Eating for Beginners Read online

  David himself had been screamed at mercilessly by the chef at one fancy restaurant where he worked. "They're all so macho," he sighed, remembering. "I had been a seventeen-year-old kid in boot camp, intimidated, scared. After that, being bossed around in some restaurant seems ridiculous. I was never into that. After being in the Navy it just seemed absurd to be yelled at in a kitchen."

  None of which is to say that applewood's kitchen was entirely free of conflicts. Liza departed about five months into my stay after a kind of subterranean turf war that rose to the surface after she returned from a vacation. No one wanted to discuss it, but I thought that during her absence David might have begun to feel he had ceded too much power to her, or she might have realized she was ready to run her own kitchen (as she went on to do), or, most likely, some combination of the two. Still, I was taken completely by surprise when David told me she was gone, having caught no whiff of trouble in my recent shifts. I did hear that David lost his temper every now and then, but that he always apologized. He didn't relish getting angry at all. "He made me so mad I actually yelled at him," he confided in me once about an unsatisfactory extern. "He ruined six pounds of butter, and then he lied about it. I mean okay, ruin six pounds of butter, it's not the end of the world. But don't do it and say you ruined three!"

  But such moments were rare, and the kitchen itself was never tense, even during the craziest dinner rush, the kind I experienced full-on as I flailed over the clam fryer that hot summer night. That was when I noticed for the first time the motto printed on a magnet stuck to the stainless steel shelving to my left. In my frenzy of clam goo and burned batter bits floating in oil, it stood out like a beacon:

  Peace. It does not mean to be in a place

  where there is no noise, trouble, or hard work.

  It means to be in the midst of those things

  and still be calm in your heart.

  My family was about to leave for Southern California, to spend a month in Noah's hometown, and that motto seemed like a good thought to take along. Maybe, in the serenity of a small beach town, we would all find our centers: Noah and I would stop worrying about what Jules was eating, and Jules would stop refusing to even taste what was on his plate. Noah, who grew up in the surf and believes in the supreme powers of sun, sand, and Mexican food, was betting he could get Jules to eat guacamole and fish tacos at the very least. We flew west with hope in our hearts and peace on our minds.

  During that month, the first anniversary of my father's death came around. Noah took me to the beach where he had surfed as a kid, and I threw a bunch of roses into the tide and watched them ride out to sea on the waves. Jules learned to swim underwater, went to the zoo, made friends with his cousins' dogs—and, at a Fourth of July picnic, refused to eat hot dogs, a buttered roll (too close to toast), and even ice cream. (I took this last rejection personally.)

  As it turned out, he did expand his palate by a single item that summer: baseball stadium roasted peanuts. I decided to be glad they were at least seasonal in some sense of the word, and I counted the days until I would be back in the kitchen.

  Oblique-Cut Caramelized Parsnips

  (including emergency Parsnip Chips variation)

  5–6 parsnips

  ½ pound butter, chopped into pieces

  salt and pepper

  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

  2. Peel parsnips and chop obliquely (see [>]).

  3. Spread parsnip pieces in a metal roasting pan and scatter butter throughout, then add salt and pepper to taste.

  4. Roast for about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally, until golden brown and still tender.

  Variation:

  If you accidentally roast the parsnips until they are more crispy than tender, remove them immediately to a pot on the stove. Add 1 cup cream to the disaster and cook the whole thing down until the parsnips are tender again, then serve. They'll never know.

  Serves 4 as a side.

  5. Meet the Farmer

  IN AUGUST we returned to the East Coast and the humidity. Jules, who had survived the summer quite happily on his peanut-based diet and even grown an inch, refused to eat chocolate cake at his grandmother's birthday party, though he had a great time yelling "Cake!" whenever someone else took a bite. What he did eat one day when Noah brought him by the restaurant was some crunchy puffed rice with cayenne pepper that Liza had made as a soup garnish. After they left I tasted some and realized it was insanely spicy. This was the start of what we came to refer to as Jules's cocktail party phase, during which he seemed to subsist almost entirely on intensely flavored foods that would ordinarily be found on side tables at adult gatherings—dry roasted nuts, hummus with carrots, red pepper strips, pita chips, unbelievably sour cornichon pickles, and, perhaps oddest of all, pickled cocktail onions. He developed a fondness for this last item at around eighteen months, shortly after he discovered that his father drank martinis. He became Noah's assistant barkeep, delivering drinks and helping shake what he christened a Papatini. Sometimes when I slept in and Noah got up with Jules, I would come into the dining room to find Jules sitting on the floor with an array of vodka, gin, and bourbon bottles, pretending to pour drinks while Noah read the paper in peace at the dining room table, pausing every so often to accept a pretend cocktail.

  I went back to applewood as soon as we returned from California. It was miserably hot, and everyone in the kitchen invented reasons to stand in the walk-in for a few minutes, where the temperature was perfect and the produce was amazing. One farm, Lucky Dog Organics in Hamden, New York, was growing vegetables I had never seen before. One week, in preparation for a Meet the Farmer dinner with Lucky Dog's owners, Richard and Holley Giles, we got bronze oak lettuce, purple beans, Red Bor kale, rainbow chard, tomatillos, mixed squash, and beets. The lettuce looked a bit like sea coral—green with rusty edges and little tendrils. It was as frilly as old lace and tore just as easily. The tomatillos looked like miniature Japanese lanterns, their green-and-yellow paper skins rustling as I picked them up. Shucking them revealed pale, almost fluorescent green orbs that were sticky to the touch. I cut one into wedges to try, and it tasted like a slightly harder, lemon-infused tomato, as bright and fresh as the color of its skin.

  At the Meet the Farmer dinner, which I attended as a writer rather than a chef, I sat with Richard and Holley. When I mentioned my book project, Richard gave me a sly smile and said, in his mellow drawl (he was originally from Mississippi), "We'll find you a pair of boots if you come up to the farm."

  It was an offer I couldn't refuse.

  ***

  A few weeks later I drove to Lucky Dog on a stormy afternoon that happened to be September 11. On the three-hour trip from the city through the pouring rain, I had plenty of time to listen to somber radio essays and debates about all the promises made after the World Trade Center fell, when we all vowed we were going to stop being so busy, we were going to spend more time with our friends and families, we were going to get back to what really mattered.

  Unsurprisingly, a lot of those wistful thoughts about connecting with one another led to food. As the chef and author Mark Bittman wrote in his New York Times column days after the towers collapsed, "With all the uncertainty outside, the idea of spending an evening inside, at home among friends, has never seemed more appealing." This was his lead-up to a dinner party menu that involved only minimal time away from the guests because, as he put it, "I wanted time to talk, and I knew they would as well."

  Times of crisis have often been times for reconsidering food. In How to Cook a Wolf, written in the midst of World War II, M. F. K. Fisher reminded her readers of something she worried they might have forgotten as a result of all the rationing: "Wise men forever have known that a nation lives on what its body assimilates, as well as on what its mind acquires as knowledge. Now, when the hideous necessity of the war machine takes steel and cotton and humanity, our own private personal secret mechanism must be stronger, for selfish comfort as well as for the good of the ideals we beli
eve we believe in." Food is as good a defense as any against the outside world. The way we prepare it and offer it to others says as much about who we are as the way we dress or talk.

  These thoughts carried me up to Hamden, in the Delaware River valley, where I parked in front of the Lucky Dog Farm Store, located in one of the trim little houses lining Main Street. I wondered where the farm could possibly be; no open land was visible nearby. I went into the store and there was Holley behind the counter, a pretty, petite Texan with long brown hair and an open face who looked far younger than her forty-three years.

  "You found us!" she said. "Come on, I'll take you to Richard."

  We went out the back door, through a gate in a chain-link fence, down some stone steps, and there it was: forty-four acres spread out in a green vista below me with the West Branch of the Delaware running along behind it and the Catskill Mountains rising above. A line of orange and red tractors and harvesters sat near an old red barn with two silos and several plastic-covered hoop houses. I felt, once again, as if I had stumbled down the rabbit hole, this time by way of an ordinary storefront.

  "Hey there," said Richard, wiping his muddy hands on his pants as he walked toward me. He was tall and lanky, with shoulder-length, slightly graying dark-blond hair and a chiseled face. "We're doing rainy day work. Come on."

  He and the farm crew were laying some new concrete floor in the barn (which was used for washing and packing produce rather than housing animals), doing equipment maintenance, and cutting weeds. Holley headed back to the store, and I sat on a soggy pile of uprooted plants watching Richard pull up and hack away at another stand. "We're slogging through the mud," he said, grinning. "We all tend to have kind of an artificial view of farms because we like the 'big farm' look—not many weeds, just beautiful crops in the field. That's become our ideal, instead of lots of personality, lots of people, lots of energy, lots of unpleasant work." As if on cue, Micah, one of the farmhands, came over to talk about the next day's potato harvest, which was going to be incredibly muddy thanks to all the rain. "We're all kind of dreading it," Richard said, but there was a lightness to his voice that implied otherwise.

  Looking around, I could see why. Even pummeled by rain, the fields were gorgeous and lush. I was swept up in the romance of the whole enterprise—living off the land, raising children with a true sense of what food is—though I knew my vision of what that meant was probably false. (Later in my visit, Holley told me she liked raising her kids, Sybilla and Asa, who were then six and three years old, on the farm, but wished they had "a little more appreciation for the vegetables.") Richard, who must have seen the look in my eye, threw me a bone. "We have eagles," he said, gesturing upwards. "The least sentimental person on the crew will look up while we're picking crops and say 'It looks good out here.'" He continued, "I love being out. I love farming. We were going to keep working in New York and work this into a place where we could live. Then Holley quit her job within a few weeks. Within six months I quit mine and we wound up here."

  In their previous life in Brooklyn, Richard had taught writing and Holley had worked in publishing. In 1999, when they first saw the former dairy farm that would become Lucky Dog, the land was being rented by a neighboring farmer who was using it to grow corn; its owners had sold their cows eight years earlier. Richard could tell by the cornstalk stubble remaining from a recent harvest that it was a good piece of ground, and the next day he made an offer for the house, barn, and cropland.

  Unlike Holley, who wanted to get out of the city to raise a family and figured farming was a way to make a living, Richard comes from a farming family, albeit one of a different kind from the one he's in now. His father, an agronomist at Mississippi State University, oversaw a USDA experimental research program that focused on cotton, rice, and soybean production. "A lot of the research was about chemicals," Richard recalled. "The air smelled of chemistry. From the window of the school bus, at some time each year, we would see thousands of fish floating belly-up in Deer Creek, the bayou that runs through Washington County. People would be down on the banks with poles and nets pulling out the poisoned fish."

  Richard got a degree in animal science at Mississippi State and started managing operations on large beef cattle farms in the area. Slowly he discovered that his true calling lay elsewhere. At one of the large farms he had the opportunity to plant a soybean crop, and eventually he bought a small farm in Monroe County, Mississippi, where he spent a year growing vegetables and selling them locally. He loved it, but he and his first wife had a young family and it was difficult, uncertain work, so he went back to a large farm, "where I could get a paycheck." He stayed in that job until his marriage unraveled, at which point, looking for a change, he went to graduate school and on to teaching.

  At the time, he said now, "I didn't intend to teach forever, but I didn't intend to go back to the farm." He landed in Brooklyn, where he built a life but still somehow found himself "waiting for just the right farm to come along." He spent weekends driving around the Catskills looking for property. Soon he met Holley, who joined the farm search enthusiastically, and they ended up at Lucky Dog, which Holley named in honor of their three rescue dogs.

  They knew from the start that they wanted to farm organically. For fertilizing and pest control, Lucky Dog uses only materials approved by OMRI, the Organic Materials Review Institute (an independent organization that tests products intended to be used in certified organic farming). These include a pesticide called Spinosad, made from a natural bacterium, which attacks potato beetles without harming beneficial insects like ladybugs; hydrogen peroxide on things like seed potatoes, wash surfaces, and the leaves of tomato plants; and other basic elements like ground limestone to improve soil quality.

  "One of the happiest things about finding and operating this farm," Richard told me, "is that it's a continuation of that beginning of a little vegetable farm that I started in Mississippi. I love growing food that we can all eat, and I love the fact that I can grow it without killing fish or going back to what I think is the wrong road of commodity agriculture. So it's also quite terrifying that this is almost not working, that the returns are so slim and the risks so high that it isn't sound business."

  Those risks, as Richard detailed them without any self-pity during my stay at Lucky Dog, made me embarrassed that I had ever complained about the price of produce at my local farmers' market. In order to function, most farmers, especially small ones, borrow money every year for operations and hope they'll be able to at least break even and pay it back by selling their crops. In Lucky Dog's case, the majority of sales come through farmers' markets and wholesale orders from places like applewood, and another ten percent come through the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, in which local people pay ahead for shares of what the farm grows, which they receive weekly during the harvest season.

  Sometimes, though, there's nothing to sell. In the summer of 2006, Lucky Dog was entirely flooded out in a torrential rainstorm, and Richard and Holley lost their whole season of produce. They found, however, that they were not alone. "We got tremendous support," Richard remembered, shaking his head in disbelief. "Customer after customer sent us checks or handed us checks. People bought two or three years ahead at the CSA." In Brooklyn, applewood threw a benefit cocktail party with a silent auction of items donated by people from the neighborhood, some close friends of Richard's or Holley's, and many who didn't know them but felt connected to them through the food they ate at the restaurant. But even with the outpouring of support, Richard told me, "We're a tiny farm and we lost so much it was very hard to recover." He paused. "We lost so much."

  Then he took me over to the side of one of the hoop houses and showed me the floodwater mark about three feet above the ground. I looked at the fields, now bursting with vegetables in the early autumn sun, and imagined them covered by water, not even the tops of the chard showing. "We paid our crew," he said, "but we couldn't pay back our operating loan and had to refinance. We're going to feel
it for years. We have a forty-thousand-dollar loan payment due in January and we only have about eighteen thousand, so I'm getting anxious about that."

  Besides the precarious finances of small organic farms, Richard also faced the larger issue of a produce market that, as he put it in an email conversation we had later, "takes for granted the abundance of blemish-free produce ... and has lost the habits of patience and acceptance. Beautiful food in huge quantities at very low prices is a daunting competitor for beautiful organically grown food seasonally available at prices that would reflect a real return to the people who grow it. The real costs of growing organic food are higher than the prices it brings."

  This is something people don't like to hear, but Richard welcomes the chance to discuss it with anyone, whatever their reasons for buying his produce. "When we were selling to the greenmarket in New York [Union Square], we took kale," he recalled with a chuckle that afternoon on the weed pile. "One weekend we sold out in an hour and we said, 'What's going on with kale?' It turned out the New York Times had just run an article about how great kale is."

  Becoming serious again, he added, "I've heard people down in New York City talking about eating local. The primary thing is, what does it mean to support local farms? It's not just buying from them. Supporting local farms now means supporting the building of an infrastructure. My hope is that people will come to my stand and talk, to say that food is expensive. Then we could talk about what food and where."