264 animal, vegetable, miraclebut didn’t understand the “1 cup rice” had to be cooked fi rst. Compared
with that tooth- cracking concoction, everyone now agreed, my pumpkin
soup was great. Really it was, by any standards except presentation (which
I fl unked fl unked fl unked), and besides, what is the point of a family gath-
ering if nobody makes herself the goat of a story to be told at countless
future family gatherings? Along with Camille’s chard lasagna, our own
fresh mozzarella, and the season’s last sliced tomatoes, we made a fi ne
feast of our battered centerpiece. If anyone held Dad and me under sus-
picion of vegetable cruelty, they didn’t report us. We remain at large.
/
A pumpkin is the largest vegetable we consume. Hard- shelled, fi rm-
fleshed, with fully ripened seeds, it’s the caboose of the garden train.
From the first shoots, leaves, and broccoli buds of early spring through
summer’s small soft tomato, pepper, and eggplant fruits, then the larger
melons, and finally the mature, hard seeds such as dry beans and pea-
nuts, it’s a long and remarkable parade. We had recently pulled up our
very last crop to mature: peanuts, which open their orange, pealike fl ow-
ers in midsummer, pollinate and set their seeds, and then grow weirdly
long, down- curved stems that nosedive the seed pods earthward, drilling
them several inches into the soil around the base of the plant. Many peo-
ple do realize peanuts are an underground crop (their widespread African
name is “ground nut”), although few ever pause to ruminate on how a
seed, product of a fl ower, gets under the dirt. In case you did, wonder no
more. Peanuts are the dogged overachievers of the plant kingdom, deter-
mined to plant their own seeds without help. It takes them forever,
though. Our last ritual act before frost comes is to pull up the peanut
bushes and shake the dirt from this botany- freak-show snack food.
We were ready now for frost to fall on our pastures. We had eaten one
entire season of botanical development, in the correct order. Months
would pass before any new leaf poked up out of the ground. So... now
what?
Another whole category of vegetable used to carry people through win-
ter, before grocery chains erased the concept of season. This variant on
vegetable growth is not an exception but is auxiliary to the leaf- bud-