80 animal, vegetable, miracle
with morels, and I am not one to argue with wild mushroomers who claim
the distinction of being still alive. I sat down at the kitchen table with
Deborah Madison’s gorgeous cookbook Local Flavors, which works from
the premise that any week of the year can render up, from very near your
home, the best meal of your life. Deborah’s word is good. We cooked up
her “Bread pudding with asparagus and wild mushrooms” for a fantastic
Wednesday supper, seduced by the fragrance even before we took it out
of the oven. Had I been worried that cutting the industrial umbilicus
would leave us to starve? Give me this deprivation, any old day of the
week.
/On Saturday the weather was still cold and windy. I pulled my seed
potatoes out of storage to check on them. Not a pretty picture: sick to
death of the paper bags in which they’d been stored since last fall, they
were sending long, white, exploratory sprouts into the darkness of the
bottom drawer of the refrigerator.
We decided for their sakes that the wind had dried the ground enough
for us to till the potato patch with the tractor. A few weeks ago we’d tried
that too early, and the too- wet ground behind the tractor rolled over in
long curls of thick, unworkable clay clods. Today the soil was still a bit too
clumpy to be called perfect, but “perfect” is not the currency of farming. I
followed behind the tiller breaking up clods with a hefty Italian grape
hoe, the single piece of equipment I rely on most for physical fi tness and
sometimes therapy. We hoed out three deep rows, each about seventy
feet long, in which to drop our seed potatoes. If that seems like a lot for
one family, it’s not. We do give some away, and save some for next year’s
seed, but mostly we eat them: new potatoes all summer, fingerlings in the
fall, big indigo blues and Yukon Gold bakers all winter. In my view, home-
land security derives from having enough potatoes.
On the same long day we dropped peas into furrows, seeded carrots,
and set out more of the broccoli we’d planted in succession since mid-
March. My baby onion plants (two hundred of them) were ready, so I
tucked the string- bean-sized seedlings into rows along the cold, damp
edge of the upper field: Stockton Reds, Yellow Sweets, Torpedos, and a