Still, I’ve been thinking about this place… see?

NB: This is just an assignment for a book design class. I don’t really have a book, and Wiley’s not really publishing it. I don’t know Mort Rosenbaum, Tony Bourdain, or Ruth Reichl. If I did, I doubt they’d have such nice things to say about me. But it’d be pretty cool, wouldn’t it?

In Defense of Food is on sale at Powell’s Books.
Hear and Read the rundown on the book according to NPR’s Talk of the Nation.

And if you’re interested in this title, I also recommend the following:

• The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, Peter Singer and Jim Mason
• The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Michael Pollan
• Epitaph for a Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm, David Mas Masumoto
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, Barbara Kingsolver
• Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal, Joel Schlosser

          I am living in an old farmhouse with a massive, inviting porch. One side sags just a little bit. I am thinking of screening it off, to keep the summer bugs away and give the cats a place to lounge in the fresh air. There is a table in the far corner, and three chairs. On warm nights when I cannot sleep, I curl up there to read. Inside, to the immediate left of the small entry way, in which stands my parent’s old, mirrored halltree and a small table for keys, change, and other household detritus, is my workspace. Two massive wooden tables are pushed together to create something reminiscent of a double desk. There are filing cabinets under the one on the right, closest to the dining nook. On the surface is my laptop, naturally, the digital camera, and a pile of books I’ve been meaning to review and pull recipes from. My full-spectrum desk lamp sits on one corner. I use it often since I am rarely at my desk when the sun is out. The office spills into my main living/entertaining space. My iPod lives on a shelf there, nestled inconspicuously among books. It’s attached to ten speakers hung around the room and, at medium volume, music fills the house and warms it. The aging hardwood floors throughout are covered mostly with old rugs. The one in here is shaggy and green, mirroring the garden you can see from the front window.
     Past the dining nook – where a massive, roughly-hewn table and two matching benches fills the space almost entirely – is the kitchen, where I spend most of my indoor time. It’s a temporally-confused space, but comfortable, and my favorite place to be. My long-lusted-after Viking range sits against one wall, not far from a porcelain farm sink. On one of the six gas burners sits a stock pot, simmering a few gallons of vegetable stock for soup and for freezing. There’s a wooden manual coffee grinder, the kind that hand-cranks into a drawer. There are herbs drying in the window. Pots dangle on an iron rack hung from the ceiling. The paver tiles are cool beneath my feet.

     Over many months I have been building this place in my mind. It’s my new fantasy and every day it enlarges, acquires new details. A handmade quilt for a bedspread. A chicken coop. Rows of leeks and garlic in the sunny spot out back. Candlelight during power outages. It is a naïve and overly-romanticized dream I’m spinning; and I know this, but I can’t help myself. I don’t want to stop dreaming it.

     I never expected to discover that I am not a city girl. When I moved to Portland three years ago I thought I was coming for a vibrant urban existence. It’s what young people who grow up in small coastal tourist towns are supposed to think they want, I suppose. I imagined I would become a metropolitan gal, a mover and a shaker, the city wrapped around me, providing the kind of love that can only come from concrete and steel. As it happened, however, I have developed a love affair of a wholly different sort – a love of dirt. I have never felt “called” to anything in the same way, or with the same intensity, that I feel I must put plants into the earth and watch them grow. I have always been driven to create – crafty things and food and the like – and I have always been happiest when in the midst of such creation. Gardening, feels like a logical progression of this trend, a tightening of my life as a cook and an eater.

     So this is what I dream about: growing my own food and living quietly, a distance away from all of those things I thought I so desperately needed for fulfillment. A drastic priority shift.

     In real life, my blueberry bush already has fruit on it. Every day when I make rounds to water, prune, and dote on my garden I check in with each plant and, I swear, the pride and satisfaction I feel in admiring my growing garden is so expansive you’d think I’d invented photosynthesis – or at the very least, blueberries – my very own self. I feel so much wonder at those basic natural mechanisms – growth, flowering, pollination, fruit, dormancy. A plant just doing what it does qua plant takes my breath away sometimes. And makes me feel totally silly. And awed.

     Nothing tastes better than food you’ve grown and cooked yourself.

     Yesterday at the grocery store – an all-in-one mammoth compound of convenient consumerism – as I rode the escalator down from the second floor I had a clear look at the aisles of canned goods, cleaning products, housewares, frozen foods, dairy cases, chilled produce. The order and uniformity of that massive place, filled with packaged stuff arrested me in a new way. I wanted to run. Instead, I bought a bag of cookies and some frozen shrimp.

     But what I want, this fantasy of mine, is to leave. I want to somehow live without needing the bag of cookies, the frozen shrimps, the flash and the bling and all the rest. Actually, I know now that I don’t need them. It is only that I am used to them. It is only that I don’t have the time to make everything from scratch, that I am accustomed to buying fruit out of season, that it is often less expensive to buy processed foods than whole ones.

     I have been intermittently reading Barbara Kingsolver’s new book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. It is the chronicle of Kingsolver’s move to the Appalachian Mountains to live on a farm and do this very thing I have been dreaming of – grow her own food, live closer to her neighbors and to her family, eat locally and mindfully. It is a pleasant enough read, naturally well-written and insightful. There is a lot of food-and-eating ethics that I am mostly skipping over, having read a heap of it in other books. Though I am absolutely behind her philosophy, and more than interested in the story she has set to tell, I am having a hard time sticking with the book. I realized today that I am jealous.

     There are lots of books about “dropping out” and living independently and those who have done it claim that it’s not that difficult to do (if you are ready to be cold, hungry, and tired). While I am not packing up the Prius and heading for the hills with my adze and seed pouch, I have begun to seriously think about the viability of such a plan. I am not particularly strong or clever in a survival-type way. This is the first year I’ve cultivated even a small garden and, while I don’t think I am botching it up completely, I’m sure I could do it better. It strikes me as positively mad, the notion of growing enough food in a year to live off of, but there are in all crazy notions a smidget of truth, an edge of possibility. Reality lives in the middle ground more often than not, and a middle path – life farther from the City and closer to the dirt – does not seem crazy in the slightest. It seems, in fact, much more sane than staying here, living as I do now.

     It begins with my own garden, and shopping at farmer’s markets. It begins with canvas bags instead of paper or plastic ones, and riding my bike to work. It begins with staking out the Goodwill and the Rebuilding Center when I set to do home improvement projects and having the patience to wait to find what I need. It begins with intentional eating and cooking and consuming. It begins with deciding on eating seasonally and, whenever possible, locally. (And not dwelling on what I would have to give up in doing so, like all of those tropical fruits I so love, which certainly do not grow up here in the Pacific Northwest.)
     I do not know if I will ever reach this dream of mine, this farmhouse tucked in the mountains. I don’t know if places like that will exist by the time I am ready to move, if I would be able to sustain myself in such a life, or if I will even want it by the time it is attainable. Some gals dream of perfect suburban houses or city lofts, of storybook weddings or men on motorcycles. I dream of dirt under my fingernails and collapsing hard into bed at night, exhausted from hauling the onions down the root cellar. I dream of cooking fresh food that, months earlier, I knew as seed. And maybe these dreams of mine are just as silly: “storybook” fantasies with slightly different kinds of characters. Though I may never get all the way to the farmhouse with the root cellar and the six-burner Viking, at least I will keep my garden. And I will do it better every season as I learn new tricks and techniques and ways to coddle the blueberries which will be, unequivocally, the best I’ve ever tasted.

My journey to hooch-in-the-linen closet began many months ago, when a good friend discovered – by what means I can’t recall – The Joy of Home Winemaking. Being the type of woman inclined to make her own wine (just as she cooks, bakes, gardens, and makes her own jams), she set to work at all kinds of home brews – dandelion, grapefruit, berry – which, reportedly, not only did not kill anyone, but were also very tasty.

On August 18th of last year, I publicly vowed that I, too, would make my own wine someday. I promptly ordered the book. I even read most of it. And then I put the winemaking project aside in favor of other things. Finishing my Bachelor’s degree, for instance. I imagined that home winemaking could rapidly become an expensive and time-consuming hobby. My kitchen and craft room already spilling over with baking bread, sewing projects, knitting lopsided baby blankets, jam-making, card-designing, writing (in theory anyway) and more, I told myself that I would have to get one or two other projects well in hand (like the degree, see?) before I could embark on another pastime that would only make me giggly and my kitchen sticky.

Last March I could wait no longer. I consulted my guidebook once again, visited my local home brewing supply store and plunged forward.

I made the Easy Apple Wine from Garey’s book. It’s what she recommends for beginners. I also picked up a book at Steinbart’s that had a very similar recipe for apple wine – similar in that both called for apple juice and only one fermentation, instead of “fermenting on the fruit” and then straining out solids, which seemed overwhelming at the time. I made that one too, so that in a few more months when I work up the courage to taste the stuff I can do some scientific-like comparisons. Or something.

When I racked my wine three weeks ago – that’s siphoning off the liquid from the yeastysediment or “must” that falls to the bottom once the initial fermentation takes place – I splashed a bit into my mouth, just to confirm or deny the presence of alcohol where once there had been none. When I splashed the wine into my mouth I also splashed it all over the kitchen.

It smelled a bit like a recycling center in here for a few days. Alcohol? Check.

The book said that it should, at the racking stage, taste a “little raw,” and that the longer I wait before bottling and/or consumption, the more the flavor will balance and smooth, so I’m not worrying yet. For now, I am actually rather enjoying the waiting. I did not, in fact, ever experience the urge to barrel ahead as I was worried I might. Perhaps this apple wine is teaching me patience. Or perhaps I am afraid that it’s been bungled somehow and I’ll be disappointed after all of this blasted patience and restraint.

I just uploaded the images that you see here on my post. I hadn’t looked at them side by side before. See in my closet, the one on the right? That’s the very same that’s above, being prepared back in April. The color difference is really quite striking. Maybe there is some hope yet.

I’ll synopsize. John Peterson grew up on a farm in the Midwest. He inherited it. Chemicals made him sad. He ran away to Mexico a lot. The farm became an artist colony of sorts. The neighbors mistook him for a devil worshipper. He decided organic farming is where it’s at. He built up a community supported agriculture program on his farm. Angelic Organics was born. He wrote books, did the docu thing, became wildly popular.

So, the book. Before even cracking the cover, it is very cool for two reasons: One: they put it out in a lightweight trade paper edition. This gets my thumbsup because it is therefore not only more affordable, but requires less energy to produce & ship. Two: Farmer John himself is hanging out on the (well-designed) cover, holding a pitch fork and sporting a straw hat and orange feather boa. This makes me happy.

Inside, this is like no “cookbook” I have yet seen. There are pages dedicated to their philosophy, naturally. & slow food. & “biodynamism.” The recipe sections are separated by season and include storage and handling information about each vegetable, as well as culinary uses and “partners” – recommended flavor combinations (incidentally, if you are particularly interested in this, I also very strongly recommend the fabulous book by Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page, Culinary Artistry). The layout of these pages is somewhat confused, jumbled. It’s not about being a slick, coffee table cookbook like, say, Thomas Keller’s French Laundry Cookbook, which is more like foodporn than something you’d ever get near your grease-spattered range. Scattered all over these pages are little blurbs, quotes pulled from shareholders, cook’s notes, the Farm’s newsletter, harvest notes. They’re so weird – I just love them. Consider page 101 under the frequently-used heading “overheard” My new jar of pickles fell to the ground and shattered, sending glass shards and baby cucumberettes all around my feet. What this is doing in a cookbook, or why it is important enough to be included, I have no idea. There are little blurbs about the soil conditions in 1998 and how the harvest was going in 1996. The “overheard” blurbs are my favorite though. They are almost invariably ironic. Consider, from page 189: Shannon: The thing about not getting married is that you feel like you’ve missed a big event. Meagan: If I ever get married, I want a nice frying pan. Or, page 156: Male #1: Want to go with me to yoga this morning? Male #2: Yoga? I’d rather be a vegetarian than do yoga.

I notice that I have veered far off on a tangent (appropriately, perhaps, for this is a book almost certainly designed by a person with a deficit of attention). A cookbook sans good recipes is, of course, not much of a cookbook. Happily, Farmer John and crew deliver here as well. We made the Pungent Green Beans and Tomatoes with cumin, garlic, and ginger for Christmas dinner and they were fantastic. Vegetables are so easy to ignore, aren’t they? They just get steamed, or sauteed in butter ad nauseum. When we feel particularly inspired, we sitr-fry them. Well, no more. Not here, anyway. Here before me I have a cookbook that boasts an entire section for rutabegas. & kohlrabi.

Page 141: Mesclun Soufflé. 212: Cantaloupe and Tomato Salad with Mint. 275: Ginger Miso Soup with Daikon, Kale and Carrots. 297: Savory-Sweet Rutabega Pudding. Clearly, these people are just like me – a little nutty, and crazy-in-love with veggies.

      Later, I moved to the dining room table to peruse the pamphlets I picked up at the Salmon Nation Blockparty yesterday: the Pangea Project, Zenger Farm, and Slow Food USA. Clearly, all worthy organizations. This perusal, also, was awesome.

      Again, I seem to be in a place of significant possibilities. When I graduate from University in December, I shall be prepared for…nothing specifically… but a whole lot, generally. I have been studying philosophy: ethics, primarily. I do logic well; I like to argue both sides of an issue, at the same time, out loud, alone. Basically, I have been learning how to think.

      When I dropped out of work in the FoodWorld and dropped back into University a few years ago, I thought that I was leaving food. My hands hurt. I can’t do 3 am mornings. I am young, and a woman, and these two conditions particularly can make life in a professional kitchen somewhat less-easy than it could otherwise be. I am beginning to see now, however, how I can weave these two passions – Passion for the Yummy and Passion for the Good – into gainful employment. No, if I take this route I shall almost certainly never be a billionaire (if that kind of thing is important to you), but what is important to me is personal satisfaction. In the words of Lady J, I do not want to be a “waste of space.” There’s so much to do, and I am starting to see how to do it.

      The first spark happened when I read Botany of Desire. The second, during The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. And then this morning, it was possible. Over breakfast, this frenzied need to DO SOMETHING ALREADY BEFORE ARMAGEDDON, YOU LAZY BASTARD hit a fever pitch. And whereas usually, I fold, hopeless and overwhelmed, this morning was different. Maybe it was the jam, the bread, the sun, but I think I can pull it off. Not saving the world, heavens no. But not leaving it worse than when I arrived, at the very least. I’d say, even, that the outlook for improvement is pretty good. With just a little investigation, you can see the hundreds of organizations, everywhere, run by like-minded people who believe that it is possible, and who are doing it. The time to think and brood is closing. Without forgetting to think, brood, and study, I do believe that the time to act is here. This, I feel, is awesome as well.