Outlasting the larder

Craving fresh produce, the author searches for sympathy among other seasonal loyalists—and finds none.

Garrison Keillor was once quoted as saying that sex is good, but not as good as fresh, sweet corn. It is precisely at this time of the year that I find myself agreeing with him and turning practically lustful over summer-grown fruit and vegetables. In fact, I could do harm to someone if they had a berry, of any kind really, in their possession, that held the sweet tang of summer in it. My lowest moments are vivid fantasies about cutting handfuls of fresh herbs or picking, slicing and salting one of my beloved heirloom tomatoes from our garden to enjoy with dinner.

The blustery season starts off well enough for me. I have plenty of potatoes, squash, apples and other storage-friendly items in the larder and happily spend the days of dipping temperatures stirring up pots of soups and stews. And I can keep up my commitment to largely local eating from the season for a good, long time in fact, but by February I am surly. My potatoes have eyes. I have a deep hatred of squash and I am longing for tender arugula. I blame it in part on my seed catalogs that arrive at this time of year with the persistence of zucchini in August. Their showy pages of vegetables ripe and hanging from their vines in wild abandon taunt me from now until the time that I can turn over the dirt in my own garden.

I thought I could find fellow obsessives in local restaurant kitchens, so I started prowling around town calling chefs who I thought might be able to empathize, especially those incorporating many local ingredients into their menus. For the most part though, I found myself alone in my longings. As it turns out, many chefs try to make the best of winter all season long. Café 128 owner Jill Wilson was kind enough to chat with me on her chef’s day off and cut me a little slack. “Nobody wants to eat turnips all winter long, myself included,” she said, but she sounded well adjusted and what I was really looking for was some angst.

To gain a little perspective on the goodness of the winter harvest, I called a man who I consider to be the doyen of local eating: Heartland’s chef and owner, Lenny Russo. This Zen master of preparing, canning and storing does what he does with what’s in season. “Quite frankly, I don’t miss anything,” he said. “I mean, do we get our best produce in the summer? Sure. Do I like to eat watermelon in the summer? Yeah. You’d have to be nuts not to like watermelon in the summer but it’s not like I’m craving watermelon in the wintertime. I work with the season and if the season is telling me to use kale and winter squash then I’m using kale and winter squash. If the season is telling me that I’m going to use spring onions and morels then I’m going to use spring onions and morels.”

I confess my own weaknesses and cop to the fact that I’m longing for watermelon and sweet corn and asparagus, but while I’m confessing, I realize that I’m really just longing for summer itself and that the very idea of that is so futile and against the kind of “be where you are” type attitude that I want to cultivate that it’s quite ridiculous to feel this way. Oddly that makes me feel just a wee bit better. Russo does confess to hoping for a good season for one item in particular. “Last year, we had a great leek season. I’ve never seen leeks like them, outside of Europe, so I’m excited about using leeks if the season is good again. But if it’s not, I’ll use something else.”

With a renewed sense of commitment, I pull some of my canned and frozen harvest from the depths of my basement storage, suck it up and plan a winter meal using some of last summer’s bounty.