rode hard road food

Driving U.S. Route 81 to Virginia and then to western North Carolina is, for us Vermonters, a little like wood nymphs slipping out of their forest homes to do battle with dinosaurs or giants in an alienating landscape.  We both need a truly imperative destination or else we’d just stay at home nestled comfortably among our tree roots.

But since U.S. 81 divides us from our daughter and other friends, warmer latitudes, and the south – the south as culture and landscape and, inevitably, food – the battle must be waged periodically.

Now look what I just wrote there – that U.S. 81 divides us instead of unites us as is no doubt the proper role of any highway worth its salt. But I’ll stick with my original description, for it is a veritable river of humongous trucks, and not a smooth one at that – up and down it goes – straight up and then straight down again, again and again, over destroyed mountains. Harrisburg. Scranton. Dead deer and concrete fields. Acres of Wal-Mart – distribution centers, headquarters, and trucks. With our wants and trivial pleasures we turn swathes of our earth gray and unproductive.

We come from Vermont, though, where the stresses we put on the earth are comparatively benign, and where WE certainly would not allow acres of our soil to be cemented over for junk storage. Would we? How about Williston? Or, closer to home, Rutland Town?

The first day we drove ten hours so that we would not have to stop until we got to our friend Dana’s kitchen in the serene rolling mountains of Virginia just north of Charlottesville. I’ve been enjoying cooking in that kitchen whenever I get a chance since it was created, maybe 20 years ago. Its centerpiece is an – oh – five foot long well-used butcher block work space, none too level,  and its many windows look out over beautiful productive gardens.

As we’d left Vermont that morning it occurred to me that Virginians didn’t, probably, grow rhubarb, so I’d picked enough for a pie. The next morning I wandered into that kitchen in my pajamas and got my first cup of coffee and started making a rhubarb pie, while partaking of conversation with Leo, who’d already been out birding, and Dana, who was making breakfast. I love that kind of cooking, in a kitchen that accommodates more than one cook and function.

A couple of soothing, recouping days in Virginia and it was off to Asheville, a mere seven hours more of playing games of wit – certainly not of force – with the mega- and mono-liths, the eighteen or twenty-eight wheelers: Pass ‘em on the way up, get out of their way on the way down.
 
But once there, with my magnificent daughter Zoe and her partner Jesse, again we ate from a beautiful garden, under a canopy set up right beside it, accompanied by the chickens clucking in their sing-song soothing way from their chicken tractor, surrounded by the sharp spires of Western North Carolina mountains. We ate eggs sneaked from under those chickens everyday, and those eggs sat right up in the frying pan as though the whites had been molded around that bright plump yolk.


And I got the honor of pulling the first head of garlic out of Jesse’s garden, and it was a thing of beauty.

Zoe was graduating from nursing school, and so there were lots of people and parties and eating. There was the pinning ceremony, a dinner before it at the Tupelo Honey Café, and a couple of gigs that Zoe and Jesse played, and then, all too soon, time to set out on the return trip.


We were making good time until, in the valley between two verticals, the traffic slowed and stopped. There had been a clash of titans on some distant destroyed mountain top, and we peons were creeping through sixteen miles of back-up and incipient pile-up – who knew which of those many smoldering brakes would reach its breaking point and when.

After a couple of hours of this we crept up upon an exit, and Dana – now see, I’m not really a Luddite – was able to guide us over a little road, all hilly and curvy, without a center line or even a name, for about twenty miles, around the pileup. Thank god for cell phones and computers!

We made it to her house only two hours late. She fed us homemade spring rolls, fresh asparagus from her garden, cous cous, and lamb shanks. I’m not sure if I’ll ever have more delicious food. Then I sliced fresh strawberries from her bushes over the ice cream we’d made on our previous visit, and sprinkled it with balsamic vinegar and maple sugar. Not too shabby for road food, eh?

***

Over the course of my travels I missed the first two outdoor Farmers’ Markets in Depot Park in Rutland. I know – this is such an unlikely happening that some of you could not be blamed for thinking I must’ve met my maker. But all is well, and the markets were extensively covered, I found, when I went back over two weeks worth of Heralds. I was especially  pleased to note the new Market Watch column written  by Kris Smith of RAFFL. Welcome, Kris.

Kara is helped by her mom at this market

So this third market was especially colorful and festive to me. As well as greeting all the tried and true friends, I was pleased to see at least two new produce vendors. Ryan Wood-Beauchamp and Kara Fitzgerald from the poetically named Evening Song Farm in Cuttingsville have a burgeoning CSA business as well as attractive booths at several markets. They got off on the right foot with me because they had beautiful broccoli raab for sale!

Then there was Meadow Squier and Josh Brill manning their Breezy Meadows Orchard and Nursery from Tinmouth. They had something I’d never seen before – a snappy pretty little curly cress that is not a watercress. And it’s Yum. We knew Meadow when she worked at the Co-op and also at RAFFL.  Welcome and good luck to all!

It was really nice to see two older businesses with new booths at the Market. I was thrilled to see a Crowley Cheese presence – its extra-sharp is one of my favorite Colbys in the world, and the price was extremely reasonable.  And Jia Indian Restaurant from the service station on West Street was there with some delightful potato and pea samosas, amongst other delicacies.

Finally, I just want to remind you that the celery-like herb, Lovage, is such that no-one should be without and it’s available in the pot at Second Nature Herbs at the Market.

Some of my "finds" at the 3rd outdoor Rutland Farmers' Market are fiddleheads from Radical Roots; a tiny can of smoked jalapenos (chipotles) from Alchemy gardens; a pot of lovage from Second Nature Herbs; salad turnips from Evening Song; a new white balsamic from Gordon's Pond; Broccoli raab from Evening Song; Blue Ledge Farm's plain chevre; half a wheel of Crowley's extra sharp colby; and a bitey little cress from Breezy Meadows.

***

And, this just in::: Happy Seventieth Birthday to Bob Dylan, who said, when we were young and pretty and in good voice and thought we knew everything, 

“Well you know something is  happening/ but you don’t know what it is/ do you, Mr. Jones.”

That's truer, I'm sure Bobby would agree, now than it ever was before.

my lunches at Sissy’s

It’s a pretty 15 minute drive for me up 140 from Wallingford to Middletown Springs and lunch, and it’s one I’ve made every Wednesday, it seems, throughout July.

Because, although Sissy’s Kitchen serves breakfast, lunch and dinner Wednesdays through Sundays, I’ve only been there for lunch; and I want you to know that even though Sissy’s is a take-out place you can usually find a place to perch – either at a table on the front porch or in the sylvan back gardens – for long enough to eat her beautiful food, much of which she sources locally and all of which she prepares with the care and expertise that her long career in food – much of it as chef/owner of the Dorset Inn – affords her.

Her website bills her place as a retail outlet, and it is full of charming touches – like the twig and small lights chandelier on the porch ceiling; selected crafts of  pottery and wooden bowls and cutting boards, and her own bottled sauces and salsas as well as a selection of cookies, including the best knife-thin gingersnaps I believe I’ve ever had the pleasure of biting into (at 25¢ apiece) and other baked goods. Yum. Yum.

For my first lunch I met Elsie Gilmore there because I wanted to meet this young woman who was so kind and effective in helping my son Spencer a few years ago when he suffered the devastating loss of his house to fire. Since she divides her time between Sarasota and Middletown Springs, I had my chance. I wanted to thank her and I wanted to know what she was about.

She’s about Green – ways to lessen your carbon footprint, which you can see on her website.  I’ve watched her do that herself on Facebook, where she downgraded from car to scooter to bus to shank’s mare back up to scooter. And she’s about reaching out to women, helping them to connect and to succeed in business.

I had the Ploughman’s Lunch – a pork pie enclosed in pastry, served with potato salad, red onion jam, Consider Bardwell Dorset Cheese, hard boiled egg, sliced tomato, and sliced apple $8.95. Even though I’d fasted all morning the sight of that plate made my eyes pop and I was sure I’d be having it for supper, too. But No! Bite by tasty bite the plate was cleared, as Elsie devoured her Prosciutto, Pesto and Fresh Mozzarella cheese on Cibatta Roll. We sat at a table on the porch, and then, being nosy, scouted the gorgeous gardens out back where Sissy grows much of the produce she uses in the kitchen, with the help, it must be admitted, of the amazing gardener Paul Morgan.

***

Next week I had lunch with Angela Miller, the owner, with her husband, Russell Glover, of Consider Bardwell Farm in West Pawlet. I hadn’t seen Angela since last fall when we met for dinner at the Victorian Inn at Wallingford.  I’d first met her at the Consider Bardwell booth at that frigid first year festival, in 2007, of the Winter Farmers’ Market. She struck me then as a pretty blond woman, petite, retiring but warm, almost shy but forthright. We talked about cheese and I sampled. Those were some wonderful cheeses. In 2008, when finally I drove to West Pawlet and saw the gorgeous (300 acre, red brick) farm and talked to Peter Dixon, the cheese maker, I couldn’t quite square the whole thing in my head. I knew Angela had her own literary agency in New York City. Driving from NYC to W Pawlet and back each week? Melding or leaping from one end of life’s spectrum to the other? THIS woman? It didn’t compute. And, really? It still doesn’t.

But sometime this summer I picked up her new book, Hay Fever, from the Consider Bardwell stand (which she no longer womans) and it had lain on my coffee table since then. You know how it is that sometimes you’re reluctant to read something that a friend has written? What if you don’t like it? What if you find it boring, or the voice is off, or... I don’t know! Anyway, one night, when I had first begun reading The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, I picked up Angela’s book as I was making myself a supper sandwich, flipped it open on the kitchen counter and began to scan through it, like you do with a new book sometimes, trying to get the lay of the land.

It. Was. Fascinating! Angela’s voice came right off the page and into my ear. I flipped it shut, took my sandwich and glass of wine out to the porch and started at the beginning, leaving Lisbeth Salander to languish pour le nonce.

It was all there. No punches pulled. Names named. An honest –  heartrending sometimes; joyful, too – account of real life on a real farm. But this is not your ordinary farm, nor is Angela – or her husband, (whom she calls Rust) – your ordinary farmer. Rust has his own architectural practice in NYC, too. Both are very successful. Thus – as a rule – she usually drives from NYC to West Pawlet on Thursday night and back again to the city on Monday. By 8AM next morning she’s sitting in the Chinese beauty salon in her office building getting redone for her city look – nails, hair, makeup – and  taking calls from “my authors” on her cell, “they don’t know I’m not in my office.” The goats take care of her country remake every Thursday evening with their nuzzling and kisses. Angela loves her goats and they love her!

I got up and emailed Angela, "You never even told me you were writing a book, and it’s terrific!"

She wrote back, "That’s probably because we don’t see each other enough. Let’s have lunch."

That next Wednesday, Angela pulled up in a utilitarian van with no air conditioning. It was sweltering. She was wearing black denim jeans and a white muslin top that she worried she would drip pulled-pork sauce on (BBQ Pulled Pork on Cibatta Roll with cole slaw  5.95). I had what Elsie had had the week before, (Prosciutto, Pesto and Fresh Mozzarella cheese on Cibatta Roll 5.95). We strolled out back to the gardens and found a shady table. And talked. For a leisurely but intense couple of hours.

We talked about her voice. She told me how she had written notes through that 2008-2009 year and given them to her co-writer (the title page says By Angela Miller with Ralph Gardner, Jr), and he had captured her voice and put the book together. Later I googled him and from what I found he doesn’t hesitate to be hard-hitting. He’s written extensively for magazines and newspapers – I got quite caught up in his compelling account of the Tony Marshall/ Brooke Astor affair from last year; one in which I hadn’t the slightest interest at the time  – and is Senior Special Writer for The Wall Street Journal. Hay Fever is his first book.

We talked a lot about the mechanics of raising goats, milking them, and making internationally-acclaimed cheese out of the milk. “Most cheese makers don’t milk their own goats,” she told me. “It’s like having two full time jobs – three, if you count my agency.” (Oh, now why would we count your agency??!!)

She told me she slept in her car during kidding season, which is March and April, during which she tries to stay at the farm most of the time. “The house is too far away from the kidding barn,” she said. “I couldn’t have someone running to the house to get me every time I was needed.”

We talked of the satisfaction she gets from the mix of all the farm workers from all strata of life – from 18 year old tough-talking pure Vermonters to the Texan who travels up to W Pawlet for every kidding season. When she first went to New York City (from her mother’s organic farm in Pennsylvania), she found herself dating a publisher and their whole social scene was literary. That was when she determined she wanted publishing to be her career, not her life.

We talked a lot about the dilemma of when to separate the kids from their mothers. We talked about the tragedy of male kids, most of whom are destined to be slaughtered.

We returned again and again to a vituperative letter to the Manchester Journal that had taken Angela to task for the euthanization of a kid that the writer took totally out of context. Angela was distraught at the letter as she had been distraught at the necessary euthanization.

A neighboring farmer had stopped her at the general store. “He said, ‘we farmers know that life on the farm holds its tragedies. But we don’t write about it.’ I think I should have pulled my punches on that one,” she told me with regret.

But that’s one of the strengths of Hay Fever – she pulls no punches!

We got up to walk through the gardens. I had one last question. Angela’s in her early sixties, but doesn’t look it. And to my earnest question, “How long can you continue to do this?” there was, uncharacteristically, no answer.

***

The following Wednesday, I took my visiting friend from Virginia – Dana Squire – to Sissy’s for lunch. I had the Seafood Salad Roll (Shrimp and crabmeat tossed with celery and mayonnaise) 7.25, while Dana had a wrap (Fresh Mozzarella, zucchini, yellow squash, spinach, roasted red pepper, black olive tapenade, sun dried tomato puree 5.95). We sat in the back and talked, and then inspected the gardens. Dana has gorgeous gardens of her own but she was entranced. 

This week, my daughter will be visiting. I wouldn’t be surprised if  Sissy didn’t see me again! Maybe we’ll all go for dinner this time.Maybe I’ll see you there! Maybe you’ll be reading Hay Fever!

originally published in the Rutland Herald 08/03/10