Trauma Farm (38 page)

EVERY DISH HAS ITS
season. Spring is rich with greens and strawberries and asparagus. My favourite crop is the early seed tops (scapes) of the hard-necked garlic, which appear at the same time as our Chinese snow peas. I steam-soften the scapes, then pan-fry them in butter with the snow peas, rock salt, and freshly ground pepper. As simple and clean as you can get. We have an abundance of garlic tops because people don’t know how delicious they are or how to use them. So they don’t buy them. Western society’s indifference (or even fear of) nontraditional food constantly surprises me, though that attitude has been changing during the last thirty years as ethnic cuisines sweep the world, riding the globalization wave, introducing cappuccinos to Beijing and rice noodles to Idaho.

Another late spring dish is fresh fava beans, which most people consider winter food. I find them too dry and lumpy then, though they might have been cooked for hours in a broth, but when they’re green and stir-fried they’ll melt in your mouth, and they remind me of those tender white butter beans of Greece. Equally delicious are the fava and snap-pea flowers that we add to our spring salads. Mixed with
mizuna,
romaine, spinach, tiny beet tops, green onions, and spidery pea-leaf tips, they keep us going until the more substantial and complex salads of summer.

Then we gorge on tomatoes and cucumbers and the
tromboncino
, or Tromba d’Albenga, which resembles a twisted baseball bat—a summer squash-marrow that’s delicious raw, steamed, or fried. The artichokes also arrive in full, big bud, and we steam them and dip their leaves in garlic butter and swoon over the hearts. Summer is also the season for flower and seed salads. Entertaining gives us the opportunity to play in the garden, picking an assortment of blossoms for a garish and tasty plate. I’m especially fond of nasturtium and day-lily flowers.

We cook according to the season, and I eat less, more simply, and later in the day. Often, we find ourselves out in the garden at eight in the evening. My stomach will start growling as I realize I haven’t thought about dinner, so we tend toward quick stir-fries and raw fruits and vegetables.

During the fall the dehydrator comes out and the harvest fills our storeroom and freezers. Cooking meals becomes more extended, especially on the days cool enough to justify lighting the kitchen stove. We begin soups we can leave simmering all day on the cast-iron surface. This is also the season when Sharon and our friend Gerda have a big antipasto day, making enough for the year, and sometimes pesto, which they freeze in ice cube trays, then dump into freezer bags for use in the winter.

Winter is our season for long, slow, hearty dishes. The wood cookstove is roaring and we raid the freezer and storeroom to make stocks to freeze for quick lunches and dinners in summer, when we are too busy to cook. Sharon or I will cook up large batches of tomato sauces. The iron of the stove clangs daily once again as we rustle about in the kitchen and the storeroom overflowing with onions, squash, shallots, cabbages, potatoes, and several varieties of garlic. Here, in our temperate climate, the garden goes on through the winter, filled with winter greens and Chinese (jade
choi, mei king choi
) and Japanese (
mizuna
) vegetables, leeks, kale, overwintered beets, and parsnips. We have a large kitchen with three ovens (including the wood stove). Sometimes we need them when a dinner party erupts.

“Some of us eat to live, and others live to eat.” That’s the theory of the American poet and novelist Jim Harrison, who also invented a new school of journalism—gonzo cooking columns. We eat both ways at Trauma Farm. Food does sustain us, and yet we delight in its rich opportunities.

I GREW UP IN
a kingdom of local food. Fraser Valley suburban cuisine—mashed potatoes, overcooked beef roasts, canned mushy peas—I exaggerate, but it was determinedly plain, except for the cooking of my Italian relatives. In my early twenties, for no reason I can understand—maybe because of the psychological fluctuations caused by my dicey medical state, my love of Vancouver’s Chinatown and a beautiful young woman whose family owned one of the tastiest restaurants in Chinatown, and an omnivorous mind that insisted on reading everything—I underwent what’s known as a “click.” One morning I woke up curious about what I ate and why. That’s when I began my adventures with food, discovering the diversity of local cuisines around the world.

Jane Jacobs, in
The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
argues that the variety in our cities sprang from a thriving, untrammelled, almost microbial civic core—a human ecosystem that naturally extended to the rural world feeding it. Published in 1961, her book was treated with contempt because it opposed the dominant planning theory of the era—the logic trap of the Radiant City, promoted in the book of the same name by the modernist artist and architect Le Corbusier. He insisted that we design mechanical, reductive environments such as traffic grids, malls, suburbs, office-tower grids, environmental green spaces—all the claptrap of modernist planners, who also see nothing wrong with factory farms feeding the factory cities. This philosophy not only contaminated urban planning but contributed to the growing pressure on the small farm. It eventually devolved into a view of food as flavoured nutrient molecules.

The Radiant City concept ignores the organic magic of people living together and treats the home, culture, and food as merely gears in a “machine for living.” Thus the boring dinners of my youth, which I soon rejected.

A half-dozen years after my first investigations into food, and the week after meeting Sharon, I invited her to one of the two surviving sushi restaurants in Vancouver during that era. The relationship nearly ended when I ordered a plate of sashimi (sliced raw tuna) and an
ikura
(salmon roe on rice in a seaweed wrap). But she fell in love with the tempura, and fortunately the restaurant served substantial whisky sours (called cherry blossoms), so she soon forgot the raw fish, and we remain together nearly thirty years later.

Although we were both raised at plain tables, over the years we have become companion adventurers in the world of food.

One of the first things we discovered was that we could resolve our expanding social debts by throwing an epic feast every couple of years and inviting our neighbours, relatives, and friends—all those whose dinners we had not reciprocated. We called these “pig parties” because we’d impale a pig on a spit and roast it whole, or sometimes we substituted a couple of lambs. The main dish made the vegans and vegetarians a little queasy, but since we provided more than enough vegetable and fruit dishes, they survived, and a few even discreetly sidled up to the carving table for a taste of crackling or tenderloin once they learned it was “happy” meat, the local term for livestock raised naturally.

If you have close to 150 people of all ages and politics wandering around stuffed with food and drink, things can go sideways very fast. And after a couple of kegs of beer the crowd gets a bit loose. At one pig party there was far too much Scotch and probably island herb smoked out in the bush, where the young rowdies wouldn’t get caught and lectured by their elders. I was fairly distorted myself, and one of the last things I remember, around three in the morning, was a large, hairy biker saying, “I’ve got thirty oysters in the shell.” We kicked up the fire in the field and roasted them in their shells. Once they popped open we forked them into a pot of melted butter, chopped garlic, and cilantro—then swallowed them whole. Only old Howard and a couple of the skateboarders hung in there with me and the biker, who announced he was known as Pigster because he used to raise pigs for a living.

Around dawn I was lying in bed with a crashing headache and what felt like a pound of congealed butter in my belly. A racket erupted below our bedroom. “That rooster sounds awful close,” Sharon muttered. Her tone indicated this was my problem. I staggered out of bed onto the walkway overlooking the main floor and realized that not only were there sleeping bodies of expired partygoers everywhere but the doors were all open and we’d forgotten to shut the coop. Gertrude the hen, being a leader and not a follower, had invited the chickens into the house. Charlie was standing atop a pile of expensive art books on the front-room coffee table, crowing his heart out while Gertie observed fondly.

I pulled on my pants and scrambled down the stairs, shooing the chickens out before they shat on the fancy books and rugs, waking a few unhappy and hungover guests. Outside I noticed Pigster crawling from under a willow tree. He strode around the house without a goodbye, tucking his shirt in, climbed on a big, black bike by the house gate, and cranked it over. It had no muffler and the roar echoed through the house. Then he revved it up and rolled down the driveway, past the field of guests who’d brought tents for the weekend, no doubt waking them all.

The bike’s thunder faded, and then, as if in a Clint Eastwood spaghetti western, it grew louder again. He drove back past the sleeping tenters and parked by the house, strode off to the willow tree, stuffed a pair of polka-dot boxer shorts into his leather jacket, and returned to the house. By then I was sitting on the front deck with a few friends. I was so wrecked I had a bottle of Maalox in one hand and a beer in the other. This time Pigster silently nodded goodbye.

He started up the bike again, and the hapless tenters got another concert as he roared by and was gone. I never did find out who he was, or who invited him to the party, but the oysters were great. I chugged back a good shot of my hair of the dog while the chickens pecked about our feet, cleaning up the spilled food from the night’s festivities.

ONE OF THE MORE
curious phenomena since the seventies is the shift in our attitude toward food in North America— the ascendency of nutritional hysterias and fad diets, the cults of exotic dishes and ethnic cuisines. Cultures generally have complex, ancient traditions of diet, yet for various historical reasons, including the modernist, mechanistic attitude to community inspired by Le Corbusier, the majority of North Americans (apart from the Québécois) have lived in ignorance and relative unconcern about what goes into their bellies. Today, overcooked meat, boiled potatoes, Southern fried chicken, and mushy veggies don’t cut it anymore, except for those whose taste buds and neural synapses have been redesigned by the artificial flavours and advertising of the fast food industry. These people—and you can see them waddling down any American street—are programmed addicts of adult-sized flavoured Pablums fortified with sugar, fat, and salt.

At the same time, food fetishism is sweeping through our society and we are discovering what only a few gourmets or world travellers once knew. Never before have people experienced such a bonanza of exotic produce. Even while thousands of tomato and cabbage varieties are disappearing, the supermarkets are displaying dragon fruit and plantains and truffles. Food shows and magazines and reviews are now ubiquitous. Dinner guests can knowledgeably discuss everything from ratatouille to the Japanese art of
kaiseki
—the ultimate combination of art and dining in which everything from the view through the window to the flower arrangement to the serving dishes is designed to express the totality of the food and the theme of the meal.