Quail. Corn. Sharp.

Travel

21 Aug

Everything outside has become sharp, dry, scratchy, stinging. The Yellowjacket populations boom, poison oak and mosquitos attack our ankles, thistles raise up their spiky flower heads and blackberry brambles take hold. Dry clouds of dust herald approaching cars on the drive and the sky is often yellowed with distant wildfire smoke. This is time to clean up. Rain is about to wash down the dusty, brittle, worn-out summer world.

The raucous, gorgeous party of Leo winds down. A faint whisper of chill at dusk makes me put on socks for the first time in months. My feet are dry, heels cracking, ankles scratched, toes dirty from trips to the garden in sandals. It’s as if I’ve been absent from my feet while my heart and head got on with the whirl of summer. Virgo invites us back down and inside for a wash and a bit of maintenance. That ‘back to school’ feeling is not just for kids. I start to want to reorganize and restock. Make sure my tomatoes are lined up in ‘ripeness order’; ready to get cooked down or frozen for winter meals. There’s regret and contentment all at once. “How did it go so quick?” And “thank goodness it’s over!”

The fruit gets sweeter now— but also more complex in flavor. Corn and peaches, soon plums and grapes. Tomatoes abound. Both tomatoes and grapes have sugars and other chemical components that respond to the dynamics of temperatures in the day. I notice the tomatoes sweeten with the cooler nights and the still hot afternoons.

I love sweet corn. Twirled in butter and salt, on the same plate with spaghetti and pesto, it is a summer meal not to be missed.

But sweet corn is just a harbinger of the field corn yet to come. Growing polenta corn (and heritage varieties of popcorn, parching corn, dent corn) represents a staple crop that is within the reach of the home gardener. And this is extraordinary! From my two beds of Dakota Black popcorn we get a few gallons of kernels, enough to share a special snack with guests in the wine tavern for the season. A little dish of Dakota Black, popped in a pan with a tight lid, then drizzled with Ras el Hanout butter is pretty exciting! (Ras el Hanout, the Moroccan spice blend, is composed of more than one hundred spices including cumin, cinnamon, ginger pepper, Indian long pepper etc).

The polenta corn is an overlooked core food. Also from one or two 25’x 3’ beds, our plants gives plentiful coarse-ground meal — so much more flavorful for being grown that year, ground to order, and from heritage seed. Here we’ve grown Cascade Ruby Gold, an Oregon-bred variety with dark red, gold and white kernels that mix in the grinder to a warm cream flecked with cranberry. We dry down the cobs after harvest, de-cob with a handheld metal ring, and grind in the hand-cranked machine anchored to a counter.

It is cooked slowly in a 4:1 ratio of water to polenta, a big pinch of salt and stirred frequently but allowing a crust to form in the pot. (After an hour or two, stir in butter and parmigiano and serve in a shallow bowl). In Friuli and other parts of Italy it is often poured out in a puddle on a wooden board and sliced when it cools.

Across the dusty drive flocks of quail drift. Their families start as little dots following the wobbly-crested parents, dashing confusedly into the bushes. Then the chicks grow and can flutter in low formation, still intent on diving into the undergrowth and gathering the tiny food there — dropped seeds, blackberry druplets — that no one else is bothering with. They are gleaners. Virgo is a time of picking out and gathering up the little things from the scratchy hulls and dried out cobs. They are worth it.