a few beaten eggs and a grating of Parmigiana Reggiano, and bake at 350 degrees F until golden. Serve in wedges.