Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

by Barbara Kingsolver

  2 loaves French bread (16 to 18 inches)

  2 8-ounce balls mozzarella

  3 large tomatoes

  Basil leaves

  Cut loaves of bread lengthwise. Arrange bread on baking sheets and layer with grilled vegetables first, slices of mozzarella next, and slices of tomato last. Drizzle with a little bit of olive oil and place the baking sheets under a broiler until cheese is melted. Garnish with leaves of fresh basil. Cut in pieces to serve.

  CHERRY SORBET

  2 heaping cups pitted cherries

  3/4 cup sugar (or honey to taste)

  1/3 cup water

  While one person pits the cherries, another can combine sugar and water in a saucepan over low heat. Stir until the sugar has dissolved completely (syrup will be clear at this point) and allow the mixture to cool. When cherries are pitted combine them with syrup in a blender. Blend on low until smooth, then refrigerate mixture until you are ready to pour it into an ice cream maker.

  DISAPPEARING ZUCCHINI ORZO

  3/4-pound package orzo pasta (multicolored is fun)

  Bring 6 cups water or chicken stock to a boil and add pasta. Cook 8 to 12 minutes.

  1 chopped onion, garlic to taste

  3 large zucchini

  Olive oil for saute

  Use a cheese grater or mandoline to shred zucchini; saute briefly with chopped onion and garlic until lightly golden.

  Thyme

  Oregano

  1/4 cup grated Parmesan or any hard yellow cheese

  Add spices to zucchini mixture, stir thoroughly, and then remove mixture from heat.

  Combine with cheese and cooked orzo, salt to taste, serve cool or at room temperature.

  ZUCCHINI CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES

  (Makes about two dozen)

  1 egg, beaten

  1/2 cup butter, softened

  1/2 cup brown sugar

  1/3 cup honey 1 tablespoon vanilla extract

  Combine in large bowl.

  1 cup white flour 1 cup whole wheat flour

  1/2 teaspoon baking soda

  1/4 teaspoon salt

  1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

  1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

  Combine in a separate, small bowl and blend into liquid mixture

  1 cup finely shredded zucchini

  12 ounces chocolate chips

  Stir these into other ingredients, mix well. Drop by spoonful onto greased baking sheet, and flatten with the back of a spoon. Bake at 350deg, 10 to 15 minutes.

  Don't tell my sister.

  Download these and all other Animal, Vegetable, Miracle recipes at www.AnimalVegetableMiracle.com

  SQUASH-SEASON MEAL PLAN

  Sunday ~ Braised chicken with squash, corn, and cilantro

  Monday ~ Grilled vegetable panini, served with green salad

  Tuesday ~ Sliced cold chicken (cooked Sunday) and zucchini orzo

  Wednesday ~ Grilled hamburgers with grilled green beans and squash

  Thursday ~ Egg-battered squash blossoms stuffed with cheese, served with salad

  Friday ~ Pizza with grilled baby squash, eggplant, caramelized onions, and mozzarella

  Saturday ~ Lamb chops and baked stuffed zucchini

  * * *

  13 * LIFE IN A RED STATE

  August

  I've kept a journal for most of the years I've been gardening. I'm a habitual scribbler, jotting down the triumphs and flops of each season that I always feel pretty sure I'd remember anyway: that the Collective Farm Woman melons were surprisingly prissy; that the Dolly Partons produced such whopping tomatoes, the plants fell over. Who could forget any of that? Me, as it turns out. Come winter when it's time to order seeds again, I always need to go back and check the record. The journal lying open beside my bed also offers a handy incentive at each day's end for making a few notes about the weather, seasonal shifts in bloom and fruiting times, big family events, the day's harvest, or just the minutiae that keep me entertained. The power inside the pea-sized brain of a hummingbird, for example, that repeatedly built her nest near our kitchen door: despite her migrations across continents and the storms of life, her return date every spring was the same, give or take no more than twenty-four hours.

  Over years, trends like that show up. Another one is that however jaded I may have become, winter knocks down the hollow stem of my worldliness and I'll start each summer again with expectations as simple as a child's. The first tomato of the season brings me to my knees. Its vital stats are recorded in my journal with the care of a birth announcement: It's an Early Girl! Four ounces! June 16! Blessed event, we've waited so long. Over the next few weeks I note the number, size, and quality of the different tomato varieties as they begin to come in: two Green Zebras, four gorgeous Jaune Flammes, one single half-pound Russian Black. I note that the latter wins our summer's first comparative taste test--a good balance of tart and sweet with strong spicy notes. I describe it in my journal the way an oenophile takes notes on a new wine discovery. On the same day, I report that our neighbor wants to give away all her Russian Blacks on the grounds they are "too ugly to eat." I actually let her give me a couple.

  As supply rises, value depreciates. Three weeks after the **First Tomato!** entry in my journal, I've dropped the Blessed Event language and am just putting them down for the count: "10 Romas today, 8 Celebrity, 30 Juliet." I continue keeping track so we'll know eventually which varieties performed best, but by early August I've shifted from numbers to pounds. We bring in each day's harvest in plastic grocery sacks that we heave onto a butcher's scale in our kitchen, jotting down the number on a notepad before moving on to processing.

  At this point in the year, we had officially moved beyond hobby scale. My records would show eventually whether we were earning more than minimum wage, but for certain we would answer the question that was largely the point of this exercise: what does it take, literally, to keep a family fed? Organizing the spring planting had been tricky. How many pumpkins does a family eat in a year? How many jars of pickles? My one area of confidence was tomatoes: we couldn't have too many. We loved them fresh, sliced, in soups and salads, as pasta sauces, chutneys, and salsa. I'd put in fifty plants.

  In July, all seemed to be going according to plan when we hauled in just over 50 pounds of tomatoes. In August the figure jumped to 302 pounds. In the middle of that month, our neighbor came over while I was canning. I narrowed my eyes and asked her, "Did I let you give me some tomatoes a few weeks ago?"

  She laughed. She didn't want them back, either.

  Just because we're overwhelmed doesn't mean we don't still love them, even after the first thrill wears off. I assure my kids of this, when they point out a similar trend in their baby books: dozens of photos of the first smile, first bath, first steps...followed by little evidence that years two and three occurred at all. Tomatoes (like children) never achieve the villainous status of squash--they're too good to wear out their welcome, and if they nearly do, our in-town friends are always happy to take them. Fresh garden tomatoes are so unbelievably tasty, they ruin us utterly and forever on the insipid imports available in the grocery. In defiance of my childhood training, I cannot clean my salad plate in a restaurant when it contains one of those anemic wedges that taste like slightly sour water with a mealy texture. I'm amazed those things keep moving through the market, but the world apparently has tomato-eaters for whom "kinda reddish" is qualification enough. A taste for better stuff is cultivated only through experience.

  Drowning in good tomatoes is the exclusive privilege of the gardener and farm-market shopper. The domain of excess is rarely the lot of country people, so we'll take this one when we get it. From winter I always look back on a season of bountiful garden tomatoes and never regret having eaten a single one.

  At what point did we realize we were headed for a family tomato harvest of 20 percent of a ton? We had a clue when they began to occupy every horizontal surface in our kitchen. By mid-August tomatoes covered the countertops end to end, from the front edge to the back
splash. No place to set down a dirty dish, forget it, and no place to wash it, either. The sink stayed full of red orbs bobbing in their wash water. The stovetop stayed covered with baking sheets of halved tomatoes waiting for their turn in the oven. The cutting board stayed full, the knives kept slicing.

  August is all about the tomatoes, every year. That's nothing new. For a serious gardener, the end of summer is when you walk into the kitchen and see red. We roast them in a slow oven, especially the sweet orange Jaune Flammes, which are just the right size to slice in half, sprinkle with salt and thyme, and bake for several hours until they resemble cow flops (the recipe says "shoes," if you prefer). Their slow-roasted, caramelized flavor is great in pizzas and panini, so we freeze hundreds of them in plastic bags. We also slice and slide them into the drawers of the food dryer, which runs 24-7. ("Sun-dried" sounds classy, but Virginia's sun can't compete with our southern humidity; a low-voltage dryer renders an identical product.) We make sauce in huge quantity, packed and processed in canning jars. By season's end our pantry shelves are lined with quarts of whole tomatoes, tomato juice, spaghetti sauce, chutney, several kinds of salsa, and our favorite sweet-sour sauce based on our tomatoes, onions, and apples.

  August brings on a surplus of nearly every vegetable we grow, along with the soft summer fruits. Squash are vegetable rabbits in terms of reproductive excess, but right behind them are the green beans, which in high season must be picked every day. They're best when young, slender, and super-fresh, sauteed and served with a dash of balsamic vinegar, but they don't stay young and slender for long. We've found or invented a fair number of disappearing-bean recipes; best is a pureed, bright green dip or spread that's a huge crowd pleaser until you announce that it's green bean pate. It keeps and freezes well, but needs a more cunning title. Our best effort so far is "frijole guacamole," Holy Mole for short.

  We process and put up almost every kind of fruit and vegetable in late summer, but somehow it's the tomatoes, with their sunny flavor and short shelf life, that demand the most attention. We wish for them at leisure, and repent in haste. Rare is the August evening when I'm not slicing, canning, roasting, and drying tomatoes--often all at the same time. Tomatoes take over our life. When Lily was too young to help, she had to sit out some of the season at the kitchen table with her crayons while she watched me work. The summer she was five, she wrote and illustrated a small book entitled "Mama the Tomato Queen," which fully exhausted the red spectrum of her Crayola box.

  Some moment of every summer finds me all out of canning jars. So I go to town and stand in line at the hardware store carrying one or two boxes of canning jars and lids, renewing my membership in a secret society. Elderly women and some men, too, will smile their approval or ask outright, "What are you canning?" These folks must see me as an anomaly of my generation, an earnest holdout, while the younger clientele see me as a primordial nerdhead, if they even notice. I suppose I'm both. If I even notice.

  But canning doesn't deserve its reputation as an archaic enterprise murderous to women's freedom and sanity. It's straightforward, and for tomato and fruit products doesn't require much special equipment. Botulism--the famously deadly bacterium that grows in airless, sealed containers and thus can spoil canned goods--can't grow in a low-pH environment. That means acidic tomatoes, grapes, and tree fruits can safely be canned in a simple boiling water bath. All other vegetables must be processed in a pressure canner that exposes them to higher-than-boiling temperatures; it takes at least 240degF to kill botulism spores. The USDA advises that pH 4.6 is the botulism-safe divide between these two methods. Since 1990, test kitchens have found that some low-acid tomato varieties sit right on the fence, so tomato-canning instructions published years ago may not be safe. Modern recipes advise adding lemon juice or citric acid to water-bath-canned tomatoes. Botulism is one of the most potent neurotoxins on our planet, and not a visitor you want to mess with.

  Acidity is the key to safety, so all kinds of pickles preserved in vinegar are fair game. In various parts of the world, pickling is a preservation method of choice for everything from asparagus to zucchini chutney; I have an Indian recipe for cinnamon-spiced pickled peaches. But our Appalachian standard for the noncucumber pickle is the Dilly Bean, essentially dill pickles made of green beans. This year when I was canning them on a July Saturday, Lily and a friend came indoors from playing and marched into the kitchen holding their noses, wanting to know why the whole house smelled like cider vinegar. I pointed my spoon at the cauldron bubbling on the stove and explained I was making pickles. I do wonder what my kids' friends go home to tell their parents about us. This one dubiously surveyed the kitchen: me in my apron, the steaming kettle, the mountain of beans I was trimming to fit into the jars, the corners where my witch's broom might lurk. "I didn't know you could make pickles from beans," she countered. I assured her you could make almost anything into pickles. She came back an hour later when I was cleaning up and my finished jars were cooling on the counter, their mix of green, purple, and yellow beans standing inside like little soldiers in an integrated army. She held her eyes very close to one of the jars and announced, "Nope! They didn't turn into pickles!"

  Every year I think about buying a pressure canner and learning to use it, so I could can our beans as beans, but I still haven't. Squash, beans, peas, okra, corn, and basil pesto are easy enough to steam-blanch and put into the freezer in meal-sized bags. But since tomato products represent about half the bulk of our stored garden produce, I'd rather have them on the shelf than using up electricity to stay frozen. (We would also have to buy a bigger freezer.) And besides, all those gorgeous, red-filled jars lining the pantry shelf in September make me happy. They look like early valentines, and they are, for a working mom. I rely on their convenience. I'm not the world's only mother, I'm sure, who frequently plans dinner in the half-hour between work and dinnertime. Thawing takes time. If I think ahead, I can dump bags of frozen or dried vegetables into the Crock-Pot with a frozen block of our chicken or turkey stock, and have a great soup by evening. But if I didn't think ahead, a jar of spaghetti sauce, a box of pasta, and a grate of cheese will save us. So will a pint of sweet-and-sour sauce baked over chicken breasts, and a bowl of rice. I think of my canning as fast food, paid for in time up front.

  That price isn't the drudgery that many people think. In high season I give over a few Saturdays to canning with family or friends. A steamy canning kitchen full of women discussing our stuff is not so different from your average book group, except that we end up with jars of future meals. Canning is not just for farmers and gardeners, either. Putting up summer produce is a useful option for anyone who can buy local produce from markets, as a way to get these vegetables into a year-round diet. It is also a kindness to the farmers who will have to support their families in December on whatever they sell in August. They can't put their unsold tomatoes in the bank. Buying them now, in quantity, improves the odds of these farmers returning with more next summer.

  If canning seems like too much of a stretch, there are other ways to save vegetables purchased in season, in bulk. Twenty pounds of tomatoes will cook down into a pot of tomato sauce that fits into five one-quart freezer boxes, good for one family meal each. (Be warned, the fragrance of your kitchen will cause innocent bystanders to want to marry you.) Tomatoes can even be frozen whole, individually on trays set in the freezer; once they've hardened, you can dump them together into large bags (they'll knock against each other, sounding like croquet balls), and later withdraw a few at a time for winter soups and stews. Having gone nowhere in the interim, they will still be local in February.

  In some supermarket chains in Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, shoppers can find seasonal organic vegetables in packages labeled "Appalachian Harvest." The letters of the brand name arch over a sunny, stylized portrait of plowed fields, a clear blue stream, and the assurance: "Healthy Food, Healthy Farms, Close to Home."

  Labels can lie, I am perfectly aware. Plenty of corporations use logo
trickery to imply their confined meat or poultry are grown on green pastures, or that their tomatoes are handpicked by happy landowners instead of immigrants earning one cent per pound. But the Appalachian Harvest vegetables really do come from healthy farms, I happen to know, because they're close to my home. Brand recognition in mainstream supermarkets is an exciting development for farmers here, in a region that has struggled with chronic environmental problems, double-digit unemployment, and a steady drain of our communities' young people from the farming economy.

  But getting some of Appalachia's harvest into those packages has not been simple. Every cellophane-wrapped, organically bar-coded packet of organic produce contains a world of work and specific promises to the consumer. To back them up, farmers need special training, organic certification, reliable markets, and a packaging plant. A model nonprofit called Appalachian Sustainable Development provides all of these in support of profitable, ecologically sound farming enterprises in a ten-county region of Virginia and Tennessee. In 2005, ten years after the program began, participating family farms collectively sold $236,000 worth of organic produce to regional retailers and supermarkets, which those markets, in turn, sold to consumers for nearly $0.3 million.

  The Appalachian Harvest packing house lies in a mountain valley near the Virginia-Tennessee border that's every bit as gorgeous as the storybook farm on the product label. In its first year, the resourceful group used a converted wing of an old tobacco barn for its headquarters, using a donated walk-in cooler to hold produce until it could be graded and trucked out to stores. Now the packing plant occupies the whole barn space, complete with truck bays, commercial coolers, and conveyor belts to help wash and grade the produce. Tomatoes are the cash cow of this enterprise, but they are also its prima donnas, losing their flavor in standard refrigeration, but quick to spoil in the sultry heat, so the newest major addition at the packing house is a 100-by-14-foot tomato room where the temperature is held at 56 degrees.