Food and Gardens
So I picked up a book at the public library on Wednesday called The Cook and the Gardener: A Year of Recipes and Writings for the French Countryside. The title was the perfect combination of terms to make me pick up the book. Food? Fantastic. Gardening? One of my favorite things, although mostly in theory at the moment. The French countryside? A mythical place that I only hope to visit one day.
Anyways, this book supplements Ms. Hesser’s experience as a chateau chef with her observations about the elderly French gardener M. Milbert. Divided season by season and month by month, she fills the book with recipes based on the Burgundian garden’s seasonal harvest. While I’ve flipped through most of it, a more indepth reading has only taken me through September or October at the moment. The idea of the garden is charming, growing all kinds of things from potatoes, onions, and leeks, to plums, cherries, and currants. The recipes are pretty fancy, even if they are not all terribly time-consuming, and described in a much more poetic fashion that usually reserved for cookbooks.( So far, I’ve read the word “unctuous” more times here than probably in the past year.)
Although the recipes in the book sound delicious, it is (predictably) the garden anecdotes that interest me the most. I want a walled kitchen garden with a stone cottage opening out to it. I want a plot of thyme growing right outside the kitchen door. I want to weed and turn the soil and worry about rain. Alas, I am stuck here in this apartment with little space to garden and the wrong season.
I’ve been daydreaming about my future garden (ie next year’s garden, then the year after that’s and the year after that’s…) instead. It is a little surprising how quickly I’ve forgotten my gardening knowledge. What blooms first in the spring – daffodils or grape hycinth? When do I start getting peas off my plants? What about strawberries? I’m going to have to look at some gardening books to make sure that I’m mentally planting everything at the right time and in the right space (will onions affect the taste of strawberries? Will tomatoes kill other plants? Or keep off bugs?).
One pleasant thing about my new gardening urge: my best chance to start the garden of my daydreams is to return to Winchester when I graduate. And as this is probably my most responsible option post-graduation, it is also now one of the more appealling. I don’t need to see my boyfriend all the time if I have nigh unlimited gardening space. Also this would be the best for a planted garden, as opposed to a potted one, since I could start my garden there in the spring and visit it on weekends, then move back when my lease was up at the end of May or in the beginning of May, right after I graduate. Otherwise, I won’t be able to plant things until rather late in the season.
Peas are factoring into my daydreams most majorly at the moment, hence my worries about planting seasons being up before my move. June is way past pea-planting season. Potatoes, too, are an early crop, as well as a vegetable I greatly care for. A strawberry bed is really only feasible at my parents’ house, since it is a perennial planting, and just so happens to be part of their plan for next year.
The house in Winchester is luring me back to it with something else: its kitchen. A lovely, new kitchen with quality appliances including a gas stove/oven. And all kinds of utensils that I haven’t found the time or money to buy yet. When I cook there, I have to remember that things will cook in about half the time I am expecting, since the stovetop flames immediately instead of slowly pushing heat through the electric coils. More counterspace! More cabinets!
And best of all, a willing taste-test crew! Yes, my family are consistantly the most willing to try my concoctions and compliment them way beyond the food’s deserving. My mother likes many of the same foods that I do, and I know she is feeling the same pinch of cooking things that no one else wants to eat… Dad and the brother, if they eat it at all, are almost certain to say nice things about the food. None of the suffering looks while shoveling food to which my roommate subjects me.
Granted, I’m not sure that I want to move back home, despite the allure of a garden and a nice kitchen. The tension between my dad and my brother is a little upsetting, but mostly, I’ve simply enjoyed living with people my own age and I don’t look forward to returning to the (now a little suffocating) nest. My parents, especially mom, try very hard to show me that they know that I am not quite a little girl anymore, but they still forget. And our lifestyles may not make us very good roommates. I’ve developed a more night-owlish existence than they have, and those extra hours after everyone has gone to bed, including (it seems) all of Winchester, can be rather lonesome.
Of course, a true gardener rises with the sun and goes to bed with the sun (sounds toasty), so maybe I’d adapt. Whatever happens, I’ll find someway to be happy and have a garden and my own space.
