Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

by Barbara Kingsolver

  If the potatoes in the produce section are already sprouting, on the other hand, it means they're ready to get up. They're edible in that condition, as long as they haven't been exposed to light and developed a green cast to the skin. Contrary to childhood lore these photosynthesizing potatoes won't kill you, but like all the nightshades--including tomatoes and eggplants--all green parts of the plant contain unfriendly toxins and mutagens. Sprouting and a tad wrinkly, though, they're still okay to eat. Rolled in a sturdy paper bag in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator they'll keep six months and more. But when I open our labeled bags of seed potatoes in April I always find a leggy mess, the whole clump spiderwebbed together with long sprouts.

  That means the wake-up call has come. We toss them in the ground and hill them up. From each small potato grows a low, bushy plant with root nodules that will grow into eight or more new potatoes. (Fingerling potatoes produce up to twenty per hill, though they're smaller.) The plants have soft leaves and a flower ranging from white to pink or lavender, depending on the variety. In the Peruvian Andes, where farmers still grow many more kinds of potatoes than most of us can imagine, I've seen fields of purple-flowered potatoes as striking in their way as a Dutch tulip farm in bloom.

  The little spuds in the roots continue to gain size until the plant gets tired and dies down, four to five months after planting. Few garden chores are more fun for kids than recovering this buried treasure at the end of the season. We plant eight different kinds, plus a mongrel bag that Lily calls the "Easter egg hunt" when we dig them: I turn up each hill with a pitchfork and she dives in after the red, blue, golden, and white tubers. For my part it's a cross between treasure-hunt and ER, as I have to shout "Clear!" every time I dig, to prevent an unfortunate intersection of pitchfork and fingers.

  Even though the big score comes at summer's end, we'd already been sneaking our hands down into the soil under the bushy plants all summer, to cop out little round baby spuds. This feels a bit like adolescent necking antics, but is a time-honored practice described by a proper verb: grab-bling. (Magazine editors want to change it to "grabbing." Writers try to forgive them.) The proper time for doing it is just before dinner: like corn, new potatoes are sweetest if you essentially boil them alive.

  In late summer we'd finished digging the Yukon Golds, All-Blues, and other big storage potatoes, best for baking. In September we'd harvested the fingerlings--yellow, finger-shaped gourmet potatoes that U.S. consumers have discovered fairly recently. I found them in a seed catalog, ordered some on a whim, and got hooked. The most productive potato in our garden is a fingerling adored by the French, called by a not-so-romantic name, La Ratte. (Means what it sounds like.) The name baffled me, until I grew them. When a mature hill is uncovered it looks like a nest of fifteen suckling baby rodents, all oriented with their blunt noses together in the center and their long tails pointed out. By virtue of incredible flavor and vigor, these little rats take over a larger proportion of my potato patch every year.

  By October all our potatoes were in the root cellar, along with the beets, carrots, and sweet potatoes (a tropical vine botanically unrelated to potatoes). Our onions were harvested too. We pull those up in late summer after their tall strappy tops begin to fall over, giving the patch an "off the shoulder" look with the bulbs bulging sensuously above the soil line. Comparisons with a Wonderbra are impossible to avoid. By the time they're fully mature, onions are pushing themselves out of the ground. It's an easy task on a dry, late summer day to walk down the row tugging them up, leaving them to cure in the sun for the afternoon, then laying them on newspapers for a couple of weeks in a shed or garage with plenty of air circulation.

  Garlic gets a similar treatment. No matter how well it's ventilated, the aroma of the curing shed gets intense; in earlier days children would have been made to sit in there to cure the category of ailment my grandmother called "the epizootie." She also used to speak of children wearing "asafetidy bags" around their necks to prevent colds. Genuine asafoetida is a European plant in the parsley family, but the root word is fetid. Garlic obviously worked as well, the medicinal property being that nobody would get close enough to your children to cough on them. As they used to say in New York, "A nickel will get you on the subway, but garlic will get you a seat." In fairness to its devotees, I should point out that real medicinal value has been attributed to garlic, stemming from its antibacterial sulfur compounds and its capacity to break down fibrin and thin the blood. The Prophet Muhammad recommended it for snakebite, Eleanor Roosevelt took it in chocolate-covered pills to improve her memory, and Pliny the Elder claimed it was good for your sex life. I wouldn't bet on that last one.

  We stick to culinary uses. When the tops of the cured garlic and onions have faded from green to brown but are still pliable, and their odor has tamed, I braid them into the heavy skeins that adorn our kitchen all winter. The bulbs keep best when they're hung in open air at room temperature, and we clip off the heads as we need them, working from the top down. Garlic is the spice of life in our kitchen: spaghetti sauce, lasagna, chicken soup, just about everything short of apple pie begins with some minced cloves of garlic sauteed in olive oil. I spend it as the currency of our culinary happiness, cutting off the heads week by week, working the braids slowly down to their bottom ends, watching them like the balance of a bank account. With good management we'll reach the end in midsummer, just as the new crop gets harvested. But we always come down the home stretch on empty.

  Garlic, like the potato, is a more subtle vegetable than most people know, since most groceries carry only one silverskin variety that keeps like Egyptian royalty. Garlic connoisseurs know the rest of the story. Seed Savers Exchange lists hundreds of varieties, each prized for its own qualities of culture and flavor. They fall into two basic categories: the lusty, primitive hardnecks have a "scape"--a flower stalk that shoots up from the center of the bulb in early spring, striking an incomprehensibly circular path, growing itself into something like an overhand knot before it blooms. The more domestic softnecks are better for braiding and storage. Beyond this, garlics are as hard to categorize as red and white wines, with equally enthusiastic legions of fans. Inchelium Red has taken first place in taste-tests on several continents. Red Toch (according to my seed catalog) has "a multidimensional quality, a spicy fragrance, and consummate flavor." Persian Star, obtained from a bazaar in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, has "a mild spicy zing." Brown Tempest starts hot and intense, then simmers down to a warm pleasant finish; Music is rich and pungent; Chesnok Red is the best for baking, "very aromatic with an abiding flavor." Elephant is just plain huge.

  Who can decide? A sucker for seed-catalog prose, I ordered six varieties and planted about a dozen cloves of each. Buried under the soil with a blanket of straw mulch on top, each clove would spend the winter putting out small, fibrous roots. The plant begins working on top growth in early spring, as soon as air temperatures rise above freezing. By midsummer it will have from eight to a dozen long leaves, with one clove at the base of each leaf nestled into the tight knot of a new head. I pull them in late June, and tend to think of that moment as the end of some sort of garden fiscal year. It never really stops, this business of growing things--garlic goes into the ground again in October, just as other frost-killed crops are getting piled onto the compost heap. Food is not a product but a process, and it never sleeps. It just goes underground for a while.

  October ceded to us the unexpected gifts of a late first frost: a few more weeks of tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and basil. Usually it's late September when the freeze comes to knock these tender plants down to black stalks--a predictable enough event that still somehow takes us by surprise every time. The late evening newscast predicting it will create a mild hubbub in the neighborhood, sending all the gardeners out in the chill to scoop up green tomatoes and pull peppers in the dark.

  Both peppers and eggplants are tropical by nature, waking slowly to summer and just getting into full swing in late September. We were happy for th
e October bonus, bringing in bushels of blocky orange, red, and yellow peppers at our leisure instead of under siege. In the evenings we built fires in the patio fire pit and lined the peppers up shoulder-to-shoulder on the grill like sunbathers on a crowded beach. The heat makes their skins sear and bubble. Afterward we freeze them by the bagful, so their smoky flavor can lively up our homemade pizzas all winter. If it's the scent of burning leaves that invokes autumn for most people, for us it's roasting peppers.

  My most nostalgic harvest rituals from childhood are of the apple variety. My parents took us on annual excursions to a family-owned orchard in the next county where we could watch cider being pressed, and climb into the trees to pick fruit that the clay-footed adults couldn't reach. We ate criminal quantities of apples up in the boughs. Autumn weather still brings that crisp greenish taste to the roof of my mouth. I realized other members of my family must share this olfactory remembrance of things past, when our October gathering spontaneously rallied into a visit to an apple orchard near our farm. We bought bushels, inspired to go home and put up juice and apple butter.

  I don't know what rituals my kids will carry into adulthood, whether they'll grow up attached to homemade pizza on Friday nights, or the scent of peppers roasting over a fire, or what. I do know that flavors work their own ways under the skin, into the heart of longing. Where my kids are concerned I find myself hoping for the simplest things: that if someday they crave orchards where their kids can climb into the branches and steal apples, the world will have trees enough with arms to receive them.

  * * *

  Splendid Spuds

  BY CAMILLE

  Dietitians seem to love or hate potatoes. This vegetable is a great source of quality carbohydrates that will keep you feeling energized and satisfied. Or else, it should be avoided because its sinful starchiness will make you gain weight like crazy.

  So which is it? First, it's not safe to generalize. The Idaho spuds at grocery stores are just the tip of the iceberg. I've eaten potatoes ranging from gumball to guinea-pig size, golden, brick red, or even brilliant blue. When you dig those out of the ground they look almost black, but after a good scrub they have a deep purplish shine you would expect in a jewelry store, not under layers of caked mud. I'm always amazed to slide my knife into the first Peruvian Blue of the season, finding its insides as vivid as a ripe blueberry. As it happens, the phytochemical responsible for the gorgeous color of blueberries and blue potatoes is the same one--a powerful antioxidant. Some antiaging facial products on the market feature mashed blueberries as a main ingredient. Nobody in my household has tried rubbing potatoes on her face to preserve a youthful complexion, but we take them internally, appreciating all the nutrients in our potato rainbow. Even white potatoes, eaten with their skins, give us vitamins C and B6, and nearly twice the potassium per serving as a banana.

  The potato's bad rep comes from its glycemic index (GI), a tool used to rate the increase in blood sugar caused by eating particular foods. Foods with a high GI (like sugar and corn sweetener, also) cause a sharp rise in blood glucose that stimulates high levels of blood insulin. It's hard on the body when that happens frequently, and has been linked to Type II diabetes. But if potatoes are eaten along with foods containing some fiber, protein, and fat, those lower the body's glycemic response so that insulin levels stay calm.

  A potato's nutritional value is a package best delivered in its own wrapper. Unfortunately, eating potato skins is not always safe. Because they grow underground, conventional potatoes are among the most pesticide-contaminated vegetables. Potatoes in the United States commonly contain chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides and sometimes even residues of DDT, dieldrin, and chlordane, extremely hazardous chemicals that have been banned since 1978 but linger in the soil. Conventionally grown potatoes are so contaminated, the Environmental Working Group warns parents not to feed them to infants and toddlers unless they're thoroughly peeled and boiled. This makes a strong case for buying organic potatoes from trustworthy growers who know the history of the land where their produce is raised.

  We're lucky enough to have home-grown. Potato salad is one dish our household never goes without, although it changes with the seasons. We eat many other root vegetables too, and plenty of sweet potatoes and winter squash in the autumn months. I've included Mom's infamous pumpkin soup recipe here, and dinner menus for a typical autumn week at our house.

  FOUR SEASONS OF POTATO SALAD

  WINTER

  4 cups large storage potatoes, coarsely diced and boiled until firmly tender 3 hard-boiled eggs, peeled and coarsely chopped

  3/4 cup last summer's dill pickles, finely chopped 2 tablespoons dill

  Salt to taste

  Mayonnaise--a few tablespoons

  Combine potatoes, eggs, and pickles, being careful not to mash anything. Add dill and salt to mixture and combine thoroughly. Add just enough mayonnaise to hold the salad together.

  SPRING

  4 cups storage potatoes, coarsely dicd

  1/3 cup fresh mint leaves 1-2 cups new peas 1 cup crumbled feta

  1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil

  Boil diced potatoes as above. Combine ingredients.

  SUMMER

  2 pounds red or golden new potatoes, cut in 1-inch chunks

  3 tablespoons olive oil

  Coarse salt

  2 yellow or red bell peppers, cut in chunks

  2 cups green beans (stringed and broken in 1-inch lengths)

  1-2 ears sweet corn on cob

  Toss potatoes with salt and oil and spread on baking sheet. Roast in 450deg oven until tender (20-30 minutes). Place ears of corn, lightly oiled, with the potatoes. Add peppers and green beans to roast for last 10 minutes. When done, loosen the vegetables with a spatula, cut corn kernels off cob, and combine in a large, shallow bowl.

  2 cups tomatoes cut in wedges

  1/2 cup fresh basil

  1/4 cup olive oil whipped together with 1 tablespoon balsamic or other mellow vinegar

  Toss tomatoes, basil, and dressing with roasted vegetables; salt to taste.

  FALL

  2 pounds fingerling potatoes (such as Russian Banana, Rose Finn, La Ratte)

  Seasonal vegetables

  4 tablespoons dried basil

  1/4 cup olive oil whipped with 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

  Prepare roasted potatoes as in "Summer" recipe, combining with late-season peppers and green beans, shelly beans, or limas, roasted along with the potatoes. Toss with fresh tomato wedges, basil, and the dressing. As the season progresses and different things become available, you can mix and match other vegetables with the potatoes to your heart's content, keeping proportions roughly the same. Cubed winter squash and sweet potatoes are wonderful in this roasted dish, requiring about the same amount of time in the oven. Don't hesitate to combine sweet and regular potatoes--they are unrelated, and marry well!

  PUMPKIN SOUP IN ITS OWN SHELL

  1 five-pound pumpkin (if smaller or larger, adjust the amount of liquid)

  Cut a lid off the top, scoop out the seeds and stringy parts, and rub the inside flesh with salt. Set the pumpkin in a large roasting pan or deep pie dish.

  1 quart chicken or vegetable stock

  1 quart milk or soy milk

  1/2 cup fresh sage leaves (use less if dried) 3 garlic cloves

  2 teaspoons sea salt

  Pepper to taste

  Roast garlic cloves whole in oven or covered pan on low heat, until soft. Combine with liquid and spices in a large pot, mashing the cloves and heating carefully so as not to burn the milk. Fill the pumpkin with the liquid and replace the lid, putting a sheet of foil between the pumpkin and its top so it doesn't fall in. (If you accidentally destroyed the lid while hollowing the pumpkin, just cover with foil.) Bake the filled pumpkin at 375deg for 1-2 hours, depending on the thickness of your pumpkin. Occasionally open lid and check with a spoon, carefully scraping some inside flesh into the hot liquid. If the pumpkin collapses or if the flesh is stringy, rem
ove liquid and flesh to a blender and puree. With luck, you can serve the soup in the pumpkin tureen.

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

  AUTUMN MEAL PLAN

  Sunday ~ Grilled steak and fall potato salad

  Monday ~ Sweet potato and chard quesadilla

  Tuesday ~ Twice-baked potatoes with cheese and late-season broccoli

  Wednesday ~ Spanish tortilla (potato and onion frittata)

  Thursday ~ Three-bean soup with fresh bread

  Friday ~ Pizza with tomato sauce, turkey sausage, roasted onions, and mozzarella

  Saturday ~ Cheese and squash quiche

  * * *

  17 * CELEBRATION DAYS

  November-December

  The closing-down season of the year set us to dragging out storm windows and draining outdoor pipes, but Lily had a whole different agenda: her egg enterprise opened for business. Her April chicks had matured into laying hens, surprising us with their first eggs in late October. Winter is the slow season for egg-laying, with many breeds ceasing production altogether when days are less than thirteen hours long. We'd counseled Lily not to expect much from her flock until next spring.

  Never underestimate the value of motivational speeches from the boss. Lily shot out of bed extra early every morning so she'd have time to spend in the chicken coop before the school bus came. Her hens have special nest boxes that open from outside the chickens' roosting quarters, so it's possible to stand (in clean shoes) in the front room of the poultry barn and reach through to collect the eggs. Or in Lily's case, to stand for hours peering in, supervising the hens at their labors. She actually has watched eggs exiting the hens' oviducts--a sight few people on earth have yet checked off their to-do lists, I imagine. When planning this flock she had chosen antique, heavy-bodied breeds with good reputations for laying right through cold weather. By mid-November she was bringing in as many as a dozen eggs a day from her nineteen layers.