In the beginning, I picked all the green things from our garden, boiled them, soaked them in butter, and served them in a moat around a central chunk of meat—as my mother had fully equipped me to do. But soon I realized that unless I wanted to drive into town every other day for meat, I would have to cook differently. I’d have to focus on the vegetables from the garden.
At that single-slab counter, I learned how. In the mornings I fried eggs in butter with grassy, peppery rings of Hungarian wax pepper and steamed them until the yolks clouded over. I whisked aioli in a bowl perched on my belly to serve with the lone steamed artichoke we had coaxed to grow. I peeled buckets of apples we picked from an abandoned tree on an old homestead nearby and stewed them into coppery mounds of sauce. I simmered plum tomatoes with the sticky, resiny tufts of rosemary, then pummeled a lump of pasta dough, hooked a hand-cranked pasta machine to the butcher block, and painstakingly cut out long pappardelle. Underestimating how long this operation would take, I think we ate at ten that night, Aaron cramped with hunger, me with none at all. Sitting under a dark cloud, I picked moodily at the too-thin delicate noodles, which really would have been better with a cream sauce. I had so much to learn.
When word got out that a young lady was living back there in the woods with a rustic kitchen, older women—some of them virtual strangers—came bearing their abandoned preserving gear: stacked boxes of dusty pint jars, old dented water-bath canners, ancient pressure canners whose gaskets and dials and clamps made them look as intimidating as bombs. Following the fine print in the Ball jar canning book, I set out to assemble an old-time pantry, an arsenal of flavors that couldn’t be found anywhere but here. Some were wild successes: chokecherry syrup that raced with tannins; crab-apple juice as tart as vinegar; fermented dilly beans as tingly as my grandma’s brined dill pickles; wild-berry bachelor’s jam embalmed in high-proof rum, instantly intoxicating. Other things—such as pickled eggplant (the texture of cotton balls) or wild Juneberry jam (which tasted only like its added sugar) or chowchow (just not into it)—felt like the waste of a good free jar.
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For three years we lived like Minnesota snowbirds: “up north” at the house outside Park Rapids for the six months of the gardening season and four hours south in Minneapolis for the winter months. To fund this routine we hoarded the income we made from our city jobs and coasted on it through our underemployed summers, during which we had no bills to pay. Aaron’s summer days were filled with making sculptures and pumping water. Mine were taken up with cooking—at home and, eventually, three mornings a week at a diner on Main Street in Park Rapids, where I earned five dollars an hour, a paycheck that just about covered the gas it cost to get there.
At some point into our third summer in Two Inlets, after we’d gradually updated our situation to include a landline phone, a single solar panel, and a propane-powered fridge, I hit a plateau.
I remember sitting in our garden slowly thinning the baby kohlrabi we’d planted for a fall harvest. It was fine work, pinching out the crowd of extra stem follicles. The kohlrabi looked like a two-leaf clover, as did most of the sprouts, but I had learned to distinguish the baby brassica—the cabbages and broccolis and collards—as slightly duller than their shinier Swiss-chard-and-beet brethren. The kohlrabi sprouts were the opaquest of them all, their almost rubbery-looking leaves foretelling the waxy, long-armed globe that would eventually grow.
I worked so intently that the animals around me forgot I was there. The frog to my right made its way slowly through the beet tops, pausing mightily between each jump, as if making thoughtful moves on a chess board. A crow swooped in to land on our cucumber trellis, cawing and beating its heavy wings against the wood; the red-winged blackbird it was terrorizing replied with a scream from its fence perch. Two tweaky chipmunk rivals chased each other over the zucchini arms, the winner chattering in delight as it squeezed through a tiny hole in the fence. The sweet white wings of the blight-bearing cabbage moths fluttered around my legs.
I followed the chipmunks, pushing back the large furry zucchini leaves. Mine were not your typical Midwestern zucchini, the kind famous for its bonanza yields. I had paged through seed catalogs until I found an heirloom known for both its firmness and its flavor: Costata Romanesco. Leggy and overbearing, its vines walked all over the garden like they owned the place. This plant was miserly with its ribbed zucchini, but the ones that grew were tight and not a bit watery, with almost invisible seeds. I checked the one I’d been eyeing for two days, reached into the spiky vines, and snapped it off. I stripped ripe Romano beans hanging against the trellis until it looked like I’d gotten them all, then flipped my perspective and went around to the other side and found a bunch more hiding in the vines. I filled the basket with the rest of what needed picking—a couple of Hungarian wax peppers, a mound of fresh potatoes—and marched up the hill to the house.
With this motley assortment, I faced my big question of the day: how to make a memorable meal out of this mystery basket. My head filled with mental pictures from the cookbooks I’d gorged myself on the night before, I knew that great cooking began with the finest ingredients, and I certainly had those.
I dumped the dirty potatoes in the sink, rubbed the fine hair off the zucchini with a damp cloth, saved the peppers for breakfast, and put the beans to the side. I grabbed the two pork chops lying on the ice blocks in the fridge and rubbed them with dry spices as my mom did, planning to fry them in butter. With the zucchini, I wanted to make the dish I’d read about: a nest of julienned zucchini noodles dressed with garlic, pine nuts, and red pepper flakes, as al dente as a pile of pasta. For the potatoes I fell back on a family favorite: German potato salad.
I sliced the zucchini as thinly as I could and then cut the slices crosswise into strips—not as finely as in the cookbook illustration. I fired up a pan, the yellow propane flames surging up the sides, covered it with olive oil, and tipped open the very expensive jar of pine nuts I’d been saving. The nuts scuttled across my board. I bit into one and saw a pale white center; was that a core or a worm? Not exactly a hot item in Park Rapids, the pine nuts had sat on the shelf for who knows how long. I threw them into the pan anyway. I scurried to chop the garlic before the nuts burned, added it to the pan, walked half a step away to search for my jar of pepper flakes, and came back to find the garlic burning, I quickly dumped in the zucchini, stirred it up, and then turned around to the sink to scrub the potatoes. They came out of the ground in all sizes—some grenades, some gumballs.