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?