Under the Hudson Sun

Frances Mayes, in her book, Under the Tuscan Sun, included a recipe for bean soup that used Tuscan kale, with a description of those dusk-green leaves that lured me into choosing it among the first vegetables planted in my Hudson garden. I made the bean soup, which was glorious, and, when sautéed, the kale's dark chewy taste lightened up with olive oil and garlic. Soon kale replaced the ironclad spinach, which was never really welcome in my home anyway.  Also, joy, I discovered that I can keep harvesting kale throughout the summer and into the fall by amputating it's bottom leaves, similar to those African cattle ranchers who lop off pieces of cow thigh for dinner without killing the animal.  (I had only heard this story anecdotally and when I tried to verify it using Google, I couldn't find anything.  Oh well.)  I have grown kale now for years, and when crazed chefs started kneading it as preparation for salads, laughably sweetened with dates and cranberries, I too succumbed to the kale massage, squeezing and mushing those muscle bound leaves with olive oil, garlic, and lemon (no added fruity treats, however).  And although I tricked myself into believing I could actually soften up those beautiful raw paint chips, when I started serving salads to friends the confessions began to roll out. "I hate kale." "Please don't serve kale."  "Kale is horrible!"

Well, my friends, do I have the crucifer for you!  Broccoli spigariello liscia, the next contender in the latest dreary battle to make the tough so-good-for-you greens edible.  I planted this broccoli last year and waited and waited, until, after weeks, tiny little florets sprung out from the ends of the plant. They were very tender and sweet, much tastier than their lunky solo broccoli cousin. I subsequently learned that you can munch on the spigariello leaves during the summer while waiting for the tasty bits to appear.  I cut my first leaf crop last night and sautéed it with garlic.  Disappointing.  Flat and bland, although I learned today that I should have cooked the stems with them and that they taste better than the leaves. My favorite local chef also said to immerse spigariello in ice water first. I'll try again. But it might be worth it just to wait for the florets.

In any case, I am a sucker for Italian seeds and their names.  Currently in my garden, in addition to the spigariello broccoli, are the Italian beans di Spagna bianca, lingua di fuoco, and cosse violetto sans fil.   And I'm convinced that the Hudson Valley, with its current influx of fanatical grower and cooker locavore immigrants, can become an Eastern Tuscany.  Unfortunately, as long as we can't grow artichokes or make drinkable wine, Northern California will always beat us in the US Italian Wannabe contest, and I doubt rutabagas and hard cider will ever offer any gastronomical competitive advantage. Nevertheless, our river valley is beautiful and given even modestly good weather, our rocky soil throws up some very mean veggies and fattens many happy, sometimes tender, cows and pigs.

There are problems with my Mediterranean vision, of course.  Aside from Hudson Valley's chronic climatic inferiority to Napa, Columbia County is the second least protected county in the state, meaning no zoning, which perpetuates an underlying anxiety.  For-sale signs tart up every major highway, exposing voluptuous virgin acres of forest and fields with vulgar enticements: "Great for Commercial Property."   To keep the cement plants and big box stores down to a minimum, we rely on our very active conservationists and a small fraction of Manhattan's one-percenters to procure land for preservation or agriculture. The salaries Michael and I made have been close enough to the one-percent so that we could afford not only to buy a chunk of land but also to conserve it. 

Weighing in on the conscience, however, is the local 99%, who suffer steady unemployment rates. I see some of them during lunch time at the Salvation Army soup kitchen, and I'm sure they would welcome a cement plant or two and a slew of bb stores.  That much of the produce they eat at the SA kitchen is organic and donated from local farms and that in my Chianti-manqué utopia their work opportunities might be limited to farm laboring might not be as exciting for them as it is for me. Still, the alternative is to beat up the landscape for the sake of jobs that barely support their kids on platefuls of sugar and carcinogens and that end up giving them repetitive stress injuries, chronic low back pain, and no happiness.  

The cultural values of ourselves, town, county, valley, state, country are fractals on America's construct that are currently the endless iterations of the right-left, rich-poor tension, continually forming patterns that repeat at every scale. I believe events will eventually converge to break those tense lines into some different pattern, I hope from some positive outcome of our chronically crazy democratic anarchy and not from violence.  Where we land as individuals within this geometric flux will mostly likely, as usual, be a matter of luck and opportunity, rather than free will. And, for better or worse, I'm hoping that when that convergence occurs that the fractal patterns repeating around and within us will be shaped, not like Paramus, but like Tuscany, where a less sick growth-minded culture allows two hour lunches with glasses of dry apple jack, where work intensifies and pauses with the seasons, and the word "consumer" has become politically incorrect.  More spigariello liscia, anyone?

I'm in the Army Now

Like many retirees, I’m looking for a way to "give back" after years of having given very little to the world except my terrific kids and a couple of useful medical articles.  I don't want to work in an office ever again.  I have no house building skills and I can't teach anyone to read. I have, however, always wanted to work in a soup kitchen, which combines cooking, feeding people, and feeling virtuous (nothing wrong with that, by the way).  On our way into Hudson, we pass the Salvation Army Center, a rather grim little building right on the edge of town and five minutes from the barn, which offers lunch Tuesday through Friday.  I Googled it and found they needed volunteers. Perfect, for in addition to having a soup kitchen, the Sally Army is meaningful for me in two other ways,

First, the SA was the only charity that my father donated to, because, as he told me when I was about eleven, "They didn't charge soldiers for donuts during World War II while the Red Cross did."  My father was never in the military, so he most likely got that information from his brother Bill, less than a year older than my Dad, who was killed in a tank unit at the Battle of the Bulge.  That Christmas I made my first donation ever: 10 cents tossed into the metal bucket of an SA bell ringer outside Woolworth's in Troy. I have given to the Army ever since, naturally with increasing amounts.  

Second, my very first job in New York City was in 1962 as a bag lady for the SA during my college freshman work term.  I worked for two pleasant women at the Barclay Hotel on 48^th Street, where the Army rented a suite.  For a weekly salary of $45, I filled little sacks with donation items and delivered them to high-end spots -- Bergdorf, Bendel, Twenty-one, Saks, Sardis -- where wealthy women who wanted Junior League credits picked them up and collected money from their friends. Bell ringers, but silent and golden. At night I joined my roommate in a one-room apartment with shiny turquoise walls on 9 West 84^th Street. We split an exorbitant rent of $100 a month for a place a block from the city's heroin center between Columbus and Amsterdam. We were broken into only once and it was the best time of my life. After that winter, NYC was my soul city. 

So three weeks ago I called Jill, the manager of the Hudson SA center, who said, "Yeah. Sure.  Come on in when you feel like it."  Encouraged by this casual acceptance I wandered in the next Wednesday and committed to work one day a week from 8 to one.

Because the Army, like most traditional churches these days, has experienced a continual decline in membership, it is testing out using some centers just for service, with no mission/evangelical efforts.  The Hudson SA center is the first in the state to be set up this way. Jill, who runs it, is Catholic and reports to an Army officer in Albany, who pretty much lets her run the center the way she wants.  And for good reason.  Jill has achieved a nearly impossible feat; her center makes money.  The revenues come from local Christmas bell-ringers -- business men, real estate agents, kids -- anybody that Jill can badger into volunteering. And, she gets so much food from local businesses and farms that she almost never has to resort to using her funds for buying any. So she makes a profit, which she hopes to use for new projects.

Jill is blonde, tough, attractive, funny, competent, and kind without being wimpy.  She should be everyone's boss. Four others typically work regularly at the center. Kevin and Sue are the cooks.  George and Charlie, who serve the lunches, lug boxes, wash floors and do anything else that's needed, are short, self-deprecating, kind, and always helpful, sort of like Santa's elves grown old.

When I first arrive at 8:00, I enter the dining area, a dowdy room, but pleasant and full of light, with four long tables, each set with 12 small fists of paper napkins wrapped around plastic utensils, and two empty tables waiting for the daily food deliveries. The SA kitchen opens off the dining room, a sketch of a small-town restaurant -- a big black stove, lots of huge cauldrons and monster bowls lining the shelves, back rooms with stacks of cans and boxes, cold storage areas piled with produce, and freezers full of ham, chicken, and beef. 

Jill and the cooks have already been there for about an hour, and if roasted meat is on the menu that day, it is already in the oven.   Kevin typically does the meat and likes to describe the marinades and rubs that he uses.  Once he puts his roasts in the oven, for the rest of the morning, punctuated by the occasional cigarette break, he tells stories about his past, describes his many unfinished projects, and complains about his Lyme disease to anyone who will listen. Kevin has been at the SA center for four years,  now on salary but originally assigned there by the Department of Social Services (DSS). He is a paradigm of how the sixties shaped and hammered its flower children into old age.  He has the apple belly and worn looking face from a life of too much booze and too many mind altering drugs providing too many unsubstantiated dreams; he's down but not yet out.

Sue is salaried and does all the rest of the cooking plus scullery duties. She is a straightforward, smart single mother, who works through chronic pain unrelieved by two previous non-helpful spinal and cervical surgeries.

Unless they are making salad that day, which requires a lot of chopping, I generally hang around listening to Kevin's stories until Sue and either George or Charlie return in the van from Walmart and Hannaford, where they have picked up boxes of donated meat, produce, and various baked and dry goods. Occasionally local farms send in fresh vegetables as well, Everything that comes in is weighed and recorded (sometimes my job), and then stored.  If the center can't store, cook, or pass all the food out at the weekly pantry, Jill has a call list of local churches and other charities that take the extra food.  Nothing is wasted.  A near-by farmer even collects the moldy bread for his live stock.

Around 11:30 the clients begin to wander in until lunch closes at 12:30 -- between 30 and 60 older white and black men and women, with a couple mothers and kids.  If Jill had a motto, it would be Zero Intolerance.  Anyone can eat there.  All you have to do is  walk in.  There are no conditions, requirements, or questions.  No one who works there preaches, and no one patronizes. (A few of the workers have been assigned from the DSS and are themselves only a step away from sitting at one of the tables.)  A food pantry is set up on Fridays and the diners can take home extra food that day after they eat.  Sue and Kevin also make a second full meal on Thursday for a local senior center.

So far this may be the best job I've ever had and if I can shrug off some of my essential lethargy, I might do more time. I'm not used to working in a place where no one is clutching their territory or eyeing a vice presidency with fearful resentment and where being of service is the only motivation.   I'm not sure I'm very useful, but I seem to be able to fill in on menial tasks. I found that none of the men will wash dishes, so at least I can do that, a mini-me scrubbing those huge pots and pans. I can also chop vegetables,  and last week, I nearly made the rice.  Maybe next Christmas, I'll join the volunteers who haunt every store in town throughout the season, puffing out steam, pink-cheeked, and frozen, a thick glove swinging the annoying persistent bell, and urging kids to put their first dimes through the wire screen of the metal bucket.