SO Good, SO Good

August 26, 2022

In advance of vacation, we can look forward to the time away as a kind of salvation from the normal life that has grown to feel wearisome, like a burden. We’ll leave our boring normal life, and experience a taste of real life, something beautiful and thrilling. We’ll rest, we’ll adventure, we’ll get good instagram photos. But when vacation ends, real life is waiting, collecting a toll for all that neglect. 

For example, the dreaded post-vacation inbox: a much-feared monster in my professional sphere. Even more deadly, for me, in an unfortunately literal sense, the post-vacation garden. We’ve spent extended time away from our DC home over the past few summers, working and living closer to family. In each case, our garden was under the supervision of a generous caretaker–so it isn’t for lack of effort that my first reaction upon returning to my garden is mortal despair. High-summer August sun creates competing problems: so much growth you can’t contain it, so much dehydration you can’t keep it alive. At least, I can’t, not from a few thousand miles away. It’s half jungle, half wasteland. What’s the point?, I’ve wondered, staring into the garden abyss. Why even try? Everything dies. 

You put so much into these plants at every stage, from nurturing the soil to staking the climbing vines. Yet one false move–a touch too much, or too little, water for a fragile seedling; a beetle biting a tender young stem at the wrong time; a stake placed at the wrong angle, piercing a root or breaking a branch; hungry whiteflies during a particularly busy workweek or a broken sprinkler during the hottest stretch in July; a bold squirrel making off with half your fattest tomatoes–and it is all for nothing, at least nothing tangible you can salvage for a meal. There are dangers at every stage; it all feels so precarious. To garden is to set one’s self up for disappointment. 

And yet, in spite of all this–my ineptitude, unwelcome garden guests, bad weather–the garden grows, at least some of it. Life wants to happen. Half my garden boxes hold tomato plants that, like Icharus, become too big for their britches, sucking up water faster than it was replenished from the supposed self-watering box below. The happy human-sized bushes I left a few weeks ago have shriveled into a collection of thin brown sticks. And yet, I still manage to collect a few pints of fruit that’s held on for dear life, ripe and sweet, more than we can eat without diverting some to the freezer or canning jars. And yet, right next door is an eggplant, loaded with heavy purple globes, and a collection of pepper plants with shiny, happy leaves and dozens of sparkling fruits. And yet, my two little strawberry marigold plants, small enough to fit in one hand when I potted them in two months ago, have expanded across the whole cutting bed, feathery foliage and constellations of blushing yellow flowers. So much life, still happening. To garden is to be constantly amazed. 

All I make time for today is harvest: in addition to the tomatoes, I pull in two eggplants, leaving ten more on the bush to grow; three cucumbers, my first of the season, hanging casually from the vine that had only blossoms when I left; several kinds of peppers, with many more to come back for; a handful of pole beans from the wall of leaves covering our back fence–a much smaller crop underway than last year, no thanks to some kind of critter’s handiwork destroying much of the foliage. But even so, life is happening. Before I left, a friend told me she saw shishito peppers selling at our farmers’ market selling $1/each, as I handed her a full gallon ziplock from our garden, with more I stuffed into my suitcase. On the west coast, I introduced my husband’s family to the pleasure of eating the blistered peppers whole, with salt and lemon. Tonight I quickly replenish my stock, leaving plenty on the vine to gather another day. I only have a few minutes to finish up out here; the evening light is waning and it is time for dinner.

August 27, 2022

But what will we eat? Coming back home to an empty-ish fridge is a strange pleasure. We used up the big things before we left, freezing applesauce and pesto, stashing some onions and oranges in the fridge, holding onto cheeses and tortillas, sauces and condiments. But it’s about as blank slate as we get. I appreciate the irony of savoring the absence of food; it’s a sign of the grotesque privilege of a life like mine that the problem is too much, not too little. I don’t want to take for granted my ready access to all kinds of good things to eat, and plenty of it. In fact, it is in part the not taking it for granted, surfacing as a compulsion to avoid food waste, that prompts relatively spare shelves to generate a tingle of delight. The emptiness is possibility, order, freedom from worrying something has gone off before I’ve had a chance to use it. Food waste–unpardonable sin in the culture I inherited–will come soon enough, but for now, I’m innocent.

Often we compensate for the just-got-home empty-ish fridge with just-got-home takeout, but tonight I’m up for the challenge of cooking. Conjuring a satisfying something-from-apparent-nothing is my cooking superpower, a game I play against myself, where I get more points for using up more random odds and ends. 

My process: pull out everything plausible, lay it on the counter, stare at it and wait for inspiration to strike. Run a search based on my first idea, scroll possibilities, hone in on a plan. Rummaging through our mostly empty fridge, I pull out the last of the passable vegetables: those onions and an orange, a couple half-filled bags of carrots, some ginger starting to mold. There’s a still-good roasted red pepper floating in a jar of brine. Somehow I’ve collected three unopened containers of cream cheese. I do a turn through the freezer and pantry, finding a few cloves of garlic, bag of old sweet potatoes, two old containers of firm tofu dated June 2021. A Google search reports back, Don’t throw out that old tofu past its expiration date! Left unopened and refrigerated, it’s good at least 3-4 months longer. Over a year later, even I can’t bring myself to cook it. Here comes the food waste. (But if wasting food is sin, the compost bin is my absolution. Microbes, have at it.)

I survey my options. . . . carrot soup? With curry? Curry paste is a long-lasting staple, always in the far reaches of the fridge. Vegetable stock too. There’s a can of coconut milk in the pantry. This could work!

The house is quiet as I settle into the familiar hum of peeling, slicing, separating usable veggie from future compost pile, resting in pale curls atop the tofu. Kids are upstairs having their version of down time, which at this point in the summer is definitely a screen. Baby is napping, husband is working. It’s just me, a quiet kitchen, a pile of not much to work with and a flash of inspiration: among my happiest places.

An hour later my daughter, now four and a big-girl, drops in to help me puree it with the immersion blender. But before she enters the kitchen she runs back upstairs, donning the rainbow unicorn apron and chef’s hat she was birthday-gifted by a beloved teacher last spring. She climbs up on the stool, wraps her hand around the blender’s handle, and stretches to reach the button. After one round of mom-assisted blending, she insists she can do it by herself. And she can. 

After we blend the soup, while it cools and rests, we pop out to the garden to pick a few more cherry tomatoes. “What is your chef name?,” I ask.  “Chef Soup,” she calls out, running ahead to the tomato plants. Just as we settle in to harvest, she loses steam and darts back into the house just as quickly. I muddle on, losing track of time per usual. 

I hear a worrisome exclamation from upstairs. Uh oh. Something’s probably broken, and now I’m caught red handed lollygagging in the garden instead of finishing dinner. I’ll be right up,” I holler, though no one’s asked. And no one responds. But a moment later, as I really truly wrap up, marching up with my bowl of tomatoes, I hear Chef Soup’s urgent, insistent voice ring out from the kitchen door, “Mom! I LOVE the soup!”

Not the emergency I was expecting.

We sit down to dinner, and she’s still gushing. “Mom, your soup is so good!” 

“I’m glad you like it,” I tell her. 

“It’s so good!” she echoes.

“Yeah, so good!” my son adds. “Did you make it with a particular method?” This from a six year old boy who loves shouting ‘booty!’

“She climbed up on the stool by herself, tasted it, and started raving about how good it was. She even came to get me and made me try it,” my husband chimes in.

I pour a few drops in the baby’s bowl; she lives on bananas and bread, craftily evading all signs of vegetable matter from any dish put before her. I don’t have high hopes. But even the baby eats up her soup and demands “mas!”

The kids eat their first serving, and their second, finishing off the soup, requesting we have it again. “So good, mom! So good!’

In advance of vacation, we can look forward to the time away as a kind of salvation from the normal life that has grown to feel wearisome, like a burden. We’ll leave our boring normal life, and experience a taste of real life, something beautiful and thrilling. We’ll rest, we’ll adventure, we’ll get good instagram photos. But what if part of what vacation does for us is not provide an escape from our boring life, but a reframing of it? The routines, rhythms and relationships that sustain us day in and day out are real life, and there’s so much there that’s beautiful, whether or not it makes it onto Instagram. 

Nearing the end of this vacation, I found myself wistfully looking forward to those routines. I recalled with fondness the friendly chit chat with fellow parents at the soccer game sidelines, my trusty banneton and baking steel I baked (only somewhat successfully) without while away, a bouquet foraged from this month’s garden blooms, peeling carrots for soup in a quiet kitchen. I remembered my garden, the dreaded half jungle, half wasteland I was coming home to–and I dreaded it, because I love it, and I want it to thrive. I wanted to be home, to tend to what I’ve cultivated. To make something from apparent nothing, again and again.

Our life isn’t perfect or glamorous but it is rich, abundant. Being away for a season gives me fresh eyes to see it, and appreciate it. If vacation is salvation from normal life grown to feel wearisome, maybe it is not because it takes me somewhere else, but because it gives me new perspective on right here. So good! So good!

Make the soup.