The Call of the Farm: An Unexpected Year of Getting Dirty, Home Cooking, and Finding Myself by Bilow Rochelle

Author:Bilow, Rochelle [Bilow, Rochelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Experiment
Published: 2014-09-22T21:00:00+00:00

LATE AUGUST

Because Stonehill functioned as a year-round CSA, the crops grown and offered in the summer and early fall months were chosen, in part, because of their preservation-friendly qualities. Swiss chard could be quickly blanched and frozen, packed into tight softball shapes, as could spinach, and with time and patience, bags of sweet corn and edamame. Carrots, green beans, and beets could all be pickled, cabbage turned into kraut, and tomatoes simmered into sauce. Week after week, we encouraged the CSA members to take these steps at home, while struggling to find the time to do it ourselves.

The farm was busier than ever when I arrived back from Colorado, with Lara spearheading the tomato project, spending days in the kitchen canning Amish Paste, Cosmonaut, Moskvich, Pink Brandywine, and my favorite, Cherokee Purple. The Cherokee were firm and meaty, with a deep burgundy interior and a less acidic taste than other varieties. I liked to bite into them like apples, eating everything down to the stem. Lara ended up with more than sixty canned quarts of crushed tomatoes, sauce, and purée, a number I found impressive, but she just wrung her hands and looked at the pantry worriedly and sighed. “It’s not enough.”

The trouble with late summer is that, while there’s so much delicious, fresh, raw food ripe for preserving, there’s very little time to actually do so, since you spent your days planting, weeding, and harvesting said food.

Hazel painstakingly picked all of the Sun Gold and Juliet cherry tomatoes that were splitting at the seams, and simmered them down into a ketchup spiked with curry, a treat she quickly learned to guard closely. The crew would go through half a pint, easy, on fried eggs and potatoes, if left unmonitored.

In the slightly less frenetic hours before and after lunch and dinner, Logan and I ran big chef’s knives down ears of corn, the prep table quickly becoming a blanket of pale yellow kernels. We had done a little research on the best way to preserve the grain, and while some sources swore that a quick dip in boiling water would better capture the summery, just-picked flavor, we both rolled our eyes and simply scooped up the kernels with our palms and poured them into zippered plastic bags. “If I’m going to cook with frozen corn in the winter,” I said, picking silk from the cobs, “it’ll be in eggs, or a soup, and I hardly think we’ll notice a minor flavor discrepancy.”

I loved soybeans and was thrilled to be growing them. To harvest, we simply sliced off the stalks and wheeled them in from the field in a garden cart, which I left parked at the entrance to the barn throughout distribution, encouraging members to take their share and more. In the kitchen, I picked bean pods off the stalk one by one, inspecting the questionable-looking specimens to determine whether they were truly unsalvageable. Most times, I placed them in a “keep” pile, a few brownish-black discolorations not enough to deter me.

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