Subsistance farming can be so romantic
August 30, 2005
… if you only have to do it for a week. The long and short of it is that whilst living in the yurt, Lad and I didn’t end up doing a whole heq of a lot of cooking, preferring instead to eat what fell into our mouths, right out of the hands that fed us. In the Occitanian summer that means raspberries, and yes, lots of leafy greens.
After the buzz of the new and the raw wore off, we did eventually develop a hunquering for heated food. Turns out that like most lads, mine knows how to BBQ, and is thankfully not averse to grilling a radish (or an ear of corn). We BBQ’d inside the yurt because the mercury did actually drop below 22°c at one point and we feared we might get the wrong kind of shivers.
Our favourite dish was a sorrel omelette prepared with Brillat-Savarin creamy cheese. Now I, in all my decades have never actually heard of a guy liking sorrel, or at least one willing to take it full on and fake it for an entire week. So for the time being, this spells blessing-counting time.
And oh how we turned eating my garden’s first tomato into a wondrous ritual. Amen.
images from l to r: Lad eating from the hand that feeds him, domestic work-related gender issues au plein air, leafy green grower talks to leafy green eater about soil tillability (although clearly, Monsieur C. is tucking into more than just leafy greens!)
As devoted readers have already noticed, the farmer’s market produce comes from the acre next to mine, so we didn’t shun non-leafy greens from our diet. I even started to realise that the reason my lettuce tastes the same as Mr. C’s is that it comes from the self-same dirt.
debra at 11:44 | | post to del.icio.us
