21 October 2010

Bok choi or Chinese cabbage, Chinese broccoli, Carrots, Celery root, Escarole, Lemongrass, Onions, Peppers, Ancho hot pepper, Yellow Finn potatoes, Shallots, Acorn and Butternut winter squash

I recognize that my recipes often leave people feeling frustrated. They lack details. Amounts, times, even ingredients are frequently a little vague, as though cooking were an almost entirely ad hoc undertaking. Some people think I am just being coy, protecting my culinary secrets behind this irritating imprecision. Some people think I am just being irritating. Few people believe me when I say I don’t have recipes for most of what I cook and that I am not entirely sure I can remember everything I put in the dish, let alone exactly how much of any ingredient.

We tend far too often to think of recipes as authoritative texts, as the final word on how make a particular dish. We want to believe in their accuracy, believe that cooking can be made relatively simple and scientific, believe that there truly is one way to make each dish. If that is true then all we have to do to succeed in the kitchen is master reading comprehension and have a decent gourmet shop nearby. We will get predictable, praiseworthy results every time.

And a lot of recipes happily play along, adopting a tone of certainty. If you want to create, let’s say, Gratin Dauphinois or onion tart or celery root remoulade, then these, the recipe dictates, are the ingredients you must have on hand and the precise steps you must take in order to end up with that dish. You only have skim milk for the potatoes? No pastry flour on hand for the tart shell? A bit short of shallots? Oven imperfectly calibrated? Then don’t bother. You simply won’t end up with the dish you desire unless you strictly obey the recipe.

I see people come to a late fall farmer’s market with a list and walk away empty-handed because none of us had cucumbers or basil or lemons (yes, people ask if we have lemons) or whatever it was they needed to make some dish. And clearly they could not amend their plans when confronted by the seasons and a pavilion full of fresh produce. They had chosen what to make and given themselves over to the recipe, and the recipe most definitely did not tell them to go to the market and see what looks good and get that and figure something out from there. Nor did it suggest that in the absence of good fresh basil they might try using some other herb, cilantro perhaps or thyme.

I suppose modern recipes can afford to be dictatorial. They may well suggest you check the local farmer’s market for really fresh ingredients, but they know that you will always find cucumbers and tomatoes at the supermarket. Who needs spontaneity or ingenuity when the modern food distribution system can provide you with a full range of crops year-round.

But a recipe is not an unequivocal solution to a mathematical problem. It is just a set of directions, and like any directions it offers one of multiple possible routes to your destination. The person offering it probably considers it the best—the fastest or shortest or prettiest—way to go and so may present it as the only real choice. But you could take a different path and end up in the same place. Deciding which way to go might depend on all sorts of conditional factors: the time of year, your skills, your esthetic sensibilities, your schedule, other people’s schedules. Even if you trust the person offering the directions enough to choose his route—if you know he has tried all the routes, know him to be sensible, find his relevant opinions sympathetic— you have to be prepared to find an alternate way should you encounter some roadblock.

Produce varies even more than traffic and road conditions. An early October tomato won’t yield the same results as an early August one. If you insist on having a tomato salad in the fall you will be unhappy if you make it just the way you did with summer fruits. You need to use more salt and vinegar and perhaps a little sugar (how much more? Well, how salty and sour and sweet do you like your tomato salad?) to get anything like the flavor the tomatoes gave you two months earlier, and there’s nothing to do about the texture. You would be far better off forgetting about that salad until next summer and trying a celery root (the dense, pale greenish orb) remoulade instead. Obviously it is not the same as a tomato salad. But it is good in its own way, and far better right now than just about any tomato you can get your hands on.

If you don’t believe me, try making it. It is easy. Just peel your celery root and julienne or shred it (why can’t I just say to do one or the other? Because I don’t know if you have an implement that makes julienning vegetables easy and I don’t know which texture you prefer and either works), add a finely sliced shallot or a more or less equivalent amount of onion (or two shallots if you like shallots (or no shallot or onions of you don’t like them)), and mix it with a dressing made of a little oil (I always use olive oil), some heavy cream or sour cream, a dash or so of paprika, lemon juice (the lemoniness of lemons varies enormously, so see how strong your lemon is and add enough juice to give the remoulade a distinct but not overwhelming sourness), a big dollop of Dijon mustard (I think you have to use Dijon mustard to get the right flavor), salt, pepper and finely chopped parsley (or maybe a little marjoram or oregano or perhaps even lemon balm). Exactly how much of each component of the dressing? Enough to make enough dressing to coat your variably sized, variably cut up vegetables well. You can eat the remoulade right away, but the flavors and texture seem to improve if you let it sit for a couple of hours so the dressing can do its work on the celery root. You could use mayonnaise instead of the cream (or sour cream) and vinegar instead of the lemon, and come to think of it you could use kohlrabi or turnip instead of the celery root. Or of course you could make something else entirely with the celery root such as a pureed celery root and apple soup, or a celery root-stuffed baked apple (apple and celery root go together nicely). Or you could make potato and celery root pancakes. Or celery root sorbet (I have actually made it—and more than once).

Is that a recipe? Well, it is a reasonably accurate description of how I make remoulade, though I admit it is probably not the easiest set of directions to follow, especially since it ends up possibly backtracking and taking off in some entirely different direction. But then that is how I think one should go about making food. Open the box, see what you have got, try to figure out what the hell it is (the Chinese broccoli is the bunched green,and just needs to be lightly steamed). Sniff it, especially the lemongrass (the slender stalks), which has a wonderful scent and can be used to particularly good effect in spicy Thai soups and curries (just for flavoring purposes; it has exactly the texture you would expect from something that looks like that). Taste it. Think about what you feel like eating and start cooking, and keep tasting and amending until it tastes good. Now that is a recipe.

14 October 2010

Arugula, Beets, Chard, Cilantro, Dill, Lettuce, Peppers, Satina potatoes, Pie pumpkin, Radishes, Tomatoes, Winter squash

I think my brain took early retirement. Unfortunately, it did not have the decency to inform me of this before I started trying to write the newsletter. So I have been sitting here for nearly four hours putting down pieces of sentences and shuffling them more or less randomly in the vain hope that somehow meaning will emerge. Occasionally I think of something to say—or think I think of something to say—but when I try put it on the page I find I cannot quite get a hold of it any longer and nothing will coax it near enough for me to grasp it properly. Not that this differs radically from my normal (by which, of course, I mean abnormal) writing process. But something about the complete futility of the effort this evening suggests that whatever cognitive functions I still had a few days ago have now departed.

Perhaps my brain took the frost as a sign that its work was done for the season. Lots of people assume that our season ends with the first frost. Our basil season certainly ended Saturday night. But basil is particularly sensitive. Just saying the word frost to basil can cause it to keel over. Most of the other crops out in the fields did not pay the cold much heed. Even the late tomatoes withstood the frost well enough for us to get another harvest, as you can see, and the pepper patch hardly suffered at all.

Frost is an odd thing. The freezing air flows like water. You can feel it running down along the drainage ditch by our field houses at night, and it does its damage where it pools up and sits long enough to burst the cells in the leaves of tender plants. The peppers were spared because we put them on a slight rise, probably no more than six feet above the early tomatoes, which the frost did in (a mercy killing since those tomato plants had already done all they could and were fading away). The north end of the row of late tomatoes suffered more than the south simply because it is near the ditch where the frost runs.

People also assume that we lament the loss of our summer crops to the frost. Our emotions are mixed. Nobody who likes to eat can entirely celebrate the end of tomato season. Nobody, however, who has spent the summer picking all of those tomatoes can entirely mourn it either. And it is not as though we have time to just sit around and moan because we don’t have zucchini. There are all those crops that don’t mind a frost to distract us from our sorrow, such as arugula and radishes, which grow better at this time of year.

Of course, this time of year does not last very long. At some point soon the weather will get cold and miserable enough to make life hard even for hardy vegetables, not to mention farmers. But I trust (for no particularly good reason) that weather won’t come until next month, so we will deliver shares through the 4^th of November. That means you only have three more weeks to give back all those waxed boxes you have been storing up to return en masse.

Speaking of storing things en masse, we will once again offer you the chance to order various storage crops for delivery on the Monday before Thanksgiving (the 22^nd of November). I will send out a price list next week. In the meantime, you can practice with some of the vegetables in the share. I think you will find that the roots and tubers like to hang out in a cold damp (but not wet) place, while the onions and shallots and winter squash prefer a somewhat warmer and much drier residence (based on that I guess I am more of an onion than a tuber). Or you could eat them.

7 October 2010

Endive, Lettuce, Purple mizuna, Onions, Peppers, Numex and Burning Bush hot peppers, Potatoes, Radishes, Shallots, Thyme, Hakurei turnips, Butternut winter squash

I hope you will forgive the shortness of this note. Though come to think of it that is a rather presumptuous request. For all I know many of you will welcome, not lament, my rare attempt at brevity. Some of you may not even notice it because you gave up on the newsletter weeks ago, certain that you would never glean enough pertinent information to make wading through the mire of prose worthwhile.

Of course, if you are not reading this then there’s really not reason for me to say anything at all about the length of the newsletter and or how you might feel about it or, well, anything. But as anyone out there who does actually read the newsletter has probably noticed, such a lack of a sensible reason to write would hardly constrain me.

What does constrain me is my annual catering gig for the Agricultural Stewardship Association. Once upon a time I took on the task of making a nice dinner for a few major donors and members of the Board, all in all around 20 people. Somehow over the years that has evolved (perhaps a little like the antlers of the Irish Elk) into appetizers for 250. Putting together half a dozen or more different little dishes for a large crowd takes time and involves a lot of increasingly tedious repetition of small tasks.

Fortunately, I have come to realize that there are better ways to feed the masses than making several thousand individual pastries. Thus the little squash empanadas and onions tarts are off the menu, replaced by polenta cakes with roasted tomatoes, and bread stuffed with greens, and red pepper-walnut dip, and pickled carrots, which we can make in large batches and serve in small pieces. But it still takes time, time I might otherwise spend crafting ornate sentences on who knows what topic for the newsletter.

So I will get straight to the vital information. As a general rule you should approach small, brightly colored hot peppers with caution. As a specific rule, you should approach the small, orange/pink pepper in your share with extreme caution. I don’t mean to frighten you away from going anywhere near it. Just avoid, let’s say, slicing it and then touching your eyes or deciding it looks so delicious you will just pop the whole thing into your mouth. Instead, try putting some portion of one (depending on how much you like hot food) into a blender with some fresh pineapple or mango, garlic, onion, lime juice and salt and making a fresh hot salsa that would be excellent with grilled fish or pork. Or you could use a piece to spice up your chili or you’re a Thai soup.

The Numex peppers, the very smooth pointy ones, do not pose anything like the same threat. I have been roasting and peeling them and pureeing the flesh with garlic, a little vinegar and salt. It makes a great sauce for all sorts of things and you can stir some into an endive and potato soup.

Because they are relatively easy to peel (I just use a vegetable peeler and keep going until I am down to solid orange flesh) and fleshy, I like to cut Butternut squash into cubes and roast the them tossed with butter, maple syrup and paprika until the have started to caramelize. Or you can just bake them whole until soft and then scoop out the flesh use it as a filling for little empanadas.

The mizuna, the frilly purplish leaf, is a Japanese mustard green. You can cook it, but I prefer it in salads. I like the texture as well as the taste. You could add some minced or grated ginger, a little soy sauce and perhaps a splash of heavy cream to your vinaigrette to go with the mizuna.

Thanks to everyone who helped pick potatoes last Sunday. We had an especially enthusiastic crew of child laborers. I trust I will not be held liable if any of them decide to be farmers later in life. For those of you who would like to pick potatoes again or for the first time, we will have a potato day late in the season in order to harvest as many of the remaining potatoes as possible for a local food pantry, and afterwards we will eat potatoes in various forms.

And thanks to the entrants in this year’s pie contest. The judges had a hard time choosing a winner, but after lengthy debate we named Tracey Boyd the 2010 pie champion. She claimed the title with a plum tart that the whole judging panel agreed we would happily eat more of should Tracey ever feel like dropping off another one at the farm.

30 September 2010

Tongues of Flame shell beans, Cabbage, Carrots, Garlic, Lettuce, Onions, Peppers, Ancho hot pepper, Nicola potatoes, Sage, Tomatoes, Acorn and Carnival winter squash

What is a pie? This is not merely an academic question. With the pie contest only a few days away, you have surely spent some time contemplating this very issue while choosing exactly what to enter in competition. You could stick with the obvious sorts of pies—fruit and sugar and maybe a little spice backed in a crust. There’s nothing wrong with that. The most basic berry pie, well executed, is one of the great foods of the world.

And apparently one of the hardest to make given how many awful berries pies there are on the loose. The blame for this tragic situation lies mostly with commercial pie makers. I cannot absolve home bakers entirely. It is certainly possible to make terrible pie at home. The vast majority of bad pies, however, are made not in homes but in commercial kitchens, and made not with taste but cost in mind. With as little cost as possible, to be more precise.

There are many ways to make pie cheaply—to stint on the quality of the ingredients or take shortcuts to reduce the time needed—and just about every one of them is also a way to make pie badly. The average commercial fruit pie has a pasty, insipid crust made with nasty shortening and a glutinous filling that tastes of little more than corn syrup and thickener. You might not notice if they skipped the fruit—if in fact that is fruit in there and not some sort fruit substitute composed largely of paper manufacturing byproducts.

We have to take some responsibility for this sorry state of affairs because we keep buying these pies. Presumably if we refused to have anything to do with them nobody would make them. But as with so much of what we eat these days, we put up with bad commercial pies because they don’t cost much and someone else did the work. I think we must also have started to forget what real pie tastes like even as we cling to a nostalgic fondness for it, and so we keep buying pies the quality of which we are no longer equipped to assess accurately.

Of course, our pie nostalgia is precisely a longing for homemade food. It’s a nostalgia for moms in aprons rolling out dough on the kitchen table, a nostalgia for picking sweet berries on a perfect summer day, a nostalgia for the aroma of baking pies wafting from the oven, a nostalgia for families gathered at the table finishing a good meal with a slice of fresh pie. Even a good commercial pie, if such a thing exists, cannot possibly satisfy us the way a proper one does.

To be honest, I doubt even an excellent homemade pie could fulfill that sort of longing. We are not going to make the modern world, with all its hurry and alienation and commercialization and complication, disappear simply by working a bit of fat into a nice pile of flour with our fingertips, or rolling out a silky disk of pale dough, or cutting the peel from a crisp apple in one long aromatic curl, or smelling the oozing fruit juice caramelizing onto the bottom of the oven, or watching the motley brown crust shatter beneath the fork.

So what. We would probably find we do not like that lost world as much as we think anyway, and at least if you make a pie have a pie. You can take pleasure in a good homemade pie no matter what has happened to life.

Whatever a pie is. It could be the classic apple version, but it could also be a quiche with a layer of caramelized onions under the cheesy custard filling or a savory winter squash pie with sage and paprika or a chicken pot pie with tender cubes of potato and carrot and little kick from diced ancho or a tomato and onion pie with parmesan and garlic and lots of black pepper or a ground beef and cabbage pie or, well, just about anything you think would taste good baked in a crust. Maybe even shell beans (those red and white pods, which you want to split open to get at the speckled beans within, which can be boiled about half an hour until tender and eaten hot or cold (I like them cold with olive oil, garlic and sliced onion)). It does not matter. Pie is forgiving, open-minded, inclusive. As long as you put in a little effort, show a little care, it will reward you.

If you bring a pie to the farm this Sunday and impress the pie contest judges with your effort and care (well, actually we tend to judge the pies on taste and texture, but I don’t want to spoil the mood) more than any of the other competitors we will reward you with an Alleged Farm t-shirt.

Not that you have to bring a pie in order to come to the farm this Sunday. The pieless are welcome too. In addition to the pie contest we will tour the fields, harvest potatoes, make hot sauce. You can gather some husk cherries, meet other members, swap recipes, commiserate with one another about having to eat all those vegetables. And, of course, eat some real pie. The farm crew gets to judge the pies, but everyone gets to eat them.

23 September 2010

Cilantro, Rhodos endive, Lincoln leeks, Lettuce, Red onion, Peppers, Numex hot pepper, Romanze potatoes, Tomatoes, Acorn and Delicata, winter squash

Somewhere around 8,00 years ago the last Irish Elk expired. Nobody knows why this huge Eurasian deer died out then. It might have had something to do with the up and coming homo sapiens, a species that towards the end of the last ice age seems to have worked up both a serious appetite and some nifty new hunting techniques. This combination of skill and desire certainly appears to have had a devastating effect on the megafauna of the time. The ground sloth, the mastodon, the wooly rhinoceros, the cave bear, the giant wombat, they all disappeared as man extended his range and his reach across the planet.

Not that we deserve all the blame. Hardly anyone ever deserves all the blame. Being chased around by cavemen with ever sharper and more accurate projectiles was probably just one of several serious problems the megafauna faced as the ice sheets retreated. Climate change and disease may have played as large a part in their extinction as we did.

As for the Irish Elk, it may have faced a special problem. Irish Elk were large, perhaps the largest deer ever, but it was the size of their antlers more than their bodies that was truly remarkable. Male Irish Elk carried around antlers so huge and ornate they would make the most impressive Bull Moose weep with shame over his own pathetic display. And that, in effect, was the point. Irish Elk stags wore their antlers sticking straight out from the sides of their heads—as much as six feet in either direction—a position that made the antlers more or less useless for combat and defense, but much easier to admire. The were meant to impress potential mates and to cow rivals.

History has not recorded precisely what led female Irish Elk to believe that a guy with absurdly large bony protuberances jutting from his brow would make a better catch, but if that was indeed the commonly held view it would have placed evolutionary pressure on the stags to have ever larger antlers. Unfortunately, growing antlers that size each year places a serious strain on even the stoutest elk. It is entirely possible that in this case evolution, which we tend to think of as a process leading to ever more sophisticated and useful adaptation, led the Irish Elk astray.

I wonder if some day after we too have died out another species will look back and wonder if perhaps evolution played the same trick on us. Learning to work with stone and bone to fashion killing points and to work cooperatively with the guys in the nearby caves to bring down a ground sloth gave us a huge advantage. Just ask the ground sloths. We have thrived because of our remarkable ability to take what we want from our environment, something we have gotten stunningly good at. We can literally move mountains to get at whatever lies beneath. But what has looked like an asset for so long is starting to seem like something of a liability as rapaciousness empties the seas, levels the forests, paves over the plains, sucks the rivers dry and fills the air with a heat-trapping haze. And we continue on our merry way, convinced that the intelligence that got us in this mess will get us out of it—convinced that when things get bad enough we will simply change our ways.

Given our history, though, it is not clear that we have another way. We evolved to exploit nature in every way we can think of, and just because that might be a bad idea in the long run does not necessarily mean that we can simply switch to some more sustainable lifestyle to save ourselves any more than the Irish Elk could suddenly have decided to go anterless and try flowers and poetry instead.

Sure, we are more self-aware than the elk probably were. I don’t suppose any Al Gore elk offered urgent warnings in An Inconvenient Antler. But just because we are smart enough to know what is happening (and smart enough too, it must be pointed out, to come up with clever denials) does not mean that we can easily overcome 100,000-year-old habits. At the very least, we need to come to terms with our nature—with the way we have been shaped by the world and its processes. Simply recognizing that we are just another species on this planet would be a good way to start thinking seriously about how we plan to stick around on it for much longer.

Switching to a diet that contains a lot more fresh, local produce would probably be another small step in the right direction. No matter how we go about it, feeding all six billion of ourselves will places strains on vital resources (water in particular). But we don’t need to clear the rain forests for ever more space on which to graze carrots, and unlike a can of soda a simple tomato salad contains all sorts of thing that are actually good for us. At the very least, a diet heavy on vegetables would give us something healthy to chew on while we contemplate our fate. There’s nothing like a good salad to help you through an existential crisis. Well except maybe salsa or a nice bowl of leek and potato soup or baked squash.

16 September 2010

Beets, Carrots, Lettuce, Mustard mix, Onions, Peppers, Hot peppers, Satina potatoes, Thyme, Tomatoes, Delicata winter squash

I am embarrassed to report that I may be compelled to fill this week’s newsletter with something like actual news—a fact that in and of itself might count as news. I hope you will forgive me for thus misusing this space, which as most of you have probably noticed by now is usually reserved for the sorts of meandering ruminations that take hold of one’s mind during long periods of tedious physical work.

There’s something about repetitive manual labor that provokes this digressive, speculative sort of thinking. Like driving, much farm work requires only a specific, limited kind of attentiveness. If you find yourself, let’s say, weeding a bed of carrots (and if you don’t often find yourself doing that but would like to, do please let me know) you have to concentrate on the task enough to ensure that you remove the weeds and leave the carrots. It’s no good letting your thoughts wander so far that you end up pulling out everything or, more likely, nothing. But those thoughts can roam quite surprisingly far and wide without impinging on your carrot weeding skills (and should you happen to possess carrot weeding skills and lack the proper place in which to employ them do get in touch with me). Apparently the part of your brain that controls fine motor coordination and sight recognition is entirely separate from the piece that takes care of philosophical reflection, and the two can work side by side without affecting one another. Moreover, keeping the motor coordination part busy with the carrots somehow disables or distracts whatever normally reins in our philosophical impulses. I would not be surprised to discover that Plato was an avid vegetable gardener and did his most profound thinking while kneeling amongst his crops plucking out interlopers (and if you would like to have a similar philosophical experience I would be happy to offer you a place to do so).

But I stray. Too much weeding, I guess. Especially for this time of year. By now we should have managed to do in all the weeds. There’s a technique called stale seed bedding in which you get the weed seeds near the surface to germinate and then till the bed shallowly, and if you do that a few times then you should have taken care of all the weeds. It takes a little time, but it ought to work for the vegetables we sow late in the season. This year for some reason many of the beds where we have seeded fall crops are not proving at all stale, and along with the plants we want we are getting lovely stands of pigweed and lamb’s quarters and purslane—all edible, I hasten to note, should any of you want to come out and pick them.

Actually one of you already did, and made a weed quiche, which he might reprise for the pie contest on October 3^rd. It is best, I think, to get in a few practice pies before the competition, something I mention now because with just over two weeks to go you still have plenty of time to refine your recipe. You don’t want to turn up on the 3^rd with an entry only to find that something has gone dreadfully wrong with the crust or realize too late that adding cilantro to the peach filling was a less inspired idea than it seemed at first.

All of which is by way of introducing the first piece of news, namely that our fall harvest festival and annual pie contest takes place on Sunday, October 3^rd. We will have field tours and our traditional potato harvest starting at 3, and a potluck dinner starting at 6. All CSA members can enter a pie (or multiple pies) in the contest to be judged by the farm crew.

We hope you will come out to the farm for this event even if you do not bring a pie. You don’t have to see the farm to enjoy the produce. But it is hard to understand fully the basic connection between your food and a field (a connection that exists no matter where you get your food) if you never see the field. Most Americans, deliberately cut off from any direct knowledge of where and how their food is produced, never get that chance. As a member of our CSA, however, you do. You can come to the farm and see the crops that will turn up in your share the following week and ask us about how we grow them and taste a fresh-dug carrot or scoop up a handful of husk cherries and find out what to do with those really hot peppers. It is a pleasant, tasty, scenic way to add even more value to your share.

We will have one more event at the end of the season. Each year we give extra produce to organizations that use it in local food pantries. While these groups have some ability to harvest the extra crops, they generally cannot pick as much as we have to offer. So we call on you to help glean at the end of the season. It is a chance to get dirty for a good cause. I will let you know the date later on.

There is one other event coming up you should know about. The Agricultural Stewardship Association, our local land trust, puts on an art show, Landscapes for Landsake, every year. This year’s show, featuring 150 works by 36 local artists, takes place on Saturday, October 9^th from 3 to 6 just outside Cambridge. It is a great party and a great show, and the money raised at the event helps ASA in its mission to protect good soil in the region for agricultural use, a mission that benefits all of us wherever in the area we live. You can get more details about the show on ASA’s website, Agstewardship.org, or Facebook.

You should also know that the easiest way to cook a winter squash is to stick it in a 400 degree oven until it is quite soft, about an hour. Then you can cut it open a scoop out the flesh and eat it as it is or puree it with a bit of cream, perhaps a dash of sherry, a sprinkle of paprika and a little thyme (you can also add stock to the puree and make a squash soup). And that the mustard greens are nice steamed, but even better as a salad with dressing of vinegar, cream, mustard, soy sauce, sesame oil and ginger.

9 September 2010

Arugula, Basil, Lavender, Lettuce, Onion, Peppers, Hot peppers, Potatoes, Hot pepper, Radishes, Shallot, Tomatoes, Cherry tomatoes

We dropped off Sam at boarding school on Saturday. We had been told he would have a roommate, but we knew nothing about the kid. When we got to Sam’s room the roommate had already moved in, but he was not there. So we spent some time trying to guess what he would be like based on the few clues his belonging offered. He had a New Orleans Saints pennant, a snowboarding picture, a Jamaican flag on the little table by his bed, a calendar from some boat club, and his name, Quint, was on the door. We came up with a number of interesting and unusual profiles.

But I had to remind the others that it is always safest to go with the base rate. Thus I predicted that he would turn out to be not some snow-loving Caribbean or boating Cajun, but a rich kid from a wealthy old New England town, with a summer house on the Cape and well-dressed, well mannered parents. As we discovered when we finally met Quint and his father, however, I was wrong. Their summer place is on Fisher’s Island.

I got the rest right. Quint (a nickname based on the fact that he is the fifth in line to have his name) lives in a historic village in Connecticut. His parents have a wonderfully easy social manner that comes from good schooling, broad experience and generations of wealth. Quint’s father looked liked he had been dressed for the part by a detailed-obsessed costume director, everything perfect right down the soft leather pseudo-yachting shoes and the nonexistent socks. I had forgotten how small a part socks play in this culture, and spent a lot of time looking at other fathers’ feet to see just how many of them had gone without socks for this occasion. A lot of them. It must have something to do with sailing, which was a frequent topic of conversation amongst this not overwhelmingly diverse group of parents. I got the feeling that given a couple more hours they would find they had all already met at some regatta or other.

Perhaps when we get together again at parents’ weekend we can have a good chat about the pros and cons of socks. After all, I have a job that’s probably even less sock friendly than sailing and fully appreciate just how unpleasant wet socks are. Granted, mine get wet from working in muddy fields, not taking waves over the port side, but surely that is a minor distinction. Wet socks are wet socks, and a shared antipathy to them can bring together people from all walks of life.

It is always possible, though, that I won’t fit in. Maybe because my socks get not just wet but filthy. Maybe because I don’t have much of an idea of how to sail close to the wind. Maybe because I am a vegetable farmer in a small rural community in northern New York and the work I do sets me apart from the world most prep school parents inhabit. And it is not just that they might consider my work a little odd, a little grubby. In fact, they are probably not seriously trouble by farming at all, and anyway they are far too polite to show it if they are.

But farmers have an odd sense of defensive pride. So many people in this country gave up farming for something “better.” Farmers became the dumb hicks left behind, about as unchic as you could get. There’s a sentimental strain in our national culture that looks back at our (real or imagined) agrarian past fondly, but even that veers towards the patronizing, imagining farming as the lost simple life, the antithesis of sophisticated, fast-paced, successful urban existence. In response, farmers tend to regard city dwelling, book learning, office work, conspicuous success and just about any activity that does not involve oil stains with a certain quiet scorn. Many of my neighbors have funny stories about rich folk coming out to the country and humiliating themselves trying to do things that any farmer handle with little effort: hauling feed sacks, shooting geese, fixing engines. As a newcomer to farming (16 years does not count for much), as a former inhabitant of that other world—I went to the school Sam now attends—as a spindly guy with bad aim and meager mechanical skills, I cannot entirely share in my neighbors sense of amusement over such tales. Nor, however, can I entirely resist the attraction of this pigheaded disdain for self-assured, neatly coifed, pointlessly sockless, nautical types.

I hope that farm life has not completely infected Sam with this point of view. We did not send him to this school to learn to be one of those people, but he does have to live amongst them for four years. He will be a lot happier if he finds a way, however cynically, to fit in. I worry, of course, that he may not, that he is not ready, that we have sent him to the wrong place, that they won’t know what to do with him, they won’t like him—all standard parental concerns that set in more or less as soon as we started to drive away from his dorm.

Of course, I have many of the same concerns about the vegetables each week. I don’t worry so much about their social and academic prospects. But I feel a little anxious about their virtues, about how they will be received (and if they will be received) and what will become of them. Don’t worry, I do not actually think of the vegetables as my children. But like Sam, they are to some extent the product of my efforts on their behalf and I want them to do well and be liked.

Fortunately, most of the things in this box are pretty easy to get along with. They don’t demand special treatment. You can pamper them if you want, but you need do little more than slice the tomatoes and sprinkle them with salt, or steam the potatoes and put a little butter on them, or toss the greens in a salad. There are, however, a couple of crops that might require a little more explanations for you to enjoy them, such as the small hot peppers. Especially the crinkly red or pink one, which can be quite hot and should be used with a little caution. Or the shallot (the smallish, reddish, onionish fellow), which you could use like an onion, but is particularly good in a salad dressing (slice it thinly and let it sit in the dressing for a couple of hours to bring out the flavor) or sauce. And then there’s the lavender, which people tend not to think of as a culinary herb. You could just hang onto it for the scent. But you can also use it in just about any recipe that calls for rosemary (such as sautéed peppers and onions or roast potatoes). I recently had a tasty drink made of lemonade, gin and lavender, and I have had lavender crème brule. You want to keep the lavender flavor in any dish at a restrained level unless you like eating things that taste like soap, but a little lavender can add a pleasant perfumy quality to food.

Obviously, I have spent a lot of time with these crops and know a fair amount about their culture. But just as there’s no one right way to raise a kid, there’s no one right way to prepare a vegetable. Certainly there are things to avoid in either case (I trust you are not kicking your share down the stairs or locking it away in a closet for weeks at a time), but there is considerable latitude in how to approach the task, and methods that might sound completely wacky can have excellent results. If you have good vegetable recipes, however unusual, I hope you will send them to me so I can add them to the ones already on the web site. We all tend to have our way of doing things, our particular sense of taste. It is refreshing, sometimes, to encounter other, alien ways—whether by discovering someone else’s recipe for tomatoes or spending a little time with people who have a lot more to say about tacking than plowing.