August 08 2007, 09:02 PM Fruitful

I have spoken before about the box of produce I share with friends on a weekly basis, all good stuff from local farms. Each week the three of us have our troubles making it all disappear before the next one, but with a little focus (and a well stocked larder with the right kind of cheeses) it can be done, it can be done. We are finally moving out of lettuce season, now: how they manage to grow such stuff deep into the heart of summer is a puzzle, and I feel very much like a rabbit these days. This week the box was packed with new potatoes and chard, carrots and dill, cabbage and pole beans, squash, squash, and squash: tomatoes. There was still lettuce. My ears are beginning to twitch of their own accord, these days. All of this was compounded by the problem of travel; the other two are leaving, so I am left with the lion's share of the haul this week. For the next seven days, I think I will have to become vegetarian if only to restore sanity to the fridge.

There are things I can do. There will be a spicy curry of squash over rice, dressed with the Thai basil that sits in a vase on the table. Some of the zucchini will dance across the grater to become fritters, some will roll across the cutting board in slices and then sit in oil with garlic, to be put upon pasta: others will disappear into sweet loaves of quick bread, heavy with the basil from the garden. The roasting pan will see work with the potatoes and dill, and then again with the pole beans and whole cloves of garlic, to be turned out into a bowl with the tomatoes sliced cold and a bit of mint from the patch by the walk. The chard can go with beans from the pantry (I must soak some beans) and the cabbage may become kraut if I am brave, or soup if I am not. It is a good time of year.

We also scored a very reasonably priced flat of excellent blueberries, perhaps the last we'll see this year. Some will go into pancakes now, some into the freezer to become little marbles of summer to go into the pancakes of February. If things go as planned, I will have jars of blueberry jam to put up by Sunday. Some of them will go into yogurt, and some for just eating: like that, they are just fine.

I came home tonight to find more of the tomatoes in the side plot by the house had turned from a delicate blush to the full fire of ripeness: one of them had fallen free of the vine, and sat plump in the mulch below. It was the first tomato of the season, the first tomato of the garden, the first tomato from my efforts in this place, warm and smooth in the sun. I picked it up, brushed it off, and tried it.

There is little so good as that.