Yes, OK, I know. It’s May and you’re celebrating the opening of the Crawfordsville Farmers’ Market the very day that I’m writing these words, but up here in Michigan we lag. The forsythia, the daffodils, and the tulips have finally managed to open but where is the sun? And just why on two different days this past week have the days started out encouragingly warm and then — insult! — the temperature dropped and the wind came up? (One day the drop in temp amounted to 30+ degrees, leaving our shorts-clad arborist shivering on a garden tour in Grand Rapids.) Here in May we get “patchy frost” warnings with alarming regularity.
Spring does thrust us into a “thin place“: buckle up your metaphorical seat belts while our earthship surges through space on its wobbly axis ferrying us from one season to the next. So fragile we are and dependent on such vast forces. It seems to me a little counterbalance would be welcome. Let’s come “down to earth” as we say and look around and remember.
Soon our gardens will be subjecting us to the happy tyranny of early seasonal produce (asparagus, strawberries, herbs, farm eggs, garlic scapes). Here in the empty, spinning interim, let’s go to the kitchen and check out counter and fridge and use up some of those storage vegetables that have served us so well through the winter. I have sweet potatoes and cauliflower waiting in their calm, solid repose. Hmm. What better way to rustle up some warmth against a raw spring day than by making a curry. Once you’ve learned to make curry you’re set for life. It’s a magician’s template. With your hands, a few veg, a couple of knives, and a few spices you are capable of nearly manufacturing sunshine. Those sweet potatoes and cauliflower, like all of us living things, have “use by” and “expiration dates” so let’s get busy. It’s a win-win to start the curry conversation.
How vivid and varied our plant foods are! Look at that solid papoose of a sweet potato! It’s one of the more difficult vegetables to peel and chop up raw (I typically wield both paring and butcher knives) and yet it transforms into that unctuous orange flesh beloved by babies and Thanksgiving diners alike. Look at that dense cumulus cloud of a cauliflower! So much easier to chop and break into cloudlets. The recipe I’m using also calls for tomatoes (use Red Gold canned tomatoes when tomatoes aren’t in season), a jalapeño, peas. There we have three softer-skinned vegetables of more hues and shapes. As any toddler can tell you, this riot of color, shape, texture, and taste is a circus waiting to happen — either to play with or to eat. But wait! How in the world did all this amazing plant variety happen? What does it mean to have plants among us?
The origin story of plants sounds like a most fabulous fairytale, but is scientific fact … Once upon a time about a billion and a half years ago, an alga-like cell swallowed a cyanobacteria and with a little help from a bacterial parasite, a new form of Life emerged — and it could do something remarkable. Those new little beings began to photosynthesize! That first new cell ”took sunlight and alchemized the spare materials of its environment — water, carbon dioxide, maybe a few trace minerals — into sugar.”
Sugar! So many of us try to avoid it in excess in our food, but, readers, plants, which over their long history “have evolved and proliferated into half a million species that thrive in every ecosystem on the planet,” are the very source of sugar and we need it to live, to build us—quite literally.” Without a constant supply of plant sugar our bodies’ vital functions cease — and quickly.” We are literally made of glucose. Without it you couldn’t read these worlds nor think a single thought.
Once that knowledge is absorbed something else might dawn on us: our stunning blue-green marble of a planet (that earth ship we’re riding through space) was created by plants. Without them no animals, no humans. They make us possible because they do something marvelous that we can’t remotely aspire to — plants “eat sunlight” and in so doing make all life possible.
Zoe Schlanger’s marvelous new book that I’ve quoted from above is called “The Light Eaters.” I thank her for it and recommend it to you. Now for those of you who might think of “origin story” a bit differently, remember that The Garden of Eden came first… and so it all fits.
Back in the kitchen in that deep skillet where onions and garlic and spices have sautéed, in come the firm vegetables, and a bit later, the soft ones and more spices. Sprinkle on some leafy cilantro at the end.
Message me if you want the exact recipe but the internet is loaded with ‘em. A few minutes later, once all the colors blend and the turmeric is in, sunshine itself seems to beam up from the curry along with its unmatched fragrance.
Long goodbyes can be good. Mine with Montgomery County and Crawfordsville will never end … Wait! Was that a knock at the door? In comes our daughter, one little toddler stagger-walking beside her; another baby (a friend’s) on her chest. Alix has come to help with a bit of DIY house stuff. Guess what’s for lunch? The babies loved it.
See you at the Market some Saturday morning soon. When you come to Pike Street on Saturday mornings between 8 a.m. and noon, be sure to bring along a bag to take home some converted sunshine.
Dr. Helen Hudson, a former Crawfordsville resident, contributes her column Real Food.
