• 20Sep 07

  Is It Soup Yet? Nope.

  Yesterday I had this exchange in an on-line forum.

  Rachel: Dinner...Hopefully soup.

  Me: Really, this early in the fall?

  Rachel: What is with people and assigning food to seasons? I have soup year round. And it was canned soup.

  I have been known to crank open a can of clam chowder any time of year if I'm eating alone and don't feel like bothering. But I'm never "hopeful" about it. And I think, despite her question about seasons, that Rachel understood that I thought she meant homemade soup. That is something to hope for.

  People don't "assign foods to seasons"; the rhythms of nature assign foods to seasons. At least before Mr. Birdseye, Mr. Campbell and Chiquita's refrigerated railcars started blurring the natural food seasons.

  This morning I went down to the farmers' market. The last of the locally grown sweet corn was looking shabby, but the tomatoes looked great, and there were lots of shell beans and zucchini. Fifty years ago my grandmother would have started canning her tomatoes and beans. The "winter" squash are just beginning to show up. Butternut, Acorn and their ilk have thick skins that allow them to keep over the winter down in the root cellar. The potatoes, parsnips, turnips and rutabagas would also keep over the winter under a bed of straw out in the barn.

  Lentils and green peas can be dried now and then reconstituted when fresh are no longer available. It's time to can the peaches as this year's crop dwindles and later the late season Winesap and York apples can go down to the root cellar.

  When it gets cold enough, game can be hunted and livestock slaughtered. We eat turkey at Thanksgiving, roast beef and goose at Christmas and lamb at Passover/Easter because that's when they are available, or were before Mr. Swift. People didn't assign those foods to those seasons, the natural order did.

  Sure, a bowl of hot soup is great on a cold day, but that not why it's a winter food. Soup is a "winter food" because that's when you have the makings – and not much else to eat. There are bones, root vegetables and dried herbs for stock to make it flavorful and dried legumes, rice and wheat preserved as pasta to make it filling, fresh meat and preserved vegetables to add nutrition.

  Asparagus and strawberries that have actual flavor are spring foods. Corn-on-the-cob isn't worth eating if it wasn't grown down the road and picked yesterday. That only happens for two months in the late summer.

  Last winter I made a batch of ham stock. I used some of it to make a lentil and sausage soup. I froze the rest. I could probably use it now to make a fabulous soup of fresh vegetables. But, that's not what fresh vegetables are for; they are for eating and enjoying as they are. The stock will come out after the first frost and after I have put up the remaining green tomatoes as relish. That's when it will be time for winter foods. Nature tells me that.

  • Posted Sep 20, 2007 10:46 am PT
  • Category: Food
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• 6Aug 07

  Worth the Work

  One of the advantages of downsizing the house after the kids moved out was upsizing the garden. I had always wanted a big English-style border garden and now I have one. Five years ago this space was a jungle of weeds and weed-trees. I layed-out the plan and did all the planting, but, to be honest, the heavy lifting was done by guys with machines.

  

  Besides lots of herbs and a few tomato plants, it's all flowers and ornamentals. And except for weeding and dead-heading it's no longer much work save for the fall clean-up and planting a few annuals in the spring.

  And on insanely hot days, like today, we can sit in air-conditioned comfort and enjoy the view with Sophie the cat.

  

  • Posted Aug 6, 2007 8:00 am PT
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• 12Jul 07

  In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning

  I am sitting here alone in the house, as I usually am this time of day. But I feel lonelier today because Jillian is out of town until tomorrow night. Let me explain the origin of the terrible feelings I get when she is away from me.

  We had been going out on dates for just three weeks when Jillian headed off to her freshman year at Duke. We dated only each other during those three weeks but there was no way, after such a short time that I could ask, nor that she would have agreed, to not date. Besides, one of the reasons she chose Duke was that a guy she dated some during her senior year was going to be a junior there, as well. Nevertheless, I was really smitten with her and did not want to lose her. It was worrisome.

  That was hard enough to ponder and then I got this delightful stomach punch. Way back then, there was this interesting contest for the Freshman Duke and Duchess. Each dorm picked a candidate whose headshot was then plastered all over campus for everyone to vote on. Jillian got nominated. And then she won. The prize for the Duchess, as I recall, was a bouquet of flowers and the opportunity to be hit on by every upper c|assman looking for fresh meat. And I got to say "congratulations" with my whole body shaking.

  I don't think she had a date with a freshman the whole first semester. But, she also had mostly first dates, thank goodness. This was when she developed her distain for frat boys. She had one date with a senior on the football team who went on to be a starter on the undefeated Dolphins team of 1972. She found him dull and shallow. And, she only had one date with the old boyfriend.

  All this time, we are communicating by mail (at least one letter a day) and one weekly three-minute phone call. It was somewhat reassuring to me that she would write me reviews of all her dates and that they were mostly scathing. Still, she was there and pretty and in demand.
  

  Just before Thanksgiving, she invited me to be her "escort" for her pledge formal that neatly coincided with my winter break. And she stopped dating other people.

  But, we still had two and a half more years of an LDR to survive without benefit of email, webcams (btw, why did Rory and Logan not take advantage of that technology instead of texting?) or cell phones. And it was wrenching. And, even after we got married, Jillian had to spend her next two summers in France doing research for her PhD. She came back three weeks early the second summer because she couldn't stand any more separation.
  

  After that we made a rule. If one of us had to be out of town for more than two nights for a conference or a meeting, the other came along. We had to break that rule a few times, but having both sets of parents in town made it easy to dump the kids when they came along. Since the kids have flown we have never broken it.

  For me, though, not having her here for just one night brings back all the feelings of emptiness, longing and dread I began experiencing over 40 years ago. She gets back at 6:00pm tomorrow. I'm making virtual hash marks on my virtual dorm room wall. By the minute.
  

  • Posted Jul 12, 2007 1:39 pm PT
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