Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

by Barbara Kingsolver

  The potato’s bad rep comes from its glycemic index (GI), a tool used to rate the increase in blood sugar caused by eating particular foods. Foods with a high GI (like sugar and corn sweetener, also) cause a sharp rise in blood glucose that stimulates high levels of blood insulin. It’s hard on the body when that happens frequently, and has been linked to Type II diabetes. But if potatoes are eaten along with foods containing some fiber, protein, and fat, those lower the body’s glycemic response so that insulin levels stay calm.

  A potato’s nutritional value is a package best delivered in its own wrapper. Unfortunately, eating potato skins is not always safe. Because they grow underground, conventional potatoes are among the most pesticide-contaminated vegetables. Potatoes in the United States commonly contain chlorinated hydrocarbon insecticides and sometimes even residues of DDT, dieldrin, and chlordane, extremely hazardous chemicals that have been banned since 1978 but linger in the soil. Conventionally grown potatoes are so contaminated, the Environmental Working Group warns parents not to feed them to infants and toddlers unless they’re thoroughly peeled and boiled. This makes a strong case for buying organic potatoes from trustworthy growers who know the history of the land where their produce is raised.

  We’re lucky enough to have home-grown. Potato salad is one dish our household never goes without, although it changes with the seasons. We eat many other root vegetables too, and plenty of sweet potatoes and winter squash in the autumn months. I’ve included Mom’s infamous pumpkin soup recipe here, and dinner menus for a typical autumn week at our house.

  FOUR SEASONS OF POTATO SALAD

  WINTER

  4 cups large storage potatoes, coarsely diced and boiled until firmly tender 3 hard-boiled eggs, peeled and coarsely chopped

  ¾ cup last summer’s dill pickles, finely chopped 2 tablespoons dill

  Salt to taste

  Mayonnaise—a few tablespoons

  Combine potatoes, eggs, and pickles, being careful not to mash anything. Add dill and salt to mixture and combine thoroughly. Add just enough mayonnaise to hold the salad together.

  SPRING

  4 cups storage potatoes, coarsely dicd

  1/3 cup fresh mint leaves 1–2 cups new peas 1 cup crumbled feta

  ¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil

  Boil diced potatoes as above. Combine ingredients.

  SUMMER

  2 pounds red or golden new potatoes, cut in 1-inch chunks

  3 tablespoons olive oil

  Coarse salt

  2 yellow or red bell peppers, cut in chunks

  2 cups green beans (stringed and broken in 1-inch lengths)

  1–2 ears sweet corn on cob

  Toss potatoes with salt and oil and spread on baking sheet. Roast in 450° oven until tender (20–30 minutes). Place ears of corn, lightly oiled, with the potatoes. Add peppers and green beans to roast for last 10 minutes. When done, loosen the vegetables with a spatula, cut corn kernels off cob, and combine in a large, shallow bowl.

  2 cups tomatoes cut in wedges

  ½ cup fresh basil

  ¼ cup olive oil whipped together with 1 tablespoon balsamic or other mellow vinegar

  Toss tomatoes, basil, and dressing with roasted vegetables; salt to taste.

  FALL

  2 pounds fingerling potatoes (such as Russian Banana, Rose Finn, La Ratte)

  Seasonal vegetables

  4 tablespoons dried basil

  ¼ cup olive oil whipped with 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

  Prepare roasted potatoes as in “Summer” recipe, combining with late-season peppers and green beans, shelly beans, or limas, roasted along with the potatoes. Toss with fresh tomato wedges, basil, and the dressing. As the season progresses and different things become available, you can mix and match other vegetables with the potatoes to your heart’s content, keeping proportions roughly the same. Cubed winter squash and sweet potatoes are wonderful in this roasted dish, requiring about the same amount of time in the oven. Don’t hesitate to combine sweet and regular potatoes—they are unrelated, and marry well!

  PUMPKIN SOUP IN ITS OWN SHELL

  1 five-pound pumpkin (if smaller or larger, adjust the amount of liquid)

  Cut a lid off the top, scoop out the seeds and stringy parts, and rub the inside flesh with salt. Set the pumpkin in a large roasting pan or deep pie dish.

  1 quart chicken or vegetable stock

  1 quart milk or soy milk

  ½ cup fresh sage leaves (use less if dried) 3 garlic cloves

  2 teaspoons sea salt

  Pepper to taste

  Roast garlic cloves whole in oven or covered pan on low heat, until soft. Combine with liquid and spices in a large pot, mashing the cloves and heating carefully so as not to burn the milk. Fill the pumpkin with the liquid and replace the lid, putting a sheet of foil between the pumpkin and its top so it doesn’t fall in. (If you accidentally destroyed the lid while hollowing the pumpkin, just cover with foil.) Bake the filled pumpkin at 375° for 1–2 hours, depending on the thickness of your pumpkin. Occasionally open lid and check with a spoon, carefully scraping some inside flesh into the hot liquid. If the pumpkin collapses or if the flesh is stringy, remove liquid and flesh to a blender and puree. With luck, you can serve the soup in the pumpkin tureen.

  Download these and all other Animal, Vegetable, Miracle recipes at www.AnimalVegetableMiracle.com

  AUTUMN MEAL PLAN

  Sunday ~ Grilled steak and fall potato salad

  Monday ~ Sweet potato and chard quesadilla

  Tuesday ~ Twice-baked potatoes with cheese and late-season broccoli

  Wednesday ~ Spanish tortilla (potato and onion frittata)

  Thursday ~ Three-bean soup with fresh bread

  Friday ~ Pizza with tomato sauce, turkey sausage, roasted onions, and mozzarella

  Saturday ~ Cheese and squash quiche

  * * *

  17 • CELEBRATION DAYS

  November–December

  The closing-down season of the year set us to dragging out storm windows and draining outdoor pipes, but Lily had a whole different agenda: her egg enterprise opened for business. Her April chicks had matured into laying hens, surprising us with their first eggs in late October. Winter is the slow season for egg-laying, with many breeds ceasing production altogether when days are less than thirteen hours long. We’d counseled Lily not to expect much from her flock until next spring.

  Never underestimate the value of motivational speeches from the boss. Lily shot out of bed extra early every morning so she’d have time to spend in the chicken coop before the school bus came. Her hens have special nest boxes that open from outside the chickens’ roosting quarters, so it’s possible to stand (in clean shoes) in the front room of the poultry barn and reach through to collect the eggs. Or in Lily’s case, to stand for hours peering in, supervising the hens at their labors. She actually has watched eggs exiting the hens’ oviducts—a sight few people on earth have yet checked off their to-do lists, I imagine. When planning this flock she had chosen antique, heavy-bodied breeds with good reputations for laying right through cold weather. By mid-November she was bringing in as many as a dozen eggs a day from her nineteen layers.

  Lily apparently knew all along that her workforce could actualize its potential. She had also been working her customer base for months, taking phone numbers in advance. A CEO wears many hats—accountant, supervisor, egg scrubber—but this company’s special strength was public relations. Advance planning had taken into account not just winter production, but also egg color. The products from her different breeds of hens crossed a palette from soft green to pink, tan, and chocolate brown. Lily arranged them so every carton contained a rainbow, and printed out her own label, “Lily’s Lovely Layers,” with a photo of herself holding one of the lovelies. She pasted this over the Brand X names on the recycled cartons friends had saved for her. By the time she made her first sale, customers were practically lined up in the driveway.

  Lily was beside herself, dancing
around the kitchen with her first dollars. Seeing my young entrepreneur realize her dream made me feel proud too, and also mystified, in the way of all parents who watch their kids acquire skills beyond our ken. When I was that age, the prospect of selling even a Girl Scout cookie mortified me to tears. Now I watched my nine-year-old stand a couple of inches taller each time she picked up the phone to arrange an egg pickup, always remembering first to ask, “How are you today, and how’s your family?” In the evenings she sat down at the kitchen table with the account book I’d helped her set up to keep track of customer information, inventory, and expenses. Finally she was entering numbers in the “Income” column.

  I soon wondered if I’d have to walk down the driveway and get in line myself. I reminded Lily that our family still needed eggs too. We’d stayed well supplied for the past year from her three old pet hens, which I had presumed were not going to go on payroll. But now their eggs went straight into the Lovely Layer cartons with all the rest. They could be mine, I learned, for $2.50 a dozen. Taking into account the cost of feed, this price gave Lily a small profit margin and still pleased her customers.

  I, however, balked at it. Of course I didn’t mind rewarding my hardworking daughter, that wasn’t the problem. She had been diligent about caring for her hens, closing them safely into their coop every night, even cracking ice off their water bowl on cold mornings. She kept her ears permanently tuned to the chicken voices outside, so knew immediately when a coyote had crept into the yard, and barreled screaming for the front door before the rest of us had a clue. (I don’t know about the coyote, but I nearly needed CPR.) These hens owed their lives and eggs to Lily, there was no question.

  But since she was taking her business so seriously, I wanted her to understand it genuinely. Businesses have start-up costs. I reminded her that I’d paid for the chicks, and also the feed they’d eaten for six months before they started laying—grazing hens still need supplementary protein, calcium, and other nutrients. I explained to Lily about capitalization, credit, and investors. She listened with interest. “I’ll pay you back,” she said immediately. “I want the business to be really mine, not just some little kid thing.”

  She sat down with her ledger to figure the size of the zero-interest loan I’d fronted in venture capital. We had the receipts. We have to buy organic feed in bulk, so we’d already purchased all she’d need until next spring. What she had to calculate was the cost of thirty-two mail-order chicks and the edible wages required to keep the layers producing one full year. (Roosters had been dispatched.) I wondered myself what the figure would be. She bent over her ledger for a long time, pigtail ends brushing the table as her pencil scratched, erased, and scratched some more. Finally she spoke: “Two hundred and eighty-five dollars!”

  She rolled out of her chair, flopping dramatically onto the floor, eyes squeezed shut and tongue thrust out to convey either despair or grave fiscal alarm. As I said, a CEO wears many hats.

  “Don’t panic,” I said, sitting down beside her on the floor. “Let’s talk about this.”

  She opened one eye. “Mom, I won’t make that much till I’m fifty or something.”

  “Trust me, you will. It’s not as much as it sounds. Plus, if we’re keeping track of everything, I owe you for the roosters we ate and all the eggs we’ve used since April. I forgot about that. Add those up and we’ll see where we are.”

  Where we were, at the beginning of November, was just under $155 in debt. Lily and I made a deal. She would give me all the eggs I wanted, subtracting $2.50 per carton from her debt. I wouldn’t charge interest, but I would ask to be considered a priority customer. No standing in line. At two cartons a week, she’d be debt-free in about thirty weeks. To a fourth-grader that sounds roughly the same as life without parole.

  “But you’ll still be earning real money from all your other customers,” I pointed out. “You’ll be opening a bank account before you know it. And everybody’s going to need extra eggs for our baking, with the holidays coming up.”

  Cheered by the prospect of holiday baking, the Corporate Executive Officer took the situation in hand. As far as I know, the workforce was never apprised of the crisis.

  Of all holidays we celebrate in the United States, few come with food traditions that are really our own. Most of the holy days and bank holidays on our calendar have come from other cultures, some of them ancient, others too modern to have settled yet into having their own menus. The only red-blooded American holiday food customs, it seems to me, arrive on the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving.

  They couldn’t be more different. The first is all about charring things on a grill, burgers and hot dogs and the like, washed down with plenty of beer or soda, the purpose being to stay outdoors for a long afternoon culminating at dusk in elaborate explosions of gunpowder. Aside from the flagpole that may be somewhere in the scene, there is nothing about this picnic that’s really rooted in our land. The pyrotechnics are Chinese, technically, and the rest of the deal is as packaged as food can be. That might even be what’s most American about it. At the end of a Fourth of July party, if asked to name the sources of what we’d consumed, we’d be hard pressed to muster an ingredient list.

  The other holiday is all about what North America has to offer at the end of a good growing season. Thanksgiving is my favorite, and always has been, I suppose because as a child of the farmlands I appreciate how it honestly belongs to us. On Saint Patrick’s Day every beer-drinking soul and his brother is suddenly Irish. Christmas music fills our ears with tales of a Palestinian miracle birth, a generous Turkish saint whom the Dutch dressed in a red suit, and a Druid ceremonial tree…I think. But Turkey Day belongs to my people. Turkeys have walked wild on this continent since the last ice age, whereas Old Europe was quite turkeyless. (That fact alone scored them nearly enough votes to become our national bird, but in the end, I guess, looks do matter.) Corn pudding may be the oldest New World comfort food; pumpkins and cranberries, too, are exclusively ours. It’s all American, the right stuff at the right time.

  To this tasty native assembly add a cohort of female relatives sharing work and gossip in the kitchen, kids flopped on the living room floor watching behemoth cartoon characters float down a New York thoroughfare on TV, and men out in the yard pretending they still have the upper-body strength for lateral passes, and that is a perfect American day. If we need a better excuse to focus a whole day on preparing one meal, eating it, then groaning about it with smiles on our faces, just add a dash of humility and hallelujah. Praise the harvest. We made it through one more turn of the seasons.

  In modern times it’s mostly pageantry, of course, this rejoicing over harvest and having made it to winter’s doorstep with enough food. But at our house this year, the harvest was real and the relief literal. Also, for the first time since we’d begun our local-food experiment, we approached a big dining event for which the script was already written. Local turkey? We had some whose lives began in the palms of our hands and ended twelve steps from the back door. Pumpkin pies, mashed potatoes, corn pudding, sweet potatoes, green beans, celery and chestnuts for the stuffing—how could it be this easy? On our continent, this party plans itself.

  I had no complaint about celebrating Thanksgiving twice, this time carnivorously. Any excuse to spend a day with friends and my husband and kids is good with me, and I’m partial to the traditional menu. I love carving up Tom on the table, and then revisiting him throughout the following weeks in sandwiches, soups, and casseroles. I have such a fondness for the stuffing, my post-Thanksgiving bliss in childhood was to make stuffing sandwiches. (Dr. Atkins, roll over.) Our recipe starts with a skillet full of sautéed onions, garlic, home-grown celery, and chestnuts from our Chinese chestnut, tossed with a whole loaf of Steven’s wheat bread torn to pieces, softened with stock, and spiced with loads of sage and thyme.

  We started the evening before, baking several loaves of bread and checking the progress of our thawing bird. I also hacked a Queensland Blue handily to piec
es (ten minutes flat—revenge is sweet) to cook down for pumpkin pies. Lily helped roll out the dough. Both girls have always helped with Thanksgiving dinner, since they were tall enough to stand on a chair and mix the stuffing with their hands like a splendid mud pie. One year earlier, at ages eight and seventeen, they had taken responsibility for an entire holiday meal when I was sidelined with a broken leg. With some heavy-lifting help from Steven they pulled it off beautifully: turkey, pies and all. Cooking is 80 percent confidence, a skill best acquired starting from when the apron strings wrap around you twice.

  On Thursday morning we baked the pies. In the afternoon we roasted sweet potatoes, braised winter squash, sautéed green beans with chestnuts, boiled and mashed the potatoes, all while keeping a faithful eye on Mr. T. By herself, Lily cracked half a dozen eggs into a bowl (subtract $1.25 from the I.O. Mama column) and made the corn pudding, using corn we’d cut from the cob and frozen in summer. Our garden provided everything, with one exception. Cranberries mostly grow farther north. I’d planted a small experimental cranberry patch but had nothing yet to show for my efforts. We discussed a cranberryless Thanksgiving, and agreed that would be like kissing through a screen door. Who needs it?

  Did we need it—was it essential that this feast be 100 percent pure Hoppsolver-grown? Personal quests do have a way of taking on lives of their own, even when nobody else knows or cares: recreational runners push themselves another mile, Scrabblers keep making bigger words. Our locavore project nudged us constantly toward new personal bests. But it always remained fascination, not fanaticism. We still ate out at restaurants with friends sometimes, and happily accepted invitations to dine at their homes. People who knew about our project would get flustered sometimes about inviting us, or when seeing us in a restaurant would behave as if they’d caught the cat eating the canary. We always explained, “We’re converts in progress, not preachers. No stone tablets.” Our Thanksgiving dinner would include a little California olive oil, a pinch of African nutmeg, and some Virginia flour that likely contained wheat from Pennsylvania and points north. Heeding the imperatives of tradition, we also bought a bag of lipstick-colored organic cranberries from Wisconsin. As the first store-bought fruit or vegetable to enter our house in many months, they looked wildly exotic lounging on our counter, dressed in their revealing cellophane bag. All of us, I think, secretly fondled them before Camille cooked them into a gingery sauce.