A Bag of Onions

Posted by Holly at August 29th, 2008

In New York, a thousand years ago, when I officially worked for Jim, Friday nights meant getting off the elevator down from our 8th floor office at the second floor bar at Sardi’s. <"http://www.sardis.com"> Even though most nights there would be a group of us who stopped off for a drink on the way home, Friday nights meant most of us – no, all of us – observed the ritual of Friday nights at the bar. For the first hour and a half or so, there’d be us, the regulars, and the pre-theatre crowd in from the boroughs, the burbs or just up or down town. They had to weave their way in and out of our clusters at either end of the bar, waiting for the moment when we were able to spread out and settle in for the evening. In chummy fashion, we would chit chat over the trays of crackers and smoky tasting yellow cheese in crocks that Vincent had the bartenders and waiters pass around with drinks….probably to do his part for Broadway and help the theatre-goers absorb some of the alcohol they were drinking. It’s not easy throwing down a couple of Martinis or Manhattans in short order and then heading to see a big musical. Big noise can put you to sleep if you system is overloaded to begin with.

We had some good times there. Our crowd ruled, to say the least. We were smart and funny, raucous and elite in the finest sense of those words. There wasn’t much we wouldn’t do. Once, during the world series, our friend Frankie Brady, a lifelong/diehard Yankee fan, left the bar to go down to the corner hotdog man, buy some dogs with everything, bring ‘em back to the bar, take off his shirt and sit on the drink rail on the wall opposite the actual bar. I joined him as we watched the game and cheered from our “bleacher” seats.

A bunch of us figured out how to make phone calls from the maitre d station at the top of the stairs and charge them to Vincent. Friends on vacation in other countries would routinely get phone calls from us and we’d pass the phone around to everyone in the group, taking our time to share whatever local news and gossip there was.

Once – one of my more stellar moments – Joe, the bartender, let me get behind the bar and play at making drinks. If any of us ever needed to cash a check – this was before there was an ATM on every corner – the policy at Sardi’s was liberal for us. This particular night, when I was playing bartender, our friend Steve Martin (not the actor Steve Martin but, rather, the real Steve Martin) showed up and wanted to cash a hundred dollar check, which he handed to me. With my new power, I instantly denied him the cash and, to seal the deal, ripped up his check. Turned out it was his only check and he was furious with me, to say the least, but not so furious that he didn’t laugh.

Another night, when we knew the same Steve Martin had just shaved off his white beard (that, incidentally, made him look a lot like Kenny Rogers) I went to Eve’s Costumes and got as many white beards as there were in stock. We all had them on when Steve walked in. For the duration of the evening, he never said one word … and neither did we.

To this day, there is an annual reunion of our crowd on the first Friday of October and it is always at the second floor bar at Sardi’s. Fridays are sacred.

So I have to laugh at myself and how I spent this Friday, albeit an afternoon, but cozying up to a bar. Not an alcohol bar but an oyster bar. The local ag business, Wilco, <"http://www.wilco.coop"> that serves all the farmers around here does an annual oyster lunch for all of us who do business with them throughout the year. This is my third one. The business changed hands a couple of years ago and around late spring I started to worry that they would eliminate the oyster feed as a cost-saving measure. I started asking Jim around late spring if he thought they were going to do it again. He probably got tired of my agita over this. When the lime-green flyer invite arrived in the mail a couple of weeks ago, I was really excited. I mentioned it at least once a day to make sure it got onto the calendar – sort of reliable – and into our memory banks – slightly more reliable. My taste buds were up, which was the most reliable of all reminders.

The first year, I put on nice slacks and good shoes. The second year I put on clean slacks and less nice shoes. Today I wore the jeans I had been on my knees in while weeding the garden. I did change my shoes from the black crocs to the sandal style. This year they didn’t barbecue the oysters because, they said, it takes too long for them to pop open. They steamed them in a bunch of good spices. We had to shuck them open, which only makes my mouth water even more as I hurry along trying to find the sweet spot that unhinges them. I stopped counting at the first dozen.

The bartenders – and most of the folks there, for that matter – tend to be less on the trim, city elegant side of the fence and more the portly type needing strong, red braces to hold up their work clothes. No designer jeans here. In fact, after something I saw in the NYTimes last week showing “Distressed Jeans” for $395, I’m thinking of putting up a pair of Jim’s on ebay and describing them as “naturally distressed from the blooming hill vineyard label”. This is a dry event, too, so there were no Manhattans, scotch and sodas or even beers. In addition to the oysters – although I don’t really understand why anyone needs anything other than oysters and, maybe, a little hot sauce – there are hot dogs (somebody forgot the buns this year), hamburgers, lettuce/tomato/onions, potato salad, beans, two kinds of chips, black olives, cut fruit and lots of cookies. Replacing the wonderful wood bar at Sardis’, the mirrors, the famous caricatures of actors and actresses, the red-leather seats of the bar stools, are long tables covered with blue plastic, rented folding chairs, and for backdrop are the big silos that hold the fertilizer for all the farmland around here. There’s a raffle, too, where you can win an owl statue to put out and scare the birds, some big clippers, wheelbarrows and chair seats shaped like a hand upside down with fingers in the air. You sit in the palm. It’s an outstanding event.

This is my Friday bar trip now and I lament only that it happens only once a year.

Posted by Holly at August 7th, 2008

I feel I should spend a few moments talking about peas, those sweet green pearls in their own environmentally safe wrapper and the current stars of our garden. I always heard you were supposed to plant your peas by St. Patrick’s Day but that was when I lived on the east coast and barely thought about planting more than a pot full of anything, let alone anything edible. I planted peas once on the windowsill of my kitchen on East 80th Street. It was a ninth floor window facing south and also was catty cornered to the dining room window so I could actually monitor the progress of my pea vine when it began to wind around the corner. In two years I doubled the yield of my crop from one pod to two. I guess it doesn’t really count as a crop.

I guessed that invoking St. Patty’s Day as pea-planting day had something to do with weather conditions. Now, on the west coast, I rely more on my farmer husband to stick his finger in the air and tell me when anything should be done. Our peas went in considerably after St. P’s Day. In fact, this year, the whole garden went in way later than intended because, through May and some of June it was COLD here. So it was iffy, in my mind anyway, whether we would eat anything locally grown.

Ah, nature. Everything, pretty much, took hold and even seems to have doubled its intention and is growing with gusto. Once the peas started to appear as little elves with their happy, plump leaf-arms waving about an inch above the ground, I got busy duplicating a trellis we had seen at the home of a friend. She wove twigs around sticks in the ground so the pea vines would have something pretty to climb upon. I loved it and immediately realized I could use our Curly Willow twigs that had once boasted lovely green leaves and out of which I had formed an arch in the opening between the living room and the hallway. I had to get rid of some them when it turned out they had aphids and the aphids were pooping (or spitting or reproducing) on top of the books in the shelves on the living room side. The now denuded twigs were still sitting outside the house with no apparent job so I conscripted them for the trellis, using bamboo stakes. It looked great Jim pointed out that the friend had only a few pea plants whereas we had a lot so my twigs wouldn’t go so far. He added red twine, the kind he uses in the big baler that automatically scoops, gathers, ties and spits out hay into rectangular packages in the field. Some of the pea vines are now shoulder high so it’s a good thing they have more than my six inches of twigs.

Here’s the thing about picking peas. I go out there and see that velvety green with little white flowers emerging from little caps, little peaky, elfin hats, lots of lacy tendrils and a beautiful curtain of green leaves in perfect shades of green and I think, hmmmm, not many peas today. Then I spy a pod, hanging like a dangling earring and I think, ahhhh, at least one or two will show up. Then, suddenly, there are four hanging there. Every day I wonder how I can look at a spot, think there aren’t any peas and all at once discover there are many. They hide. Maybe they have stage fright for the first few moments before they go on stage.

Sometimes I feel like a giant in the pea patch. Even though the vines reach my shoulders, they are delicate plants so, bending between the rows to see the pods on the bottom, or reaching over the trellis, I take care to be gentle with them.

Peas are old fruits (truth-be-told, they fit the description of fruit, not vegetable). I have learned that they used to be called pease and date way back, maybe to the Bronze Age and some have even been dug up on the site of Troy. I have been trying to figure out the rhyme Pease Porridge Hot and I don’t think I would want to eat pea porridge. Pea soup is another story. In the days when my late husband was so sick, when we were living in a magical place on the Hudson River and still close to my roots, all of my family still lived in New York. Thank heaven for them because I could not have managed those difficult and sad months at the end of Don’s life without them. My mother and father and grandmother were there every weekend and my mother stayed through most weeks. My grandmother’s family role, among others, was out nutritional nurturing and she cooked restorative meals for all of us as we kept our vigil. I think we all knew, but didn’t want to believe, that the restorative nature of the food would hold the family together but couldn’t save Don. Still, she made his favorites and mine, pea soup a constant and welcome meal. It was what I ate the night of the day he died and I can still look down into that bowl and remember how comforting that particular shade of green was to my aching eyes; how the soup felt in my mouth, so warm and thick with the remnants of solids that dissolved on my tongue in a very pleasant way; and, that something could still taste good to me. It was almost as if that lovingly prepared and served bowl of soup let me know I still had a future – although I didn’t even want one at that moment.

It’s been years since I tasted that pea soup of my grandmother’s – or anyone’s that can come close – and yet, here I am in my future and excited when I make my way through the rows of peas looking forward to their beautiful appearance, albeit brief, on our table, grateful for their promise fulfilled.

Posted by Holly at August 5th, 2008

It is hot. The cats are barely able to move around and I would so love to help them take off their furry coats for a while. It is 95*, as I am told by the flashing temperature icon on my computer.

Jim is up in the pasture baling the hay he cut and raked in the last two days. Yesterday he came in looking like a rust man, covered by the good red dust of the fields. He always says he’s whipped when he comes in but he’s usually pretty sociable after he’s washed away the dust and revived under the shower. At least he is as long as I can get a few calories into him as soon as he does come in. He approaches snarky otherwise. It makes me remember how I was often reminded that I needed a boost when my own blood sugar dropped – “Holly,” my late husband would say, “you need to eat an apple.”

We’re blessed here with apples, peaches, plums (although only a handful this year), wild berries and, of course, all those gorgeous vegetables growing their mopsy heads in the garden. We added a few things this year: eggplant, Brussels sprouts, leeks, spinach; oh, and jack-o-lantern pumpkins that are already the size of basketballs. Those are in addition to cucumbers, squash, peas, beans, lettuce and our soul satisfying tomatoes. All those babies are out there stoking up the sunshine and daily watering. We’ve been eating out of the garden for a few weeks, now; but, I have to say, it still surprises me that it takes so long into the summer before you get anything out of the garden up here in Oregon. Oh, well, never mind. It’s all delicious when it’s ready and we’ll have lots of food we put away for the damp, grey fall and winter.

I can’t even begin to tell you what the grapes look like. It’s a jungle out there! They are, in Jim’s word, vigorous. The trellises are heavy with the weight of the vines. They all seem to have thicker vines this year than last and the leaves are big and green. The grape bunches are almost hidden in the abundance of leaves. The vineyard is like painting a bridge: as soon as you get finished at one end, it’s time to start over again. The only difference here is that it’s usually a different task you start in on. It’s daunting to me and I only occasionally help out. I can’t imagine how Jim gets out there every day to separate vines that are growing the way they want and not the way he wants, disengage their strong and resilient tendrils that seem to have personalities and mean to thwart the best intentions; how he prunes and ties and coaxes the best out of his grapes. I can’t imagine how he is going to do twice as much once the new vineyard takes hold.

I think he’s happy, though. I think he regards the heat and the sweat, the swaying energy of the tractor under him as his tools and his badges of the work he does, which is partly to feed the horses, feed us and make wonderful wine; but, also partly to protect the land and use its resources well, without depleting it. We were working on the wording for a description of our vineyard today to be used in regional marketing and he questioned a phrase I had – simple and elegant – asking if that wasn’t contradictory. I tried to explain that I thought elegance was clean, pure and simple in the sense of uncluttered, unfettered. It is exactly how I see this farming life. I see in the cycles of the year the direct results of almost every action. Here there is no time for office politics or jockeying for positions of power; here the earth determines the power and we are allowed to turn its bounty into things that nurture the body and soul.

To me, it doesn’t get much more elegant, nor is anything else as simple as that.