Mom and I have settled into a routine. Two or three days a week, we go out and work together in the garden. The whole garden is quite large, so the work is never-ending. There's always a pot with a plant we need to replace, or a long branch that needs to be tied up or removed. This has been a fantastic year for roses, so there's always more faded roses to remove. There's herbs to trim, and fountains that need to be refilled because the kitties keep drinking out of them. We weed, we talk about what we'd like to do, we rearrange pots, we water plants, we tackle small garden projects, we harvest, and then...we cook.
Cooking from the garden has become almost a religious experience. There's something spiritual about picking tomatoes that you then go and use in a salad or a sauce only minutes after they were still attached to the plant. It has become a never-ending source of satisfaction to incorporate the literal fruits of our labor into the food we enjoy at lunch. Cooking has become more experimental, which has added even more joy to the process. The results have been exquisite explosions of flavor and texture that any restaurant serving haute cuisine would be envious of. Today was no exception.
We needed to make a trip to the nursery to get some more colorful flowers and a couple of herbs we wanted to add, so we started the morning by prepping the pasta sauce for the pasta we planned on for lunch. A good pasta sauce is layered. You shouldn't dump all the ingredients in the pot at once because the aromas and flavors will never fully open. Fresh ingredients are a must, and the old-fashioned methods are sometimes better than the modern ones. In my family, any good cook has a wooden chopping bowl for chopping herbs and garlic; my mother and I both have our own. The scent of the garlic and herbs wafting up as you chop is a heady perfume, a sign of good Italian cooking about to happen.
Our pasta sauce started with olive oil and loose mild Italian sausage meat. We wanted a hearty sauce, hence the meat. If you're looking for something lighter, stick with just herbs and veggies. After the sausage cooked through, in went the diced onion. Next came the chopped garlic and herbs, including basil that we grow ourselves. In went chopped San Marzano tomatoes from our garden; this is a great tomato for cooking. Once those flavors opened up, it was time to get serious. And by serious, I mean wine, a cabernet sauvignon. The wine helps to deglaze the bottom of the pot and adds amazing body and flavor to the finished product (pro tip: don't use any wine in your cooking that you wouldn't drink by the glass--trust me!). Once the wine cooked down, we added the last ingredient: tomato sauce Mom made herself from a previous year's San Marzanos. We brought it to a simmer, covered it, and left it to slowly cook while we went to the nursery.
When we returned, we planted the few things we purchased, then went to work on the rest of our lunch. By the time we sat down, we had bruschetta, salad, porpeta (essentially patties made from ravioli filling), penne pasta with the sauce, and biscotti. As Mom is so fond of saying, "this is all we have." Each dish had something from the garden. The pasta had tomatoes and basil we grew. The bruschetta had our own tomatoes, shallots, and zucchini. The salad had our own cucumber and vinegar. The porpeta had our own herbs and swiss chard. Each bite had us in ecstasy, almost like some illicit form of dining. "This is soooo goooood!" "Oh my god, did you taste this?" And when we paired it with the wine that had gone into the sauce...absolute perfection. Food tastes so much better when you grow it and make it yourself.
And for today's garden surprise, we discovered the parsley we thought we bought is actually celery. Looks like we'll be growing that too now! We've been gardening for years and were so confident at the nursery. I guess this is proof that even "experienced" gardeners can still be surprised. It'll be perfect in the box that currently has the last remaining sprigs of lettuce...
