Cooking in the Moment by Andrea Reusing

Cooking in the Moment by Andrea Reusing

Author:Andrea Reusing [Reusing, Andrea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-88974-4
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-04-05T04:00:00+00:00


TUESDAY, LATE SEPTEMBER

FALL GREENS

In the South, we don’t get many greens during the hot summer, so early fall means leafy relief from the dense, ever-bigger eggplants and squashes. I cooked my first greens of the season today at the SEEDS (South Eastern Efforts Developing Sustainable Spaces) garden in downtown Durham. It’s an oasis of fig trees, sunflowers, rows of lettuces, tomatoes, okra, summer and winter squash, yard-long beans, and black-eyed peas in the middle of a food desert. Because this part of town is a bus ride from the closest grocery store, some neighbors get many of their meals from gas stations and convenience stores.

Here in the garden, thirty teenagers meet each day after school to tend to their crops and rotate shifts getting up at 5 a.m. on Saturdays to sell their vegetables at the Durham farmers’ market. They grow twelve different kinds of hot and sweet peppers—including sweet Marconi and spicy Jamaican Hot Chocolate—such a bountiful crop that it helps their bottom line to find ways of preserving them. Today, we worked on some ideas for their imminent harvest: pickled and salt-cured chile peppers and, since it was lunchtime, an all-garden meal of red chard braised with fresh hot peppers and garlic. We simmered the greens until they were sweet, tender, dark forest green.

Although a few kids had never tasted the chard they grow, most had. When someone doesn’t like a new flavor, Kavanah Ramsier, the group’s leader, asks them to explain why. This usually requires another taste, after which the taster often just gives up and likes it. But as long as they try it and think about it, not liking a vegetable is no big deal—there is a lot to choose from in the garden. School gardeners are a nonchalant breed, and Kavanah’s cool reminded me of the tortured dinner Oona and I had a few days ago when I watched her pick fifty gnat-size pieces of carrot out of her chicken soup. Fully aware of her burgeoning plain-food fetish, I had gone ahead and added the spoonful of minced carrot anyway, proving that I am more compulsive than she is. Kavanah wisely takes the long view, having learned that if you go to the mat with kids about food, you have already lost. She lowers the stakes, knowing that one day she will neutrally reintroduce the offender, maybe waiting until late fall to give a kid a face-saver; after all, greens are sweeter after the first frost.



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