Not Without Its Disappointments

It's not all good health and happy talk, you know. Raising organic crops is no different from most endeavors. Disappointments appear unexpectedly, like your cousin Ted, who knocks, uninvited, on your front door, with sour breath and a sad tale that culminates in his need for a place to crash.

You may recall that at the beginning of the summer, I planted one tiny cantaloupe vine, as an experiment really, to see how it would fare. For much of the summer, the little vine grew and grew, sending out long shoots and broad green leaves. The cantaloupe's vines entwined themselves wherever possible, circling around adjacent plants. At first, only a few flowers appeared, and no real fruit developed from these blossoms. But the vine looked healthy and was visually pleasing, so I left it alone.

By early September, things changed. Dozens of delicate, white flowers developed, from which a few tiny cantaloupes began to grow. I had the audacity to hope and found that the cantaloupe was now engendering warm, smile-inducing feelings in me whenever I checked its steady progress. My giddy reaction was reminiscent of the best days of the Obama campaign, and I liked how it felt.

By the time the new flowers appeared, however, the vine had grown exponentially from its humble beginnings, taking up scads of ground and encroaching on the neighboring herbs. An intervention seemed appropriate. What kind of gardener would I be if allowed the cantaloupe to push everyone else around. So, I gingerly redirected some of its shoots toward a less crowded space in the planting bed, and inserted a tomato cage upon which they could climb. That was it. I swear.

Although I don't know when or how this occurred, my brown thumb must have inserted itself. Within 12 hours of my so-called assistance, the cantaloupe vine was a limp and lifeless corpse. Clearly, I had made a huge mistake, although I'm still not sure what I did wrong. Eventually, I removed the detritus and threw it into the green waste bin. Did I unwittingly uproot it when I redirected a few of its shoots? How delicate can a cantaloupe plant be!

This was not the summer's only disappointment. Remember the grape vines, from which I hoped to make grape jelly. Long story short, the grapes suffered from dramatically poor timing. Unfortunately, they came of age at exactly the same moment that the Station fire erupted just north of our house, the largest fire in L.A. County history. Our local air was so polluted and the temperatures were so high, that we didn't dare venture into the yard for several days. When we finally crept outside to assess the damage, ash covered everything, including the clumps of purple fruit, some of which were already drying on the vine. Since the newscasters were warning us of how damaging the ash was for the paint on our cars, ingesting traces of soot clinging to a bunch of grapes seemed imprudent, at best. I eventually clipped off the entire crop of grapes and tossed the fruit into the bin, leaving my new jelly jars standing empty and idle in the pantry.

Some produce is destroyed by insects and other pests. Other times, human error brings destruction. And, occassionally, mother nature sends in a flood or a fire to devastate what we attempt to grow. Imagine if your livelihood depended on how much and how well your farm produced. It's probably a good thing that I live in the city, where fruits and vegetables are stacked neatly for sale and groceries grow on shelves.

My Gazpacho Garden

Without any real planning or conscious effort, we somehow achieved the essentials for gazpacho -- tomatoes, cucumbers, and red and yellow peppers -- in our summer garden. A Spanish soup, served well-chilled, gazpacho has to be the perfect accompaniment to the sun-baked summer days found in Granada or Seville. Given how heated things had been here of late, with fires devastating the nearby Angeles National Forest and flames close enough to see from our front windows, cold soup seemed like the solution. Raw nourishment served up in a bowl. With this thought in mind, I consulted my Williams-Sonoma Soup Cookbook and set about procuring the one or two ingredients not already in the pantry or growing just outside the kitchen door.

A few days later, when the temps reached over 100 degrees and turning on the burners seemed like a foolhardy brush with heat prostration, I turned to my gazpacho recipe instead. Whatever climate you find yourself in, I provide this recipe below, in the spirit of passing on a good thing. One caveat, however: While I'm a big fan of this soup, the males in my house are, inexplicably, not as enamoured with it. They eat it, but they don't love it. On the flip side, I've served this soup at baby showers and other events where the guests have all been women, and not a drop goes uneaten. Could this be a gender thing? Perhaps a cold vegetarian soup lacks sufficient heartiness to appeal to more manly appetites, aligning it more closely with cold salmon, cucumber sandwiches, salad nicoise, and other so-called ladies' lunch fare. No matter, whatever my guys pass up, means more for me, which translates to cold comfort-- in a good way.

Gazpacho
This soup relies on a food processor, or a good blender, at the very least.

1.5 cups of bread crumbs
1/3 to 1/2 cup of olive oil
1 cucumber, peeled, seeded and diced
1 red or yellow bell pepper, seeded and chopped
1 small red onion, chopped
4 cups of fresh tomatoes, roughly chopped
2 cups water, chilled
2 cups tomato juice, chilled
3 to 6 tbsps of red wine vinegar, depending on your taste. (Spanish vinegar is best here).
salt and pepper
Extra cucumber, onion and bell pepper for garnish

Put the bread crumbs and 1/3 cup of olive oil in the food processor. Pulse until a thick paste is formed. (If too dry, add more oil.) Reserving some of the diced cucumber, onion, and bell pepper for garnish, put the three vegetables into the food processor and combine with bread crumb mixture. Once pureed, add the tomatoes and pulse some more. Transfer the mixture to a large bowl, cover and refrigerate until well-chilled. Before serving, with a whisk, combine the pureed mixture with the cold water and tomato juice. Gently stir in salt and pepper and the vinegar. (Note: add vinegar incrementally, tasting as you go, until you arrive at a sourness level that works for you.) Serve with extra diced cucumber, onion, bell pepper, croutons, or diced hard-boiled egg.