A Cooking Life

Garden Report: April 8

Hard to believe, but it's almost that time again. Winter held on pretty tight until a few days ago, but the sun finally came out and it warmed up to seasonal levels – and all that snow finally started to melt away in earnest. If you can imagine, the chair in the garden was totally buried in snow for a good part of the winter.

Planning the garden is one of the things that keeps me from going nuts during the long grey cold months. Seed companies have it just right that they start mailing their catalogs just after the first of the year – they know forlorn housebound gardeners will leaf through the pages of bright photographs and lusty descriptions and drive themselves mad with desire for green leaves and dirt. And then order lots of seeds.

Pig Fat Follies

My quest for real lard began about 7 years ago, when I decided to learn myself some Mexican cooking. I'd spent a few days eating my way around Chicago with a bunch of girlfriends, and a raucous dinner at Frontera Grill pointed up a glaring gap in my culinary repertoire (I'd wanted to cruise the Maxwell Street Market for the real deal, but our travel schedule got us into town too late on Sunday).

So I did what any reasonable cooking obsessive would do. I bought a cookbook on the subject (Rick Bayless's Mexico: One Plate at a Time) and invited a bunch of people to dinner. Finding ingredients wasn't too hard. For one thing, it was early September and I had a surplus of tomatoes, hot peppers, cilantro, and tomatillos growing in my garden. And I was able to order corn husks, dried chiles, and masa harina online (from the late, lamented CMC Company). The one thing I couldn't lay hands on was the lard required for the tamales and refried beans.

Sure, even the groceria up the road had turquoise boxes of Sno-Cap “Manteca”, but oh, my brothers and sisters, that crap bears about as much resemblance to home-rendered pig fat as Bud Light® does to a cask-conditioned bitter ale. It's an exemplar of the processed, sanitized, hydrogenated, industrialized “food” that's overtaken this country.

I thought I could just buy some pork fat from the butcher counter and render it myself, but at every grocery store in a 30-mile radius (and there are at least 3) my request for pork fat was met with laughter or incredulity or both. You think we actually butcher pigs here?

In the end, I stooped to the industrial lard and baked some country-style spare ribs in it to impart some flavor. The dinner was a huge success, and I even scored a husband out of it (a story for another time). But finding pig fat became my Quest.

Spaghetti and Meatballs

© 2007 Dan Grossman; Hosted on Fotki

We haven't had a very autumnal autumn this year, but the weather pattern appears to have shifted in fall's favor late last week. Saturday broke dark and heavy, with pelting rain shot from a lowered sky – an excellent day for a track meet.

My husband's youngest daughter, Isabel, took up cross-country running when she got to high school this year. It's quickly become very important to her, and we've scheduled weekend visits carefully to allow her full participation (the kids live with their mother in the farthest northwest corner of the state, just shy of the Canadian border; we see so little of them as it is, we'll take them however we can get them). The state championships were held Saturday up in Thetford, north of here by about an hour-and-a-half's drive. Isabel would be traveling there by bus with her team; we arranged for the other kids to be delivered to the meet, where we would collect them all for the remainder of the weekend.

Hot Tomato

Jaune Flammée d'Orange. It's the name that does it. Or maybe its flawless beauty. Or maybe its perfect tomato taste. Put them all together, and this tomato gets my vote for The One Tomato I'd Grow If I Could Grow Only One.

Garden Report: August 12th

I've been thinking a lot about how off it might seem that I post so much about gardening on a blog that's supposed to be about cooking, and that I post so little about cooking (or that I post so little at all). The truth is, cooking and gardening occupy approximately the same coordinates in my firmament. If I lived in a place with a milder climate, and could garden for more than the few fleeting months allotted us in the hills of Vermont, my blog might easily have been called “A Constant Gardener”. I often fantasize about having my own paradise, overgrown with flowering plants and exotic fruits. But I suspect I'd tire of it, and I'd miss the snow.

A Gift of Chanterelles

A few evenings back, when I finally wandered into the kitchen to start thinking about dinner, I found lying on the counter a plastic Pepperidge Farm bread bag containing a few handfuls of fresh chanterelles. I knew without having to ask that they'd come from Rob, the fellow with whom my husband works building stone walls.