End of summer

It is the first grey morning in recent memory. The lovely string of clear warm days with almost no humidity has been beautiful but I'm secretly a little glad for some clouds. It keeps the sun feeling like a gift when it comes. The season is changing, it's unavoidable now. The red maple outside the kitchen window has a whole branch that has turned red already. I'd love this season with even more intensity if I didn't know that many months of winter are around the corner. But I do love it nonetheless.

I love it for the sound of the school bus early in the morning. For the fog in the mornings that the sun takes so long to break through. For the increased energy I have and the quickening of events and harvest celebrations and weekend plans. There's the sense that summer's sluggish August haze is over and now it's time to get back to work, head back to school, start over again.

A couple of weeks ago we took a two day trip to Montreal. And I'll be frank, I'm not sure our intentions were ever really anything other than to eat our way through the city. My husband and his parents are the best eaters for a food trip because all three of them have discerning palettes and a genuine enthusiasm for most anything edible. A friend suggested the Jean Talon market in Little Italy (fervent thanks, Bill, for that recommendation) on Saturday morning. And that is exactly where we started. It was cold and raining and people were dressed in coats. But that was okay because the cold made us hungry.

The Jean Talon market is the largest open-air market in North America (according to its own website) and I've never seen such care taken to make all that food look beautiful. There was a totally different style there than we have at our farmers' markets here. It was orderly, geometric, symmetric. We were disappointed (well, sort of) that we were eating out for two days instead of taking all those glossy fruits and vegetables home to cook. But we spent a long time looking anyway.

We tasted ice cider at a tasting at the edge of the market- we spent some time here, tasting, comparing different orchards' varieties and appreciating how much more common cider is in Quebec than in Vermont.

We ate frites with flavored aioli that was pretty damn incredible. Bison sausage on little sticks, fried cheese from a cheese maker. Ralph tried wild mushrooms, and I had a crepe. The crepe was heaven- buckwheat batter, smeared with nutella. This flavor reminds me so much of our family trip to Paris when I was fifteen that I have to sit down for a minute (post-crepe picture below, note the smile). It was heavenly. I loved every second of it and if I'd had the opportunity, I would have eaten another one before we left.

The rest of the weekend continued in the same vein- fancy drinks before dinner, dinner at a Greek tapas place that looked suspiciously empty of patrons but turned out to be incredible. And the waiter knew exactly what I was talking about when I said I couldn't eat gluten. For that, I am willing to forgive a lot of flaws, but there was no need because it was amazing.

Our last morning there, Ralph and I got up early and went down to the river with our cameras while his parents went to church at the Notre-Dame Basilica. I love this photo of him because it's exactly how I like to think of him- camera in hand, absorbed in the moment. It was quiet and cold that morning, not many people around and lovely to be out and appreciating the city.

And so that trip felt like the beginning of fall- abundance at the market- the need for sweaters and jackets. Trees starting to change color. And the capstone was the chocolat chaud with cayenne- yes, it was cold enough for hot chocolate- from Suite 88 Chocolatier on Rue St. Denis. Note the urban intro on their website.  And this stuff was amazing. They melt dark chocolate and blend it with cream (not milk, cream) and add enough cayenne to make it difficult to stop drinking it- the heat catches up with you when you stop. It was decadent and lovely and we bought some to take home. I haven't made any yet- I'm waiting for another cold day that needs some heat.  

Photo credits to Ralph except for the morning fog photo and the photo of him, which are mine.

More corn?

Why did you get so much corn? Ralph asks me looking at the huge burlap bag I've carted around to the deck for shucking. Well, fair question, I suppose. The freezer, already pretty full in general, has plenty of corn from when Ralph was the one coming home with dozens of ears. And after thinking about it, I shrug. It's summertime?

There's a new farmstand on my way home from work. I watched them build it over the course of the summer and when they finally put up a sign advertising sweet corn, I stopped and have been stopping every few days ever since. I like it. It's less Vermont and more Ohio. They fill your bag for you. They have the borderland French Canadian accent. They push tomatoes and cucumbers and squash along with their corn. But I'm there just for the corn.

On Thursday, when I stopped for corn for dinner, I honestly don't know why I asked her to reserve four dozen for me for Saturday morning. Sometimes, I think that abundance is important. It's been a bad week- the loss of our tomatoes, and the near-constant pressure and anxiety about work culminating with a very bad meeting Friday afternoon- well, abundance feels good.

After sleeping in and lingering a long time over coffee, I drove over and picked it up. When I saw the size of the bag, I did briefly think... uh oh. I stopped at the hardware store for a bigger canning pot, and at another farmstand for cabbage and peppers, and hauled it all inside.

I used half of that corn for corn relish. It's a vinegar relish with corn, peppers, onions and cabbage from the Ball Blue Book, aka canning bible. The nine pints of relish didn't really make a dent in the pile of corn I sliced off 54 cobbs. I admit, I stuck three more quarts in the freezer (don't tell hubby) and there's too many quarts in the fridge really to use. But I'll make more corn chowder, spoon bread with fresh corn, maybe a corn salad. It will be abundantly sweet, and that's just fine with me this weekend.

Blighted

I don't know why I thought we'd get away with it. Everyone else has succumbed to the blasted blight. The early summer's cool and rainy weather made ideal conditions for late blight. This disease hit northeastern farmers hard in the early days of the summer, wiping out tomato and potato crops completely. But the last month or so has been warm and dry, definitely not ideal conditions for blight. And the buzz has abated a bit. And as the big, fat Cherokee Purple beauties started rolling in from our garden, I really let myself think that we might miss it. I was injudicious with my tomatoes. I was flagrantly adding them to everything- white beans and sliced cherry tomatoes, salads of nothing but tomatoes, basil and olive oil, pot of beans simmering on the stove? Add some tomatoes. I forgot that they are rare this summer. And now they're all gone.

Friday of last week, we harvested a whole flat of tomatoes from the garden, handfuls of Sun Gold cherry tomatoes, beautiful Cherokee Purples, and the start of the Gilbertie Paste- the tomatoes I was counting on to stock our basement shelf with canned tomatoes. We spent two days in Montreal with my in-laws and came home to half our plants dead or dying. Those two days we were in Montreal - and which I'll get to in a later post, there was amazing food there - were cool and rainy. On Monday, I took the day off to spend it with my in-laws. We went out to the garden to harvest some tomatoes and I was shocked to see how quickly everything had deteriorated. It was awful. I had to sit down and just look for a while.

The leaves were spotted with brown lesions and so were the stems on the worst looking plants. They looked pretty terrible, especially given that they were beautifully vibrant and heavy with fruit three days earlier. So my mother-in-law and I spent the day Monday picking green tomatoes, pulling out plants and bagging them, taking down the trellis, and cover cropping the bed. We also cut off the potato plants at the base and I'll harvest the potatoes in a couple of weeks, hoping that the disease hasn't made it to the tubers. If it has, we'll have potato mush in our root cellar this winter.

This breaks my heart in a million little ways. I know that there are worse things that could happen, but we had thirty tomato plants and they looked healthier than they've ever been for us before. The whole landscape has changed in the garden. It looks empty without the tomato and potato plants. The beans are the only thing left out there with any presence. It has taken summer and turned it into fall in one weekend. The work of garden clean-up that we'd normally do in October, we did at the tail end of August. There is one more flat of tomatoes sitting on the kitchen counter. I am trying to ration them, but they'll go bad before we can eat them all. That's right about when we'd start canning except there aren't any more waiting to be picked in the garden. Summer's over with an abrupt, unanticipated halt. And we'll hope for better things next year.

A part of me is glad to move on. To shift to the sweetness of fall and cooler air, to appreciate the culmination of a summer's work and to see the smooth earth, seeded with rye, waiting for the cold. The slow cooling period, the flaming trees and crisp air is like a final gift before winter sets in, something to tide us over between summer's lushness and the winter grey. But I'm not sure I was quite there yet. I was looking forward to the canning and even the fruit fly haze from too many tomatoes on the counter to eat fast enough. So I'll spend this weekend making green tomato chutney, fried green tomatoes, maybe a green tomato pie - I saw a recipe for that somewhere recently. And I'll freeze some more corn and then that will be enough. The onset of fall and the end of the garden for the year. Damn blight.

Photo credits to Ralph.

Love letter to Ohio sweet corn (sort of)

Ralph went out Saturday afternoon to pick blueberries and came home with two quarts of raspberries and four dozen ears of corn plus the seven pints of blueberries he went out for. Berries are lovely, and I'm the first to say so, but corn is something else altogether. I love corn. I am a Midwestern girl at heart, and I'll freely admit that Vermont just can't grow sweet corn like Ohio can. We used to go down into the Cuyahoga River valley and buy corn from Szalay's in Peninsula. They'd harvest it onto a big hay wagon and park it next to their farm stand and we'd fill grocery bags of it from the wagon. And go ahead, make all the toxic-river jokes you want to about the Cuyahoga River (which- come on, be fair- has come a long way in the 40 years since it caught fire and simultaneously caught the nation's attention), but that damn corn was the sweetest I've ever had. Some combination of soils, rainfall, alchemy, whatever, made it magical. And it ruined me for anything else.

Except that over the years (thirteen, thirteen!, since I last had Szalay's corn), well, you forget. Memories fade a bit, your point of reference shifts. And then your hubby brings home four dozen ears of corn in a year when all things have been slow to produce. And well, allegiances shift, I'm sorry. It was pretty damn good corn. I know you buckeyes will forgive me when I say, it may have rivaled Szalay's.


So ravings aside, hubby shucked a big pile of it on the kitchen floor and we processed it all for freezing. This is a sticky process involving big pots of boiling water, slicing it off the cob while juice splatters the counter, the floor, my shirt, my glasses. It's almost as messy as the pickled beets we made a couple of weeks ago. But it means that we'll have sweet corn in January to add color to corn chowder with bacon, to big pots of chili, to pasta. We may do another batch if we get our act together.


In fairness to Ohio and that much-maligned river valley, it still probably wasn't as good as Szalay's corn. But this summer, it will do just fine.

Alium wealth

Well, we thought that we were rich in onions with the harvest of our Walla Wallas. And indeed we are. The caramelized onions we made and ate on top of everything for a week. That was wealth. And the onions I sauteed last night with chard and fresh tomatoes and tossed with pasta. That was luxury. But I think we are reaching slightly ridiculous heights with the number of onions I pulled out of the garden today.

Remember those photos? The ones with the labels from my onion bed? Well, I pulled out the rest of the shallots- the ones that were sacrificed for the love of beans and are consequently puny. And I pulled the New York Earlies which were not early and not impressive in any other way either. And I pulled the four rows of Cortlands. They weren't as big as the Walla Wallas, but they'll be a lot harder, and a lot longer lasting in our root cellar. (The root cellar that I hope we'll have finished by the time the onions are dry and cured.)

When you open the door from our kitchen into the garage, the smell of aliums is overwhelmingly, overpoweringly intense. My hands were funky with the smell of onion. But we won't buy an onion for the next 9 months. Rich, rich, rich indeed.

(photo credit to my hubby, Ralph)

Traveling trials

The dog days of summer are upon us but it was noticeably chilly in the overly air conditioned Newark airport Monday. Ralph and I spent the weekend in Virginia visiting family and friends, and had what we thought would be a two and a half hour layover in Newark on our way back. It was early evening and we were hungry and shivering and definitely worn out from packing too many people and too much wine into a very short weekend. We went in search of dinner. Airports can be a hard place for someone who can't eat gluten; I know this. But a recent memory of a decent, if pricey, meal at Gallagher's at that airport several months ago made me less concerned about bringing food with me than I usually might be.


So as we walked up and down the packed halls of the airport, searching out the food options in the C concourse, I felt my mood get darker with the seemingly never-ending pizza, salty Chinese food, pretzels, and sandwiches. Even the tacos at Maui Taco were made with flour tortillas. The chicken and rice I ended up eating at a fake French bistro was distinctly not good. And no doubt full of modified food starch, or just plain flour. It was a bad food decision for a celiac, but I was on the verge of a food-breakdown, nearly in tears, and I bought it anyway.

I realize that this is probably a fruitless rant but, really, why does it have to be so damn difficult to eat safely in an airport if you have an allergy? As I was waiting in line at Maui Taco (and sorry to keep maligning them here, but the experience was really pretty disappointing and the name stuck in my head) to ask about corn vs. flour tacos, the man in front of me asked the cashier whether their beans were vegetarian. The man answered dismissively, "yeah, yeah, yeah." The customer, noticeably skeptical, asked, "Are you sure?" The cashier again brushed off the question, inspiring something less than confidence in the answer. Do I live in a bubble here or is it fair to say that people who are in the business of selling food should know what they're serving? And airport or not, I refuse to accept that food can't be whole and fresh or at the least that there can't be options that are whole and fresh. For God's sake, can't we do better than this?

While that last meal at Gallagher's was nice enough, it was close to $150, for two people, in an airport. We were on our way back from a trip to Jamaica and reluctant to end the vacation. But we weren't feeling so extravagant on Monday night. We did sit in their bar and have a drink- and my wine came in a glass with someone else's lipstick on it. The bartender was extremely apologetic and immediately brought me a new, clean glass. But, hey, Newark? Get your act together. It shouldn't have to be so bad.

That layover ended up being more than five hours. We were cold and tired and ready to go home and when our plane finally landed in Burlington at 2 in the morning, I was very grateful to be home.

(photo credit to Ralph)

August bounty

Well, yes, I started the weekend a little cranky. I freely admit it. I don't remember why but I do recall that I was cranky all the way through Friday night and into Saturday morning. So I went out to the garden in an attempt to keep my pique to myself (as it wasn't spreading peace and joy throughout the land). And would you know...there I discovered onions? Walla Walla sweet onions, huge and round? It happened while I forgot to pay attention, and all of a sudden, they're ready for picking.

So I found an attitude adjustment in the midst of the onions. A whole garden cart full of onions, which represents only about a quarter of the eventual harvest. Just about nothing could have made me happier. Except that there were beets ready too. While they could have stayed there a bit longer to fatten even further, they were sort of victim to the beans.

The beans that are taking over the world out there, close cousin to Jack's variety. They've overtopped the original trellis, a wimpy four-feet tall. And they've since overtopped the second trellis I rigged up over the original one, another foot and a half higher. I underestimated their vigor. I mean, really, look at them above... what has the right to be so youthfully vital and vigorous in August? These things are still growing! I could build a third trellis on top of the other two and it would overwhelm that one in a couple of days. Amazing. So anyway, they were crowding the beets and I've been wanting to make pickled beets, so I yanked out all the blood-red roots and laid them in the grass for washing with the hose.

And so, it turned into a harvest weekend, rather unexpectedly. The summer that's been slow to yield finally produced. We even plucked the first full-sized ripe tomato, a sincere accomplishment in a year full of Late Blight and decimated tomato patches all over Vermont. Two eggplant and some more of the seemingly endless chard and kale plus some bonus potatoes growing out of the compost pile rounded out the take.

Perhaps it is obvious and everyone would feel this way, but reaping the bounty from all our hours in the garden gives me a measure of joy that's hard to compare to anything else and that doesn't diminish from year to year. Every time, it is a miracle when the damn bean plants once again over top whatever trellis I've built. Tying the onions into bunches to hang to cure in the garage, braiding the garlic to dry along with the onions, pickling beets in the late afternoon, and hubby coming in the back door with two fists full of potatoes gleaned from volunteer plants in the compost pile, these things all bring me immense pleasure. So, yes, I was cranky, but now, my hands are stained red from the beets (and from a minor mishap with the knife and slippery beets) and my pique has faded. I so love this garden.

(top photo credit to hubby, ralph)