Winemaker's Garden
People tend to believe that gardening is virtuous, therefore we gardeners virtue signal about our gardens: the fattest pumpkin, broadest dahlia. Winemakers who grow and cook our own food will naturally observe the connection between our gardens and our vineyards, between a palate unsullied by the habit of consuming processed foods filled with sugar, corn syrup solids, and excitotoxins, one that relishes the sweetness of a peapod, and the palate that creates and blends a wine of natural purity, restraint, and freshness.
Cooking from the home garden can be a source of comfort and groundedness in difficult times; the quiet discipline of cooking according to natural prompts of what is ripe, seasonal, and abundant has a certain honesty and exigency to it. I work fast, around stressors good and bad, work, family visits and illnesses, travel, and daily fatigue. I’m not a chef, editor, influencer, or cookbook writer. I have no staff, no gardener, no help. I like to snap a quick photo of a dish in the warm evening light of outdoors just before sitting down to the table. I’m sharing these images—so joyful and colorful—with a sense of humility. This is every day sustenance. Here’s what we’ve cooked from our garden this summer, so far.
In Defense of Simplicity
I’ve spent time this summer waiting—in airports and hospitals—and I’ve discovered that I enjoy reading cookbooks on my Kindle, a serene passtime. Returning home and cooking from the overgrown garden creates a sharp sense of contrast; the books I chose based on predilection, the recipes I read in quietude, were packed with the exotic flavorings I enjoy and that seem to be on trend. But when forced to cook with a sense of time urgency at home, the recipes I’ve perused seem overly complicated by comparison, so much gilding of the lily. Maybe that’s what cooking with garden-ripe produce does to a person—it creates a bias for simplicity and a suspicion that too many layers of spice and sauce may be covering up for something.
It may be my imagination, but I think I can tell when a cookbook writer lives in New York City, because, when they write about vegetables, they focus on winter staples like broccoli as canvases for tahini and chili crunch. Meanwhile, I’m focused on seemingly urgent problems: the problem of zucchini, the problem of cucumbers. Too many cherry tomatoes. Not enough time to can or preserve. Clearly, my cookbook authors don’t garden, they shop. Is my bias becoming too overt? If I dine in a restaurant in Napa in July, I expect the desserts to be packed full of stone fruits and desperately trying to pass off squash as a sweet. When they don’t? I’m suspicious because I equate freshness with goodness.
Meanwhile, it’s possible that my cooking has become too simple, this summer, due to the time squeeze. If so, that’s OK. The produce speaks for itself, like a child who has reached the point of maturity when they’re really better off without too much parental involvement. A light touch, a watchful eye is what’s needed. I was worried that my cooking had become dull when I picked ripe blackberries from the backyard vine and scattered them on still-warm, homemade vanilla pudding. No arabesques, no crusts, no layers. The combination of acidic berry and warm cream was thrilling. If that’s simplicity, I’ll lean into it. It was also better than a Michelin-starred restaurant dessert I’d recently eaten, an incredibly beautiful piece of chocolate art made to look like a real mandarin orange and filled with mousse and cake. I say this to remind myself, as I am so often ambivalent, that simplicity is OK when it’s true.
I like to think that people can tell when something is true, and when it’s not. (Life is full of fakes.) I’ve come to the sad realization that mostly, they cannot. The garden offers some hope. But still. Kristof’s relationship with a winery once began to deteriorate when the bean-counters began cutting corners on production winemaking and farming to save money. He resisted. To make matters worse, they spent money, both lavishly and foolishly, on things that didn’t make sense: a wooden platform in the olive grove where employees could practice yoga. No one did.
The symbol of the change in the relationship was a jar of plum jam. In the warehouse where wine was stored, there was a freshly-delivered pallet full of boxes of unlabeled jars of plum jam. The jars were to go in gift packs along with wine, and customers would be led to believe, without overt promises, that the jam had been handcrafted on the estate from (non-existent) plum trees.
Kristof and I were in the warehouse one day to pick up wine. “Look at this jam,” Kristof said, disgusted. “Does that taste like plum jam to you?” He cracked a jar open, stuck his finger in, and held it out to me. He was more upset than the situation seemed to merit. so I knew this was about more than jam; I paid attention.
“Prunes, yes,” I said. “Plums? Definitely not.” The jam was mud brown, when it should have been brilliant reddish-purple. I don’t know why people pretend to be something they’re not. The truth is so much more interesting. Cooking from the garden this summer, I’ll win some, and I’ll lose some. Peaches will go bad before I use them all or even gather them to give away. The family will complain, too many figs! Then the next avalanche will begin. The discipline—and the pleasure—comes from the attempt to do one’s best with what one has. And not pretend to more.
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