You know how summer goes – at first it seems endless, and then several weeks disappear completely. We needed to spend not-enough time with dear friends who are suddenly leaving town; another had a significant birthday; there was a blissfully cool camping trip to the Catskills (also too short, which was actually fine because camping trips, to me, belong on the list with fish and house guests); we were part of a huge family party (for another significant birthday) on a Vermont day that turned out to be deliciously, heartbreakingly perfect (see sunset picture). Not to mention there have been some major shifts in thinking about the actual direction of our near future, which resulted in my planning and un-planning a schedule for Fall and beyond.

And suddenly, the glorious days of late summer are upon us! At last we get warm clear sunny days and cool nights, several at a time. Dark is creeping in a little early and the angle of the light is changing, bringing the bittersweet panic of summer ending just as it gets really good. CSA pickups are almost too heavy to carry home, and despite this summer’s several awful streaks of weather (first hail, then not enough rain, then too much rain) the market is just bursting with tomatoes and everything else…. August as usual is no less poignant for being predictable. Late summer feels like falling in love despite one’s better judgment.

In August, the nightshades are in ascendancy, with the brief novelty (at least in the Northeast) of eggplant and peppers, and tomatoes in almost ridiculous abundance. Zucchini (which we have officially eaten enough of to not mind it being relegated to a less-than-starring role) persists; the supply of onions and garlic seems, for the moment, inexhaustible.  Ratatouille is inevitable! And this is the sort of dish I love the most – truly seasonal, a yearly ritual.

Almost without meaning to, I’ve been creeping towards a “signature” version of Ratatouille for years. The first version stemmed from the purchase of my first major cookbook, Julia Child’s The Way to Cook (the purchase of which I remember as being a momentous splurge).  This was in the pre-internet days, when recipes were written on pieces of paper or enshrined in big, expensive, hard-back books. I coveted these cookbooks, which I could not afford, and spent many half-hours hiding behind shelves in bookstores, furtively scribbling notes on scraps of paper, in order to research and develop recipes for things I’d eaten in the restaurants where I worked. For years I tried to make off with my mother’s 2-volume Mastering the Art of French Cooking on visits home (which, I pointed out, I hadn’t seen her use in years) to no avail. But finally I had my own Julia Child book – big and glossy and important.

During this era (the mid-to-late 90’s), Patricia Wells may have held court on the West Coast, with its glorious fresh produce year-round.  But Julia Child’s recipes were a culinary lifeline for us East-Coat, cash-strapped, Star-Market-Discount-Card-wielding post-graduate gourmands.  Here were ways to take what you could afford to buy on sale, and transform it into something wonderful. My first Ratatouille must have the result of peppers and eggplants being on sale the same week (zucchini was always cheap), but it became a semi-regular production, such that I remember once actually having a Julia sighting in the Brookline Star Market while buying the ingredients for this dish.  I felt an inner glow while I slowly wheeled my cart past hers, Ratatouille ingredients on board. (Julia Child had an apartment in Cambridge; I lived on the other end of town in Jamaica Plain. But this particular Star Market was the new and shiny flagship store in the area. It was a regular beat, along with Trader Joe’s, for foodies who didn’t have, or didn’t care to spend, the money for Whole Foods, which was just then beginning to take over.)

The funny thing is, it turns out that I never actually made Julia’s version, as it’s written in The Way to Cook. Even though I’ve thought for years now that this was the recipe I had been repeating, in fact, going back to the cookbook (which now sports a ripped jacket and many pages stained from use), I see that my early ratatouille was an actually adaptation of her technique, which I must have modified based on some other recipes I’d read or versions I’d tasted. Julia refers to Ratatouille as a “provencal eggplant casserole,” in which “the vegetables cook separately, then finish with a short communal simmer.” In her version, the eggplant and zucchini are roasted separately in large slices, then layered with an onion/tomato/pepper sauce (for which canned tomatoes are fine) and baked in the oven.  I suppose I’d always thought of ratatouille as having a more homogenous texture. So I adapted Julia’s version, cubing my eggplant and zucchini before following her instructions for roasting them separately in the oven and adding them into a cooked-down tomato and pepper sauce for a quick stovetop simmer. Experience taught that after a half-day or overnight of sitting, the flavors mingled well.  It was a pretty good ratatouille:  worth the work and worthy of becoming a dish I pulled out when there were guests to impress (and being that my boyfriend at the time was a chef, the guests usually knew what they were doing in the kitchen).

This was in the days before the concept of eating seasonally and locally really hit the East Coast. For a long time, Ratatouille was a winter dish for me (who wants to do all that roasting and simmering in the middle of summer?).  But my relationship with the dish completely changed the summer I had a very successful garden. The ingredients for Ratatouille were at hand (with supplements as needed from a farm stand 2 miles away) for weeks on end, and there was all that lovely produce to be used up. In the midst of canning tomatoes and dealing with an overabundance of zucchini, I made batch after batch of the stuff. Out of sheer exhaustion, and probably in deference to the hot August kitchen, I occasionally abandoned what I thought of as the “Julia Method” of roasting the zucchini and eggplant separately, and adopted the quick, rustic, down-‘n-dirty Elizabeth David method.  Hers leaves out zucchini, which I added with the eggplant in the middle. The recipe is so amazingly short that I will copy it here in its entirety:

“Peel the tomatoes and cut the unpeeled aubergines into squares. Slice the onions and Pimentos (peppers). Put the onions into a frying pan or sauté pan with plenty of oil, not too hot. When they are getting soft add first the pimentos and aubergines, and, ten minutes later, the tomatoes. The vegetables should not be fried, but stewed in the oil, so simmer in a covered pan for the first 30 minutes, uncovered for the last 10. By this time they should have absorbed most of the oil.”

That’s it – under one hour, one pan, and it’s done. With the fresh vegetables coming right from the garden, this was actually an acceptable version (if a little watery – the tomatoes gave a lot of liquid).

But that same summer I discovered my favorite late-summer cookbook, Lulu’s Provencal Kitchen (more on Lulu and my favorite recipes in an upcoming post).  She, like Julia, recommends that the vegetables should be “precooked, separately, each in a different way, before being assembled.” But her recipe goes on in quite a different way, specifying that they should then be “simmered together and reduced to a melting perfection in which some are dispersed and absorbed into the whole while others retain their individual identity.” Richard Olney’s prose brings the recipes of this formidable cook and hostess to amazingly specific life – he is a master at writing out details that allow you to get the essence of a dish. 

For me, there were several important notes in the ratatouille recipe. First, it is specified that the onions should be cooked over “very low heat…until they are melting and simmering in their own juices but uncolored.” Second was the note that in the final simmering, the vegetables should cook down “until all excess liquid has evaporated and the vegetables are coated in a syrupy sauce.” That consistency, far from a mixture of roasted vegetables or a loose watery stew, is what I was after.

My final version is an amalgamation of techniques. There are three very important aspects taken from Lulu’s version, with some things learned from Elizabeth David, and a touch from Julia.

The first Lulu/Elizabeth David technique is the initial cooking of the onions, continued with the cubed zucchini, at a very low temperature. It is important to allow these vegetables to stew slowly in the olive oil so that they will give their juices up, but gradually. Only if you cook the zucchini at a low temperature will it get tender without disintegrating. And the advantage of letting it do this in the pan where everything will end up (as opposed to roasting it separately) is that the zucchini (and onion) juices ultimately are kept so they can reduce down with the final tomatoes. Thus, the “syrup” at the end has the essence of all the vegetables. If you roast the zucchini separately, you give up all this wonderful juice, and you introduce quite a bit more olive oil into the dish. But the key is fairly large chunks (the recipe calls for them to be “quartered lengthwise then chopped into 3/4-inch pieces”) and very low temperatures.

The other important Lulu innovation is to roast the peppers. Having no wood coals from a grill, I simply char the peppers over a gas burner, then cool and then peel them (a process that Olney describes, incidentally, as being scorned by Lulu as “barbaric.” Whatever; I work with what I’ve got!) This eliminates several things I hate: pepper skins in my ratatouille, thinly slicing raw peppers, and waiting for the peppers to get soft in a sauté. Don’t ask me why I find this less annoying than burning my fingers while charring peppers over an open burner, but I do.

However, I don’t follow Lulu to the letter. I persist in the Julia method of salting eggplant slices to draw out some of their liquid before roasting them. I then persist in my own method (could I have gotten this idea from Cooks Illustrated? 2001 seems a little late, but it is plausible) of cubing the slices up, tossing with a small amount of olive oil, then quickly roasting them in the oven at 400 degrees. I find this keeps the eggplant from becoming mushy, and it absorbs quite a bit less oil if you salt it first.

Finally, the perfect ratatouille has resulted. I don’t think I’ll change a thing.  The recipe follows, with a blow-by-blow description of how I deal with the many steps and long periods of waiting around this method requires. Basically, do not make ratatouille if you are in a hurry. It’s best stretched out over a lazy morning at home, when you have a few non-pressing things to do. 

Perfect Ratatouille adapted from Lulu’s Provencal Kitchen

The amounts given for vegetable ingredients are approximate. Use what you have. Every batch is different!

• 1 very large or 2 small onions (a little under a pound)
• 3 large or 4 small cloves of garlic; more if you like
• 1 pound of zucchini (2 medium)
• 1 pound eggplant (1 medium-sized)
• 1.5-2 pounds tomatoes, preferably plum
• 3 long red peppers, or 2 red bell peppers (the ones we’ve gotten from Roxbury this summer have been great for this)
• dried or fresh thyme
• Olive Oil (about 1/2-2/3 cup total)

Directions:

• While you are waiting for your coffee to brew, boil a kettle of water for peeling the tomatoes. (This is an annoying job best done before you are fully awake.) Cut a cross in the bottom of each tomato, drop them in the boiling water for about 20 seconds, then pull out with a spoon and run under cold water to cool off. Peel the skins off with a knife, then you might as well core them, slice them into quarters, and push out the seeds. Roughly chop them, then set aside in a bowl. Since it’s so fun being in the kitchen before you are dressed, why not also start charring the peppers on a burner (“no pants, no pan” – that’s my motto for living on the edge)? And if the smoke alarm goes off, your spouse will finally get out of bed!
• At this point, you may come to your senses and go do some normal morning activities. In my case this is drinking coffee, then going for a 5-mile run.
• When you get back, the peppers and tomatoes are sitting there waiting for you. So, why not carry on? Slice up the onions (cut them in half, then slice thinly), and put them in a big heavy pot with some olive oil over very, very low heat. Peel, crush, and chop the garlic, then quarter the zucchini and chop into large cubes. Check on the onions, but they take a really long time, so nothing much will be going on there. This is a good time to slice the eggplant. Throw the slices into a colander in the sink and sprinkle with coarse salt. They need to sit for a while (about 30 minutes is good). Now you have about 20 minutes to kill. Cover the onions, keeping the heat on very low. This is a great time to send out a few overdue emails, catch up on blog reading, start the crossword, do the breakfast dishes…..just don’t forget to stir the onions once or twice, and at some point, preheat the oven to 400 degrees for the eggplant. 
• Now you can get a little more involved for about 15 or 20 minutes. Uncover the onions and raise the heat slightly, then throw the garlic and zucchini in. Stir to coat, and once the zuch is cooking nicely, turn that pan back down to quite low, leaving it uncovered. Cut the eggplant slices (which should have expelled a lot of brown liquid by now) into half-inch cubes, then toss them with a little olive oil on a baking sheet, and throw them into the preheated oven. (I don’t rinse the salt off. If you salt the onions and zucchini minimally, the little bit of salt from the eggplant makes it just about perfect).
• Keep stirring the zucchini, and stir the eggplant after 5 minutes (it should take 10-15 minutes total, don’t forget to check it!). Pull the eggplant out when the cubes are tender but not falling apart. Some may have browned, which is fine. Meanwhile, heat up a sauté pan with a little olive oil, and throw the cubed tomatoes in. Sprinkle with salt, then toss them and shake the pan over high heat until some of the liquid has evaporated but the cubes still hold their shape (Plum tomatoes do this best, other types may fall apart while there is still a lot of liquid. Not really a problem, keep reducing anyway).
• Peel the blackened skins off the roasted peppers (you may need to run under water), being careful not to break their flesh and lose their juices. Press the juices into a bowl, then seed and slice them.
• Now for the final simmer: if you’re using dried thyme, sprinkle it over the zucchini/onion mixture, which is still idling along in the big heavy pot. Pour in the slightly-reduced tomatoes, stir in the eggplant along with the peppers and their juices and get it to a slow simmer. (If you are using fresh thyme, tie a few branches together and throw in with the tomatoes.) Turn the pot down very low, and let it simmer away for about an hour, checking and stirring it from time to time to make sure nothing is sticking on the bottom. (More emails can get sent, pages written, dishes done, crossword finished and OpEd page read….). It’s done when you get that magic syrupy sauce.
• And, Voila! It’s 11 am, and you have perfect ratatouille. It’s best to turn it off and let it sit out on the stove ‘til dinner time. If you aren’t using it until the next day, you can put it in a glass bowl once it’s cool – don’t cover until it’s cool either way, or you’ll make your nice syrup all watery.

I love ratatouille served at room temperature, as side dish with almost anything. It’s particularly good with an omelet and some crusty garlic bread, with a salad on the side. It’s also a special treat with lamb that has been grilled with garlic and rosemary. And ratatouille is such a perfect excuse to bring out some exuberantly spicy red wine – the first cool nights of summer, coming as they do while we’re still indulging in the season’s freedom, are made for eating lamb and ratatouille and swigging back some slightly cool, fruity-spicy Provencal red (like Gigondas, or a good Cotes du Rhone). Would that this gorgeous season would last forever!

Of course we know it won’t, but happily Ratatouille freezes well. Long about your third batch, when you are getting a little tired of it, throw some in the freezer.  Won’t it be a wonderful treat in January?

It was with dismay that I read the following on the blog of a fellow Roxbury CSA member, a week or so ago: “I can tell you one thing for sure: not many people are taking the braising greens. I must have packed up half a dozen bags brimming with the stuff.”

My initial reaction to this was a slight sadness (all those people missing out on something delicious!), coupled with indignation (why join a CSA if you aren’t going to try cooking some of the more unfamiliar things it brings you?) and tinged with pure greed (a selfish urge to disclose my address to any non-green eaters out there who might want to make a delivery. I will eat your greens! I will freeze them for later!).

The indignation was admittedly unfair, especially given the amount of cultural baggage greens have to overcome. The image of the mean mommy saying, “eat your greens or no dessert!” is an entrenched meme.  After being billed for so long as nothing more than an icky gateway to dessert, cooking greens are desperately in need of an image makeover. Maybe we can get the same PR firm that did such a good job for arugula* and ramps (which latter have taken the New York culinary world by storm.  I think the market folk must find the number of well-heeled urbanites who will line up to pay $4 a bunch for something that grows wild for the taking somewhat hilarious. Am I cynical to think that they also roll with laughter on the floor when we pay $3 a bunch for purslane?).

My personal greens hero is Paula Wolfert, who is (or ought to be considered as, if she isn’t) the foremost post-Elizabeth David “Mediterranean” food writer. I first read about Wolfert seven years ago in the often-hilarious, love-him-or-hate-him Jim Harrison collection The Raw and the Cooked.  Harrison is a champion of some of the great “outsiders” of food writing – John Thorne and Richard Olney, for example – and to some extent Wolfert belongs in this camp (in contrast, say, to someone like Patricia Wells.) Her recipes, while they are adapted for home kitchens and American supermarkets, are not watered down, simplified, or beautified for the camera. Recipes, to her, are experiences – not things that are simply “made up” or written to be “followed.” She speaks of being “taught a dish” (not a recipe), and all of her recipes are translations of a sort: deeply connected to the person who taught her, translated through her own experience and iteration, and offered to you to learn and incorporate into your own culinary life. I find it best to trust her completely on the first go-round with any recipe. After that, you can make it yours.

All of Wolfert’s cookbooks have an air of being singular, definitive, and comprehensive — I don’t know how she does it.  On the subject at hand, there is Mediterranean Grains and Greens, which begins by laying out the thought that these two basic culinary elements are the perfect and eternal union of organized agriculture (grains) and the ‘old ways’ of foraging for food (greens).** For this alone, which serves as a real and enthusiastic “call back to nature,” the book would be indispensable—but then she goes on to devote the entire first chapter, before offering a single recipe, to a discussion of types of and sources for greens (foraged and bought), along with several basic strategies and techniques for cooking and storing them.  I highly recommend finding a copy of the book and even just reading this chapter – it will revise your relationship with greens forever (as it did mine).

While you are waiting to get a copy, here is a brief synopsis of tips for discovering the deliciousness of greens:

1. Probably the main reason that greens no longer figure largely in our cuisine is the fact that when they are small enough to be really tasty, they don’t keep or transport all that well (which makes them unsuited to the agricultural industrial complex of our modern supermarket-based food chain).  It’s true that the dinosaur-sized kale sold in supermarkets is tough and nasty. And those big floppy chard leaves are usually fairly flavorless.  No wonder it’s a chore to “eat your greens!” A nice fresh bunch of young greens from the farmer’s market (or CSA) might change your opinion.

2. As I just mentioned, young tasty greens don’t travel or keep all that well. But if you do need to store them for a day or so (or longer) there are several options:

• For up to 5 days: soak greens in cold water, spin them dry, then layer them between paper towels (N.B. you can dry out and reuse the towels used for this purpose) in a plastic bag. Squeeze as much air out as possible, and put in the bottom of the fridge (in the crisper, for example).
• For 5-7 days: blanch the greens for 1-3 minutes in boiling water (depending on the age and tenderness – shorter for younger, longer for more bitter) and then rinse with cold water (or drop them briefly into a bowl of ice water) and then spin and squeeze as dry as possible. Do not be depressed at how much volume seems to be lost!! Pack into a ziploc (these are also highly reusable) and store in the fridge.
• For up to 6 months: do as above and then freeze. Think how welcome those greens will be in January! I also do this when the week’s allotment is small so I can build up enough for a larger recipe.

3. Mix your greens – a mixture of spicy, sweet, and earthy greens is more interesting than one kind alone. You can easily substitute a bag of mixed greens for chard or spinach in any recipe. Roxbury Farm’s braising mix is a great example of this mixture – lucky us!  I’m going to try adding some wild greens (once you know what it looks like, you will notice that lambs quarter is everywhere) in to mine, too.

4. What to do about bitterness: Bitterness is a neat botanical adaptation that protects plants against being eaten by grazing predators once they have invested in the very energy-intensive process of reproduction – flowering and making seeds. Later in the summer, when it is hot, the plants tend to get to this stage more quickly and will often be more bitter than the tender little greens that had the luxury of taking their time in the spring. You can cope with this (as well as with the daunting volume of a pound of greens!) by blanching greens in boiling water and then cooling them quickly (see above).  Although when it’s 80+ degrees and humid, boiling a kettle of water may be the last thing you want to do. Try chopping your greens roughly and sprinkling with salt in a colander. Leave them in the sink to give up liquid for about an hour or so, then rinse well, squeeze dry, and cook.  Wolfert also suggests thorough cooking and long slow braising as a way to bring out the sweetness of more aggressive greens without blanching (as she instructs in one recipe, “forget fashionably crunchy vegetables.”)

I use greens in all sorts of ways – I especially like them with eggs and garlic in a frittata (or quiche, if I’ve got the inclination and time for pastry). Blanched greens, sautéed quickly with garlic, olive oil, and red pepper flakes and tossed with penne pasta, make a wonderfully satisfying and quick summer dinner (if you’re going to boil water to blanch greens in July, you might as well use it for cooking pasta afterwards!). But the following recipe, adapted from Wolfert, is my hands-down new favorite (no pun intended, but you will get your hands dirty when you make this!).  I’ve always been crazy about bulgur – I love grains that have a nutty, rich taste. In this dish, the bulgur cooks in the liquid from the greens, and everything melts together with lots of garlic and fairly mild chili.  Best yet, it is versatile to serve – this is good hot as a side dish for grilled tuna or roast chicken, or cold or at room temperature as a very flavorful and satisfying salad.

“Best Ever” Bugulama – adapted from Paula Wolfert’s Mediterranean Greens and Grains

3-4 cloves of good fresh garlic (Wolfert calls for a whole head! I find 3-4 cloves to be plenty, and I love garlic. I’d say start with this much and adjust to your taste.)

1 tsp of salt (plus more to taste)

1 pound onions (the fresher and more juicy the better)

1 pound mixed greens (sweet and bitter)

1 cup coarse-grained bulgur*

4 TBSP olive oil

1-2 tsp ground mild chilis, or more to taste (I use piment d’espellette, because I have a string of them from last summer’s vacation. Ground anchos would work well too. Here’s a source in case you can’t find them in the supermarket. Do NOT use “chili powder,” which has powdered garlic, oregano, etc. in it.).

¼ tsp red pepper flakes

½ tsp ground black pepper.

½ cup water

Crush the garlic with the side of a knife, peel, and roughly chop. Mash the garlic, 1 tsp of salt, and the ground chili with a mortar and pestle (or if you don’t have one, sprinkle the salt and chili on the garlic and chop and chop it, crushing to release liquid. Or press through a garlic press, then mash the chili and salt in with the back of a fork).

Peel and finely chop the onion. Wash and chop the greens into fine ribbons.

Here’s where it gets fun!  In a 3-qt. or larger heavy-bottomed pan, mix the crushed garlic mixture, onions, and slivered greens with the chili flakes, black pepper, and more salt if you think it needs (this is to taste – make it without any extra the first time and see what you think). The best way to mix is with your hands. I just love mixing thing with my hands! The greens will start to wilt a little from the salt, and the crushed garlic will smell heady and divine.  Add the bulgur and water, and continue mixing, kneading it and really working the liquid from the greens and the water into the bulgur until everything is very well combined.

Cover tightly and set pot over medium heat. As soon as it steams, turn down as low as your burner will go and let cook for 15 minutes. Turn off heat and let stand for 10 minutes more before uncovering, then stir and re-cover if it needs a little more time.

*I have been using Bob’s Red Mill bulgur, which is what is readily available in supermarkets. It is ‘par-boiled,’ which means it cooks fast and can even just be soaked (great in the summer!). However it does have the tendency to gum up and stick to the bottom of the pan in this dish.  Turning way down and letting it sit with no heat seemed to help. Wolfert’s recipe calls for cooking for 30 minutes with med/low heat. If you are using bulgur that isn’t parboiled, this is probably the way to go (but be aware that it might scorch a little on the bottom). The beauty of my cooking method is that it will continue to cook with the residual steam heat, so you can err on the side of underdone, then just leave it covered for a while to finish.

I had sort of forgotten about cucumbers until the first cucumbers of the summer arrived in our weekly produce pickup two weeks ago, when we got 2. The following week, as is wont to happen with cucumbers, the production exploded and my husband came home from the pickup with 4 good-sized ones and a whopper.

Maybe it’s because we haven’t had cucumbers since last summer, but these cucumbers have been a revelation. The other night our salad at dinner was just a plate of sliced cucumbers – no salt, no dressing, not peeled.  Just a pile of cucumber slices.  And we sat there greedily stuffing the slices in our mouths as fast as we could and in between bites rhapsodizing about cucumbers, and how they are underrated, and how, with apologies to sweet corn and tomatoes, cucumbers really ought to be recognized as the defining vegetable of summer.

It’s true that where I grew up, in the mountains of Southern Vermont, cucumbers were much more common than corn on the cob and tomatoes in the summer. There isn’t a lot of flat fertile land around there to plant corn, let alone corn that is not destined to feed animals. Sure we bought and ate some corn in the summer, but I didn’t discover the delights of really fresh sweet corn was until I was in college in the Hudson Valley. I remember being shocked at how sweet it was (did someone put sugar on my corn?!), and how you could eat it practically raw, with no butter. Likewise with tomatoes – the growing season at my mom’s place is so short that lots of the tomatoes ended up ripening wrapped in newspaper in the basement. Vine-ripe tomatoes were definitely a treat, but not one I got to eat my fill of until later in life (when my Columbia County garden produced county-fair-winning-sized specimens for weeks on end; it is, in fact, possible to get tired of tomatoes).  

Cucumbers, however, were often available in abundance: if not in our garden, in a neighbor’s for sure. You know how it is with these vine-y plants – once they get started, look out! And because cucumbers don’t have the status of sweet corn or ripe tomatoes, people would give armloads of them to you almost apologetically.

So I do have fond childhood summer memories of cucumbers. But these cucumbers from Roxbury Farm are far more delicious even than the garden-grown ones that I remember.  Their taste is distinctly melon-y* and so pronounced that you can savor a bite for several minutes after. They are firm but crisp (even the whoppers); the skins are tough but tasty; the seeds are sweet. In short, they are such good cucumbers that it seems a shame to even add salt. 

The memory of these delicious cucumbers was in my head as I was doing some reading this week. Sir Albert Howard’s An Agricultural Testament is a book I’ve read and heard about several times, most lately in the afternoon discussion at Polyface, which ranged into some far-flung philosophical, agricultural, and political territory. I made a note to actually find and read the book next time I got a chance.  And this week, an abundance of developing ideas in my head coupled with 90+-degree muggy summer weather seemed as good an excuse as any to a trip to the NYPL reading room (where I have whiled away many a hazy afternoon reading in government-funded air conditioned comfort. New Yorkers take note – here is a summer survival method much cheaper and more intellectually stimulating than the movies!). **

As inclined as we have become to dismiss the older works of recent agricultural history as relics, Howard’s work resonates uncannily.  Much of what he writes seems as if it could have been written last week – although of course this should come as no surprise. The development of land in monocultures and the use of chemical fertilizers was well under way by 1940, when An Agricultural Testament was published. (Liebig’s seminal book on agricultural chemistry, don’t forget, dates from 1840 – chemical fertilizers had been in development and use for nearly 100 years by the time Howard was working). So much damage had already been done to the world’s soils (the American Dust Bowl era springs to mind) and in the 1940’s Howard held out a not unreasonable hope that his work (and the work of his colleagues; he certainly wasn’t alone in pushing against monocultures and chemical fertilization) would have an effect on the way agriculture was practiced.

He makes as cogent case as any I’ve seen for the true costs of industrial agriculture:

If a cheap substitute for humus exists why not use it? … the use of such a substitute cannot be cheap because soil fertility — one of the most important assets of any country — is lost; because artificial plants, artificial animals, and artificial men are unhealthy and can only be protected from the parasites, whose duty it is to remove them, by means of poison sprays, vaccines, and serums and an expensive system of patent medicines, panel doctors, hospitals and so forth.  When the finance of crop production is considered together with that of the various social services which are needed to repair the consequences of an unsound agriculture, and when it is borne in mind that our greatest possession is a healthy, virile population, the cheapness of artificial manures disappears altogether.  In years to come chemical manures will be considered as one of the greatest follies of the industrial epoch (pp. 37-8).

While he does perhaps rather over-simplify the solution (along the lines of “if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail”; in Howard’s world the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything comes down to Compost and Compost Alone) the philosophy that he espouses – of creating a cycle of life and a therefore a living soil is still irreproachable. He argues strongly against the idea of soil-nutrition-by-the numbers:

The principle followed, based on the Liebig tradition, is that any deficiencies in the soil can be made up by the addition of suitable chemicals. This is based on a complete misconception of plant nutrition. It is superficial and fundamentally unsound. It takes no account of the life of the soil, including the mycorrhizal association — the living fungous bridge which connects soil and sap (p. 36).

He goes on to connect this to the nutritive value of crops grown with chemicals: “Artificial manures lead inevitably to artificial nutrition, artificial food, artificial animals, and finally to artificial men and women.”  This might seem like a leap of crackpot intemperance, but the philosophy behind separating nourishment into a collection of separable chemical “nutrients” sounds an awful like how humans have been taught, recently, to think of what they eat. This leap – from “food” to “nutrients,” is well discussed in Pollan’s latest, In Defense of Food. (“From Food To Nutrients” is in fact the title of Chapter 1, and it goes on from there in good form to indict the modern “science” of nutritionism.  Read it if you haven’t.)  It makes sense that as we have ceased to think of our soils as living working systems, we have begun to think of what is grown there as merely a collection of nutrients. A series of nutrients in; a series of nutrients out. And as we have ceased to think of our soils and farms as living systems, so have we come to think in the same way about our food and our bodies. Our modern medical system has evolved (at great cost) to treat what might be considered symptoms as diseases in their own right.

Whether or not organically grown vegetables can be shown to be more nutritious than those grown with chemicals is still a matter of debate***, although the idea that food grown in healthy soils will just be, well, healthier, has a strong appeal to common sense.  (“Garbage in, garbage out” has applications that range far beyond computer programming). But nutritional analysis is, given the context, beside the point here.  As Howard writes in An Agricultural Testament, “It is an easy matter to distinguish vegetables raised on NPK. They are tough, leathery and fibrous: they also lack taste. In marked contrast those grown with humus are tender, brittle, and possess abundant flavor” (p. 82).  Case in point my crunchy, delicious cucumbers. Case in point the sweet onions, the firm and sweet-nutty zucchini, the jewel-like (and delicious) baby chard we had eaten earlier in the week.  It is not necessary to risk sounding like a natural-food-obsessed nut in this case – anyone could taste the difference between my organic Roxbury Farm produce and what comes from a supermarket (via an industrial, NPK-driven farm).

One of the biggest takeaways from my recent visit to Polyface farm was Joel Salatin saying, “Nature’s ability to heal is amazing.” Something not to be missed about Salatin (successful businessman and rock star of modern agriculture that he is) is that he sees his way of farming as, first and foremost, the way to heal the land that he loves and live the way that he wants to.  In this sense, the beef and eggs and chickens and pork his land yields are more like handily consumable byproducts than an end unto themselves.  And this is not “healing the land” or “saving the world” in a fleeting summer-after-college-internship-before-I-go-get-a-real-job sense – it was a real conviction and something we could easily see, touch, and taste when we were on that land. 

Similarly, the tasty cucumbers from Roxbury Farm are about a lot more than just a delicious (or more healthy) meal. Like Salatin, Jean-Paul and Jody see farming as much more than a simple input-output production mechanism.  They see farming as a series of relationships – of wild land to cultivated, of soil to crop, of farmer to eater (and hence city to country).  A cynical view could peg Salatin, Roxbury Farm, and many of the newly minted CSA’s and vendors at the NY City Greenmarket as “smart capitalists” who are just responding to a demand created by the latest food fad of the urban upper middle class.  But it goes much deeper than that.  Farming in this way is a completely different mission. When Jody wrote on the Roxbury blog the other week, “We are creating new communities that are not bound by close geographical or economic confines,” it was not some woo-woo abstraction or a way to make privileged city-dwellers feel good about their food choices. Instead, she was making a real observation about the difference between buying food as a financial transaction (dollars for donuts) and the way in which CSA members support the farm (paying in advance for whatever the season yields). Whether or not we get dirt under our nails, we are involved in what the farm produces: it is what fills up our refrigerators (or not) every week.

People like Salatin and the farmers at Roxbury are doing something of fundamental importance to our society, as they dissolve the separation between “country” (backwards) and “city” (progressive). They blow the image of the farmer as an uneducated “hick” who couldn’t make it in the white-collar world to smithereens. And what they are doing is not just about making a tastier cucumber or a better chicken. It is not just about “saving the planet” or “eating healthy.”  It’s about all that, but it is also about liberating one of most fundamental relationships we have from the realm of the merely economic. And the cucumbers (did I mention?) are totally delicious.

Everyone we talked to had stories to tell. There were many people and families who had just made the plunge into farming (as retirement or new livelihood) and were using this day to boost their morale and gather information.  There were people who’d started keeping chickens for eggs in their suburban backyards, recent college graduates thinking about studying agricultural philosophy, and a sizeable Amish contingent.  The license plates came from as far as New York (and not just ours!), Ohio, Illinois, and Ontario.

At any rate, once I have some more time to digest it all (quite literally — we came back with a Polyface chicken in our cooler, of course) there will be more.  In the meantime, here are a few more photos that will give you a small sense of what the day was like. And, as luck would have it, it was a picture-perfect summer day. Fate smiled on Polyface, which is pretty much as it should be.   

Charlottesville is just down the road, so there will also be a visit to Monticello, which is equally exciting.  I’ve been doing a little reading about the early history of viticulture in the US, which means I’ve run into Jefferson references all over the place (not that he ever managed to get his vineyard really off the ground, but he was a big booster for American viticulture, at least in theory.) And the gardens are supposed to be marvelous.

I’m sure we’ll return with many ideas, photographs, and schemes.  And, if we’re lucky, a box of Polyface Farm eggs or two, a chicken, and maybe some “salad bar beef”. Our minds are open and our cooler is large…..!

Just to get this out of the way, I will confess that I started making frittatas because I can’t make a decent omelet.  There was a time when I told myself that I should, must, would learn this impressive culinary skill.  But then I had the good fortune to marry a man who (among other laudable talents) can make perfect omelets.  This one skill on his part makes us a veritable Jack Sprat and his wife in the kitchen!

I will also say, in my defense, that I find the omelet genre a little limiting. Making good omelets requires restraint - very few ingredients, a nice paper-thin layer of eggs, precise technique and timing. When egg night comes around, it’s usually towards the hairy middle of the week when people are hungry, time is short, and ingredients are likely to be random. I’m more for pulling out anything that needs to be used up in the fridge and throwing it together in one convenient pan, with leftovers a bonus for tomorrow’s lunch.  Although I have blocked out specific memories of this, I’m pretty sure that early on in my cooking existence fritattas were just overly thick, failed omelets that I chucked under the broiler so they wouldn’t be runny.

In other words, this is not the sort of dish for which a recipe is required.  Like all dishes that can be called ‘peasant cuisine,’ it is the food equivalent of monkeys with typewriters.* Given a certain amount of time in a kitchen containing basic ingredients, one is bound eventually to throw eggs and some other things together in a skillet and discover that the only way to cook it through is to run it under the broiler at the end.  Finding that this is likely to taste good, and that the leftovers make a delicious lunch, practiced technique and variation will arise. 

I think I finally formalized my frittata skills into a genre the year I had a garden up in the Hudson Valley that produced copious amounts of Swiss chard. I remember processing sink-full after sink-full of the stuff. Chard freezes well (blanched, in bags) and thawed frozen chard is made for eggs. That winter there were quiches, there were these timbales, but above all there was chard frittata. (Incidentally the timbale link requires a resounding aside in favor of Swiss chard and Loire Cabernet Franc. Long may they live together! And the current Baudry Granges (2006) is so delicious.)

One of the other vegetables that seems made for frittata is zucchini (and its related squash friends).  Except that, unlike chard, the time for zucchini frittata is fleeting. That time is now-the beginning of the season, when zucchini are small, sweet, nutty and firm. It happily coincides with the beginning of new garlic (hoorah, hoorah!) and occurs before the relentless squash has become big and tiresome and something to hide in other dishes.

I had a wonderful zucchini frittata last Wednesday at Terroir. This was a restaurant I approached with a certain amount of trepidation-admittedly trepidation of the “not-wanting-to-belong-to-any-club-that-would-have-me-as-a-member” sort. I had a friend meeting me who has a low hipster/bullshit threshold (as well as impeccable taste in wine) and who had had an extremely trying day. I wasn’t sure if it would be possible for a restaurant to do things like having a whole page of Beaujolais (served at the right temperature) and only serving Riesling by the glass all summer (with Tshirts to prove it) without all the wine geekdom crescendoing into a cooler-than-thou, wink-wink, mildly threatening roar. I came prepared to flee if necessary. 

Fleeing was not necessary.  Apparently the feat is possible, and the zucchini frittata was a clincher.  It was thick and brown and homely and garlicky and full of good olive oil and zucchini. The bread alongside was crusty and the slice was generous. This hearty, simple, delicious and unpretentious foodstuff cast the proclamations of the menu and wine list in a kind and gleeful light. I allowed myself to covet the “Phylloxera” sticker on one of the wine list binders. (Imagine, if you will, the word Phylloxera printed in rococo script, like the name of a 1980’s hair/metal band, white on a black background…. Having just spent several weeks perusing the history of scholarly research on phylloxera for a Botany paper I found this simply hil-larious.)** We ordered a bunch more food (the paninis are superlative as declared, although the fried lamb was declared an “enh” by all), we drank a bottle of deliciously ethereal Beaujolais (Cheysson Chiroubles 2004), and the bill was not, by New York standards, horrendous.

I found myself still relishing that zucchini frittata two days later, and so I made myself a version with summer squash and fresh garlic (topped with a sprinkle of my new favorite condiment for everything egg-related) for lunch. And this, too, was delicious.

** I refrained from obtaining photographic evidence; I think taking pictures of one’s food (and other stuff) in restaurants is absolutely annoying and detrimental to proper enjoyment.  This is what I never, ever, want my life to come to, blog or no.

(Scallion photo comes from Play with your Food) 

It all started innocently enough.  The week’s CSA pickup had included a small head of intriguingly pointy, wrinkly-leaved Arrowhead Cabbage. I also had some fresh ground lamb and some Chinese-style folded buns that have been in the freezer FOREVER (ever since a party where we roasted a pork butt and made our own pork buns, yum, but which was sort of an embarrassingly long time ago), and which I had finally formed a plan to liberate (thus also liberating some much-needed space in the freezer).  The thought was to brown the meat and add sliced cabbage and sweat it all up with some nice Asian-inspired sauce. The cabbage-y, saucy mix would be great with some steamed buns. All I lacked was a piece of ginger, and maybe some green onions, to make it perfect.

Luckily I had scoped out a small Asian-owned produce stand that lies on the path I travel on the way to my classes at Lehman College, on Bedford Park Blvd. This is a section of the Bronx that, like so many of New York’s largely immigrant neighborhoods, is underserved by grocery stores. There is a big Pioneer all the way over on Webster, but I’m pretty sure that the polystyrene-plated, shrink-wrapped produce horrors that lurk therein are the stuff of my most rant-inducing nightmares. Bedford Park has adapted with a few small local shops – a carniceria, a bakery with a window display of rather alarming pastries, and a little produce shop.  I’d stopped in there for an emergency bottle of water on a very hot day and noticed that the produce there looked green and fresh and the sight of the workers putting up umbrellas to shade the outdoor stands in the morning had become a comforting part of my morning scurry to the indignities of 9 am summer school.  This seemed like an ideal place to pick up the ginger I needed, and it was right on my way.

I picked out one of the smaller pieces of plump-looking ginger (which was still pretty big – this was obviously a store for serious ginger-buyers.  No small shriveled knobs here!) and decided to grab a bunch of scallions as well.  The girl at the counter weighed my ginger and asked me for just over $1 for it and the scallions.  It was cheap enough that I didn’t even have to get out a bill – I had enough money in coins!

There was a time when I would have whistled my way down the street after such a transaction, pleased at my little food bargain. But in fact this is where my discomfort with the poor unsuspecting scallions began. Because this was a little too cheap, in my mind, for a bunch of scallions that were obviously not local.  These scallions, although they looked plump and fresh, were too even in size, and their greenery too tender, to be from around here.  Scallions are in season now, and available at the farmer’s markets (there were to be some in our next week’s CSA pickup). These scallions have more gnarly shapes and tougher green tops than the ones I’d just bought. Like all the produce in the little store (and stores big and small all over New York), they had come from a local produce wholesaler, who may have gotten them from a regional distributor, who had gotten them from an importer or trucker, who had brought them from who knows where (Mexico? California?). The fact remains that these scallions had changed hands several times, and yet they still cost me, the end purchaser, less than a dollar. To be that cheap, they must have started out at five cents a bunch or less. 

Uncomfortable thoughts began to niggle at the back of my mind. Under what circumstances could scallions be grown that were to be sold at five cents a bunch?  What were the lives like of the workers who worked to harvest scallions that could be sold that cheaply?  What kind of environmental damage might have been wrought by the farming systems that allowed scallions to grow fast enough that their tops were still tender when they were big enough to harvest? What was the quality of irrigation water used to keep them growing fast, and the quality of the water that was used to mist them to keep them fresh while they were waiting to be shipped?  As Keith Stewart (a local farmer who has sold his great garlic, among other things, at the Greenmarket in Union Square for years) writes in his essay “The Hidden Costs of Farming,” “It’s hard to argue with inexpensive food – I like a bargain myself.  But before we get too self-congratulatory about our food system, we should take a closer look at it.  Behind it lie some hidden and largely unacknowledged costs that can make our cheap food not such a bargain after all.” (It’s a Long Road to a Tomato. New York, 2006, p. 112).

The other thing that lurked in the back of my mind, even as I picked up the bunch of scallions from their small, refrigerated pile, was the fact of their untraceability. No one, certainly not the owner of the produce store, and probably not even the buyers at the local produce wholesaler, had any idea where they had come from beyond the last stop along the line.  The “farm” (insofar as we can call what is essentially an outdoor factory a farm) that grew them and the workers who picked and boxed them up for sale had no way of knowing where they were going to be eaten.

Notice that I did not say, here, that the store owners, produce buyers, and scallion-processing workers simply “didn’t know” where the scallions had come from or were going to.  That would imply some sort of willful or deliberate ignorance on their part. Instead, they simply had no way of knowing.  If I had asked the store owner where she had gotten the scallions, she would probably have been able to tell me the name of the local produce company who sold them to her.  If I showed the produce wholesaler a dated invoice, they might have been able to get me one step closer. But even then, the ultimate origin of my exact scallions would probably have been unclear. As Marion Nestle points out, “Food suppliers do not want you to know how commonly food from different places is commingled.  The foods in any one bin might come from anywhere.” (What to Eat. New York, 2006, p. 30). 

Discomfort with, or at least a dawning awareness of, the opaqueness of our produce distribution system fortunately seems to be coming to the forefront of public consciousness (perhaps due to the fact that there have been two widespread and highly publicized outbreaks of food poisoning attributable to produce in the last year?).  Just as my musing on the troubling scallions was going on, I was interested to hear this piece a few days ago on Morning Edition.  Here’s a telling excerpt:

 Supermarket co-owner John Garcia was surprised when asked whether he sells Chinese shiitakes in his store, which is locally owned. He said he thought his supply was all domestically grown and that he wasn’t sure there was a difference.

“There’s definitely not anyone on our staff who knows that,” Garcia said. “If they knew, I would know.”

But Garcia was curious, so he went to his office to look more closely at records from his supplier.

“I have an invoice that says I got some shiitake jumbos that were imported, it doesn’t say from where,” Garcia said.

When asked whether that was a problem, he said, “Yeah, I would like to know where it’s coming from, because I never knew this was an issue.”

Notice that Garcia was not even aware that lack of transparency about the origins of the produce in his store was an issue.  It is telling that he is surprised to find out that he could be selling mushrooms imported from countries such as China, where overuse of pesticides (not to mention use of pesticides like DDT, which are no longer legal in the US) is a known and well-documented problem. So easy to find out about, in fact, that it is as easy as typing “pesticide use in China” into a Google search. Try it and you’ll come up with these two links and many more.

We can take comfort in the fact that there’s a pretty good chance that, once the long-delayed implementation of Country of Origin Labeling takes effect, many consumers will vote out Chinese mushrooms and Mexican scallions with their wallets. (While Mexico succeeded in eliminating DDT use ahead of schedule, they still have a rather large problem with untreated irrigation water.  Granted this is from 2006, but I doubt the situation has dramatically changed. Here’s just one quote: “For example, less than 10% of waste water from Mexico City, with a population of greater than 25 million is treated, hence more than 90% of the city’s untreated waste water is sent into rivers that irrigate farmland to the north.”)

But let’s not get off-topic here. I’m not in the business of trying to put the blame for problems with our food supply on foreign countries’ growing practices. Take the recent Tomato/Salmonella outbreak (or, as Marion Nestle so aptly renames it, THE TOMATO (MAYBE?) SAGA.  What is most troubling to me (and, I’m sure everyone else who has a brain and eats fresh food) is the difficulty inspectors have been having in ascertaining where exactly the tainted tomatoes may have come from (or even if tomatoes were the cause of the outbreak).  The FDA and CDC have done a fair amount of hemming and hawing and trying to put as much blame as possible for their delay in targeting the source on the faulty memories of the sickened eaters. For example, here is an LA Times article, which notes that “Consumers and farmers have criticized health officials for the slow pace of the probe, which the FDA says is unavoidable because of the wide scope of the outbreak, the shaky memories of victims and the difficulties of tracing tomatoes.” (Emphasis mine.) Note how the shaky memory of victims comes strategically before the difficulty in tracing tomatoes.

But it is clear that the problem lies much deeper than just faulty memories, and tomatoes aren’t the only culprit. Marion Nestle’s ongoing coverage of the tomato crisis will give you about all you need to know (see link above), but I she succinctly sums up one possible solution in her July 2 update where she notes that, rather than showing the need for better “cooperation” between various US food agencies, “it shows the need for a single food agency!”

This type of thinking plays right into the tenets of what is called “Normal Accident Theory,” which deals with complex systems and how large-scale accidents come about within them. This thinking has commonly been applied to nuclear accidents, but the theory has also been applied to commercial plane crashes (many thanks to my aviator husband for directing me to William Langewieshe’s commentary on the 1996 Valujet crash, which you can find in the last chapter of his book Inside the Sky (New York, 1998)). I was also reminded of the incident that Wendell Berry relates in the essay “Margins” in his 1977 book The Unsettling of America:

In Michigan in the fall of 1975, a fire-retarding chemical known a PBB was mistaken for a trace mineral and mixed into a large order of livestock feed.  This feed was sent to four Michigan mills run by the Farm Bureau, and from there it went to farms and to the stock troughs.  The resulting contamination of meat, milk, and eggs produced a disaster which is still continuing after three-and-a-half years and the limits of which are not known.

“Normal Accident Theory,” as described by its author and long-time expounder Charles Perrow, states that in highly complex systems “serious accidents are inevitable, no matter how hard we try to avoid them” (Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies.  Princeton, 1984/1999, p. 3).  This is directly in opposition to the competing “High Responsibility Theory,” which states that decentralization of decision making, redundancy, and the ability of complex organizations to learn from mistakes will lead to safety in complex systems. Even if you don’t happen to work for a large corporation, a fairly cursory look at the response of the CDC and the FDA to the tomato/salmonella outbreak will serve to decrease your confidence in the “High Responsibility Theory.”  (Incidentally the best thinking I’ve seen on the tenets of High Responsibility Theory vs. Normal Accident Theory appear in Scott Sagan’s 1993 book on nuclear technology, The Limits of Safety: Organizations, Accidents, and Nuclear Weapons. The first couple of chapters are worth a read for the cogent and detailed analysis of the two theories, even if you may not sleep well at night after finishing the book, especially if you grew up during the Cold War.) 

Given the convincing tenets of Normal Accident Theory, in any system that is as price-driven as our food supply currently is, and in which distribution systems have become concentrated at the same time regulation and oversight have become decentralized, widespread outbreaks of food poisoning are not only more likely but in fact inevitable.  And as Berry points out, “In a highly centralized and industrialized food-supply system there can be no small disaster” (Unsettling of America p. 223). There is an oft-cited study by Lawrence Wein (I have read about it in Perrow’s recent The Next Catastrophe as well as Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy), which basically found that it would be possible to poison 500,000 people by tainting a single milk silo with botulism. (McKibben, p. 61; Perrow, p. 299).  In a situation like this, the distribution system, which removes producers and consumers from direct access to one another in the chain of supply, would be to blame rather than the milk producers themselves.  Similarly, in the case of the tomato/salmonella (maybe) outbreak, the blame lies less on where the produce came from than on the fact that the source of the contamination has become virtually untraceable by the time someone (or in this case, 869 someones – and those are just the reported cases) gets sick.

It is, of course, possible for consumers and producers to regain contact with one another – the rate at which farmer’s markets, CSA’s, and buying clubs have exploded in the past few years is well documented and encouraging.  But the fact remains that this way of eating requires flexibility and a fair amount of commitment. I regularly take the subway 45 minutes each way to get to the farmer’s market in Union Square, and there was a mini-crisis the other night when neither my husband nor I was going to be able to pick up our weekly CSA share (we rearranged the schedule.) Processing the majority of your own food (I make bread, granola bars, and granola, although I confess that crackers will probably remain beyond my ability or interest) doesn’t cost much more than shopping at the supermarket, but it takes time, commitment, and a supportive partner who will make the CSA run and do the dishes. To keep the costs down, it requires modifying your diet to include much less meat. But this kind of commitment just isn’t possible for everyone, and even the committed are still to some extent vulnerable (for example we feel we can’t afford to buy the milk available at markets in New York, as much as we would like to and would do so in an ideal world. I’ve just cut milk to a bare minimum, too. When we have kids it will be different – something else will probably have to go). Country of Origin Labeling will go a long way towards giving people for whom shopping at the supermarket is their only or best option at least some sort of choice about what to buy (and I hope it will encourage more produce wholesalers to consider buying more local produce).

But where does this all leave the hapless bunch of scallions that launched so many lines of investigation? As it happened, when I bought the scallions I was on my way to the New York Botanical Gardens for a Soil Science class. By the time I got there, the scallions were already disturbing enough that I was quite relieved to discover that there is now a Farmer’s Market at NYBG for a couple of hours on Wednesday afternoons!  I bought a bunch of plump young red onions with greens attached from Migliorelli Farm two dollars, figuring I would rather use those for my cabbage buns. However, I hate to waste food, even food that makes me uncomfortable. Heartened by the quality of the ginger (the freshest, juiciest ginger I’d seen in a long time!) that had come from the little store in the Bronx via who knows where, I ended up using the scallions in a broccoli-chicken stir fry a few days later. Through no fault of the scallions, which turned out to be perfectly respectable if a bit bland, it wasn’t my best meal ever. But I felt somehow better having eaten the evidence and survived, none the worse for wear.