How do you know...?

How do you know something is good for you? By the taste.

Our garden food tasted good. All of it.

There was no such thing as a child saying he didn't like something, if it was from the garden or the goats or the chickens. It was all good.

I firmly believe taste is the way we know something is good for us. Good flavors come with other good things, the things that build healthy bodies.

Our garden was full of good things, and so would we be as we ate our way through the harvest bounty. Such were the blessings from all the work.

The work was a blessing too. It felt good. That's how we knew it was good.

Such statements beg for an acknowledgement of God. But at the time we were between Gods, so while we had appreciation for all the wonder of good-tasting food and work-hardened bodies, we didn't know where to direct our thanks. All that was yet to come...

The color of harvest...

The colors fell into piles leaving stark branches behind. I could almost smell the burning leaves of my childhood, now made illegal because of pollution. How I had loved to be in charge of the burning of leaves at the curb! I earned the privilege by showing how carefully I added just a few more rakefuls to the pile and didn't allow the flames to rage.

But now the only flames were in the color of maples, and their glowing cinders slowly drifted until they were slowly extinguished on the ground, getting ready with the help of the snow to merge with the loam beneath them, slowly, slowly....

And in the stillness and crispiness of it, we scurried like squirrels to bring in the last of the harvest. The light went from somber-bright to slanted to shadowy to dusky all too quickly, and we had potatoes left to dig and squash left to cut. Everyone scurried. The wheelbarrow was filled to the tipping point and run up to the porch. Boxes were topped off, then couldn't be lifted. Small arms were filled while small legs ran for the kitchen.

Frost was coming. The great white steed of the north was about to blow out his ice-breath. By morning the grass would be crunchy-white and the squash plants droopy-black.

The goats looked on, munching mouthfuls of alfalfa and timothy to keep warm with. The bacteria in their guts happily stoked up the fires of metabolism when fed such fine fodder, and they would not be cold.

But our noses reddened and we wondered where last winter's mittens had gotten to.

Gradually the dark took over, and the feeble porch light shed no glow on the garden. It was time to quit. As we moved the piles of veggies from the porch to the kitchen, we looked over our shoulders toward the darkened plot and wondered what we had abandoned....

Inside we went about our business: homework, practicing, the cooking of supper. We had turned the heat on just the day before, and we were toasty. Clumps of earth stuck to everything, squash, children, shoes. Later we spread newspapers on the floor and lined the harvest up on them. Hands on our hips, we stood in a circle and smiled, and then got back to work.

1977

Root cellar?

Our house happened to come with a storage room in the basement, one without shelves but an actual room not designated for anything else. It became our root cellar as the first overflow of harvest began to take over the kitchen counters.

Root cellars are cool and moist because they have earthen floors. Dirt floors. This room of ours had concrete floors just like the rest of the basement. So it failed as a literal root cellar, but it reigned supreme as a-space-to-store-things. John built shelves.

Winter squash were the first inhabitants. They had hard skins and looked durable enough to survive for several years as storage foods. We had vast numbers of them.

The shelves were about as wide as a good-sized squash, so we lined these winter ingredients up in a single rank side-by-side.

We also had potatoes to store, and sunflower heads. We cut these off at the neck and placed them seed-side-up on the shelves. Apples were piled up on a side away from the potatoes, because their smells intermingle and I thought I might not be fond of raw-potato-flavored apples.

I think we had a few turnips, too.

Green beans went into the freezer, which was in another part of the basement.

Tomatoes and eggplants stayed in the kitchen. Their sheer abundance overwhelmed us, but even our amateur thoughts about storage were not so naive as to expect them to survive on their own for long.

I had thoughts of canning, but no time or expertise. How pretty the shelves would have looked with jar after jar of tomatoes! But it didn't happen.

We just ate them as fast as we could, on sandwiches or in the pot for dinner, whatever it might have been.

Soon a hard frost would hit and put an end to the bounty. But for now it threatened to overtake us, and we were glad to have some place to put it all that was for the most part out of sight.

1977.

Harvest

As the end of August arrived, we had a better mix of heat and cool, including a few truly chilly mornings. Maples were showing signs of turning to fall colors. And young goats were coming into heat.

Meanwhile, we were enjoying a bounty from the garden. Tomatoes were inundating us, as were zucchini. Our favorite bounty, though, came in the form of purply shiny-skinned eggplant, which we used at virtually every meal but breakfasts.

There was of course fufarah, now full of green peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, and big chunks of eggplant. We also had eggplant sandwiches made of fried eggplant slices, goat cheese, and fresh-picked lettuce. But perhaps our favorite was babaganoush, a mixture of cooked eggplant and sesame tahini, mixed with lemon juice, garlic, and a bit of salt. The fact that all this sumptuous eating was for free was hard to comprehend.

Another garden treat was jerusalem artichokes. We had discovered these in the food boxes we got each week from the coop, and though it was expensive to plant them instead of eat them, we were reward by a long row of tall sunflower-like stalks with small flowers on top. And all we had to do to add a sunchoke to the meal was to dig about their roots and pull up as many as we wanted.

We had to learn a few tricks about cooking them: to saute them in oil takes a while, until they give up and soften, then brown. Before they brown, they taste like oysters, while afterward more like potatoes. They could also be steamed and eaten like potatoes, or mixed with potatoes and mashed. But our potatoes were still in the ground, and we were happy enough to cut the sunchokes in discs or strips and add them early to the pot that would sooner or later contain all the components of fufarah.

So we ate well. A slice of our beloved pure-white goat cheese went on the top of almost everything. There was never a food as glorious as our homemade whole-wheat bread toasted, a thick slice of tomato still hot from the garden added along with lettuce, the bread spread with butter or good mayonnaise, and then goat cheese in its 1x3 inch slices aligned across the top so that a knife-cut would not disturb it. It was a bit messy to eat, but accompanied by mint 'tea', it made a 100% satisfying lunch. Or we'd just eat it in hand, or crumbled into fufarah or onto a garden salad.

So harvest brought a lot of joy, and it was just beginning.

1977.

The 4th of July after...

On July 4 1976 Boston had a big celebration. And then suddenly we found ourselves again on July 4, but a year later.

On July 4 1976 we had thought we'd take the kids into Boston to join the crowds and wish our country a happy 200th birthday. We had thought to hop on the MTA and let the subway drop us off at Park or Boylston and walk the rest of the way to the Harvard bridge, whence we could watch the fireworks that were discharged out over the Charles River.

But Kay Ferguson's son David had gone in ahead of us and found a pay phone and called and warned us off. He said that there were several million people squeezed between the highways leading to Boston and Boston Harbor, and while everyone was behaving it would be way too easy for a small child to get separated or maybe even trampled. And we had three to watch out for.

So we had stayed home. We had local fireworks to enjoy, and we were ok about it. 

And now a year later we decided to have some friends from MIT over to enjoy a store-bought watermelon filled with berries, peaches and more melon. And we decided to include homemade ice cream. Made with store-bought milk and cream.

The day was of course hot and sticky as 4ths of July always are, and we hung out in the coolest room of the house and talked. We were the only ones with kids, so the comings and goings of small humans were met with puzzlement, which amused me because it seemed so normal to me.

After the watermelon gave out, we worked on the ice cream. It wouldn't freeze. A half dozen chemists sat around trying to get the mix to harden, and nothing happened. Then someone remembered the salt, and we were soon divvying up the lovely slurry and covering the servings with strawberries. Very yummy, but too soon gone!

Everyone went in different directions before dark, and we had chores to do and never did make it to the fireworks. 

We enjoyed the fireflies instead, which flashed in syncopation with distant booms, whether heat lightning or fireworks we never knew.

With the 4th behind us, we were in the full intensity of summer. We dreaded the exuberant and abundant flies by day and the clouds of mosquitoes by night, but otherwise we enjoyed our existence: the freshest possible, purest possible, food from the garden, cold hours-old milk from the ladies in the barn, and the companionship of each other without the stress of meeting any schedule but milking and chores.

It was tranquil. Until mid-month, when peace went away never to return in quite the same way again.

Lunches supreme

When we finally had our first ripe tomatoes, in mid-July after a month of steam and sweat, we discovered a remarkable way to eat them. Only on the farm could we have indulged our urgent cravings for this treat!

We took our homemade bread and cut it thick, and toasted it in the toaster oven, then covered it with butter. 

We then cut a fresh wheel of goat cheese into 1/4 inch slices, and laid them on the bread, as soon as possible so they would soften from the warmth left over from the toasting operation.

On top of the goat cheese went one or two huge, thick, incandescent tomato slices, usually still warm from the garden and filled with that glorious earthy smell. They were red all the way through and juicy.

Then we added the lettuce, fistfuls from the later planting and already in danger of bolting before it could all be eaten. 

And then, maybe some good mayonnaise, or maybe not. And then on top, another slice of that good coarse deep brown whole wheat bread.

And then a diagonal cut, because Nana always cut things diagonally and it seemed respectful to do it her way. (She said a diagonal cut is a way of keeping your face clean because you can eat the point first intead of having to dig in sloppily on the side.)

And then the first bite, pure heaven - creamy tangy cheese with bright tomato with crunchy, slightly bitter green with the deep roundness of the whole wheat. 

A glass of cold goat milk or water stood by, and did a pile of napkins to handle the tomato-y drip. 

When the green peppers were ripe, a slice might be added to The Sandwich, but no other adulterants were tolerated or desired. It was already Perfect.