Dusting off my Overalls

Winter schminter. Cold, harsh and unwavering. Sobering, heartbreaking and crippling. In just three days, Spring gardening begins for me. I've spent months evaluating past gardens, and calculating what this year's plantings will call for in terms of seed, soil, irrigation, succession and design. I'm feeling ambitious this year, planting enough vegetables to share far more than I could possibly keep or even preserve. I plan to split the excess with close neighbors, donate some to hungry folk, and if there is still some left over, perhaps we'll have a little curbside farmstand. I remain cautious. Mark, however, wanted to lease 16 acres for me this year. What can I say? He loves "Katie's Tomaties" and gets just as excited about the garden as I do. Though I was flattered, I declined this time around.

Gardens hold such promise, and each year, I approach the process not only with a new set of sketches and skill, but with a new set of desired outcomes. This year's mindset has everything to to with prudence and abundance. In a world ridden with crises of all kinds, I find solace in the power of kinship, stewardship and community. And there is great hope in knowing that I am not the only one.

This week, I was reading an essay by Wendell Berry, a self proclaimed mad farmer/writer whom I have held in great esteem ever since reading the words, "Eating is an agricultural act." Furthermore, anyone who can so eloquently make a case for the human and environmental condition by way of Shakespeare and Blake is good in my book. In Life is a Miracle: an Essay Against Modern Superstition, Berry writes, "the standards of our behavior must be derived, not from the capability of technology, but from the nature of places and communities. We must shift the priority from production to local adaptation, from innovation to familiarity, from power to elegance, from costliness to thrift. We must learn to think about propriety in scale and design, as determined by human and ecological health. By such changes we might again make our work an answer to despair" (12).

I spend a great deal of time considering the standards on which my behavior rests, and with every pitch of my fork I am reminded of the world in which I am participating. When I consider this with any seriousness, I get angry and I pitch harder. But after several turns (and fits of rage), all of that pitching and turning results in rich compost. It will get spread around, feed the soil and eventually become food to be shared with my community and kin. On Friday morning, when my pepper seeds are sown, I'm invoking an end to the Winter of our discontent.

What, will these hands ne'er be clean?

A couple of weeks ago, Grammy sent me her hand-cranked pasta machine. Though it is time consuming, I've been looking for any old excuse and expanse of hours to play around with pasta dough. Valentines Day, a centuries old celebration of Catholic martyrs and all things pink and red, seemed the perfect occasion for a kitchen massacre--Beet Red Pasta.

Some folks don't like to cook with beets, and it is easy to understand why. The vibrant red hue that makes a beet so delectable is the very same substance that will stain a cook's clothes, hands, countertops and pans. For every minute that you spend preparing a red beet, you might spend another scrubbing out bright pink spots. I often stick to preparing Golden or Candy varieties when it is time for beets. But for coloring pasta, only true red would do.

I began by making a beet puree. Putting a small saucepan on the stove to boil, I trimmed the remnants of the beet greens from the roots and gave them a good hard scrub. Then I tossed the beets in for a 10 minute boil, then carefully without scalding anybody, slipped them from their skins and cut them in half. (You can also roast them in the oven, but I wanted to reserve the red cooking liquid for boiling my pasta later on.) From there, I was just a teaspoon of olive oil and a few pulses of the food processor away from my puree, which I set aside to cool while I began making my dough.

When I make pasta (I've done this twice, so this sounds somewhat disingenuous), I start with a big bowl in which I mix together 3 cups of Unbleached All Purpose Flour and 3/4 teaspoon of Salt. Then I make a well in the center of the Flour, crack in three whole Eggs and pour in 3 tablespoons of my best tasting Olive Oil. I was surprised to learn that you don't need fancy flour to get started making pasta. You do need to make sure that your bare bones components taste good, because as you'll see, there's not much but olive oil and salt to fall back on in terms of flavor.

THIS is where things got a little "Double, double toil and trouble." It didn't help that I'd watched Polanski's film rendering of The Scottish Play just one week before, but seriously, if I wanted Bloody Valentine, I got it. I tossed three tablespoons of the beet puree among the eggs in my flour well, and as I had done before, beat the ingredients in the well together with my bare hands. Seriously, the whole process should have ended with a newt's eyeball or by my spitting in the goo and smearing it on some unfortunate Thane. Luckily for my husband, it didn't.

Working from the inside of the bowl, I incorporated the flour mix with my hands until I had sort of a shaggy ball of dough. At this point, I worked in more beet puree, one tablespoon at a time (using 2-3 max), until the dough came together. Then I turned the ball onto a floured surface, kneaded the dough for ten minutes, and then left the ball to rest beneath the big bowl while I made a short-lived attempt to clean up after the carnage. The beet juice spots multiplied before my eyes, so for sake of my sanity, I gave up on mopping and strapped the pasta machine to the countertop.

Now as I've mentioned, I'm pretty new to using a pasta machine. It is a lot like a play-doh fun factory--one that is actually intended for edible ends. I have yet to use the cutting attachments without gumming up the machine royally, so for now I stick to just using the rollers and cutting my sheets by hand into something like Fettucine or Pappardelle. This way, the noodles look fair enough and have that nice handcrafted thing going. Because I was going to cook my pasta right away, and because I didn't want my house to look any more like Dunsinane than it already did, I opted out of hanging the noodles to dry. I just tossed the cut pieces in a touch of flour and laid them onto a sheet of wax paper. I could have spread them flat or made nests I suppose.

Next, I put my reserved beet water into a large stockpot, topping the pot off with water from the tap. I added plenty of salt to the pot, and brought the water to a boil. Meanwhile, I decided to roast up some Chioggia "Candy" Beets, to have on the side. (I promised my husband that I wouldn't make him eat beets for a while.)

With the Chioggias in the oven, I made my sauce for the pasta. Many folks like to serve a cream sauce with their beet pastas. I opted to make spicy sauce using the leafy beet tops, diced tomatoes, garlic, onion, crushed red pepper and a touch of vermouth. I threw in what was left of the beet puree for good measure, and I ended up with a sauce that would make Technicolor nervous.

Once my red water came to a rolling boil, I raked through the noodles to unstick them a bit, and dropped them into the water to boil for 6 minutes. I knew from what I read that the pasta color was going to fade upon boiling from magenta to something more along the lines of, say, salmon. *Sniff* What came out of the pot actually had a variegated quality--marbled like strips of bacon. It seemed unnatural to say the very least, like purple ketchup or blue raspberry. But every bit of color, from the stripes of the candy beets to the red ribs of the greens, came from one vegetable. (Oh, sure Katie, one magical, delicious vegetable.) Happy Valentines Day to mine, you and yours.