Priceless

There are some things money just can’t buy.

Love. Happiness.

And a big black trash bag full of fresh mustard greens.

Love, we all know about.

Greens, not so much.

Of course, you can buy greens, but as I was blanching the towering pile of greens on my counter to freeze today, I realized I could never have bought these particular greens.

True: you can buy greens in the produce section of the grocery store. Lettuce, definitely. Kale, maybe. Collards, even. But probably not mustard greens.

You might be able to get them at natural food store, Whole Foods maybe, on a good day, or the local natural foods store. And if you’re lucky enough to have a fabulous farmer’s market like mine, you’ll be able to get them there as well. Or, you could grow them yourself But if you want a whole big black trash bag full of them, you’d have to have a lot of space in the garden.

Like Frances.

Last week, I was at the Callaway Community Cannery, a place that’s been open since 1945 for local folks in Franklin County, Va. to can their greens – along with their tomatoes, applesauce, venison, beef, you name it. I’d already been told that people there share their bounty with one another, and they share the work of preserving it. If you finish cutting up your potatoes and you’re waiting for your soup to be finished before you pack it into jars and place it in the ginormous pressure canner, you go over and help the 90-year-old gentleman who is smashing up his apples in the strainer and packing it into his jars. You swap recipes with your neighbor, and share advice about tin cans vs mason jars. You let your friend know when you’re slaughtering the pigs, and offer her a ham. I overheard all these transactions the day I visited the cannery.

Frances and her friend, Shirley, were there canning greens, and when she heard I loved greens she said, “Come with me.” Then she took me out to her car, where I saw more greens in one place than I think I’ve ever seen. There was the big black trash bag, along with those black speckled pots – enormous ones -- full of cooked greens ready to can. Frances cans a lot, and besides the greens, she’d brought chickens to can the day I saw her. She gives more than half of her canned goods away to neighbors who don’t have easy access to fresh food. She is one giving person.

In fact, when she found out I wouldn’t be able to come by and see her garden and get some fresh greens straight from the source (I’d told her I was envious of a garden that could grow that many greens) she gave some of those greens from the back of her car, stuffing a quart jar full of the cooked ones, and cramming fresh ones into a re-usable shopping bag I had in my car.

These are the sweetest, tenderest greens I’ve ever eaten. Thank you Frances.

Money can’t buy that kinda greens. And it can’t buy this kind of community.

Everything but the squeal

The first time I tried scrapple, I was sitting on a stool at the Exmore Diner on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, and I had to ask the local fellow sitting next to me what it was, exactly.

He put his coffee down, turned to me, and shook his head.

“You don’t want to know.”

But, of course, I did. So I pressed. A little.

To make a long description short, scrapple is a kind of sausage – and we know how making sausage is compared to all messy processes, including the political variety (“Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made," said the oft-quoted Otto von Bismarck.) As long as you like the outcome, you don’t want to know what goes into it.

I ordered the scrapple anyway.

It was delicious. Creamy and savory on the inside, crunchy and crispy on the outside, a bit salty. You have to fry it long enough, the cook advised, or it really is awful, mushy and unappealing and too close to what it is: the discarded scraps of the pig slaughtering process, the who-knows-what bits like ears and snouts and, I don’t know, maybe eyelids. The cook did not, of course, describe such things across the breakfast counter.

I’m not sure why there’s all this aversion to eating every part of the animal. If you can get past eating animals at all – their legs, their bellies, their butts – why would it matter if you also eat their livers and hearts and gizzards, whatever those are? I think eating “everything but the squeal” is smart. Admirable, even. Waste not, want not.

Though I do draw the line at beef tongue. Its texture is waaaaaay too close to that of my own tongue. And it’s not even dressed up with a nice name to help me forget what it is – like “tripe” for intestine, or “sweetbreads” for glands.

But mostly, I think it’s a great idea to use every part of the pig. In her book, Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Pa slaughtered a pig, took the bladder, cleaned it, blew it up like a balloon, and gave it to his girls to play with, like a ball. Laura and her sister, Mary, also put the pig tail on a stick and roasted it over the fire; they were so excited to eat it, they burned their mouths on it every time, never waiting for it to cool.

The same concept can be brought to the vegetable garden. At one point, our food co-op had an arrangement where if you hauled away a portion of the produce department discards as compost once a week, you got a 10 percent discount on your groceries. It was the best deal ever: I got great compost for my garden, I got the discount, and I got to pick through what they were tossing to find all sorts of edible food – whole red bell peppers with just a bit that had gone soft, apples with nicks and bruises that were perfect for applesauce, potatoes with blemishes. Granted, I had to root through soggy lettuce and smelly, yellowed broccoli and slimy carrots, but it was worth it.

This week, I salvaged vegetables from the garden before the weather turned seriously cold. I picked all the green tomatoes, stripped the pepper plants, and grabbed the basil for one more batch of pesto. And since I don’t love fried green tomatoes, I found a recipe for green tomato pie. Delicious.

Well, I thought so. Here’s another opinion:

Me: So, what do you think?

My honey: I think it would be better with apples.

Me: It does taste a bit like apple pie, doesn’t it?

My honey: Yeah. They both have crusts.

Two nights later, it had somehow gotten better, and we shared it with our wonderful friends whose table we always enjoy: they often serve us beef raised in their back yard, and veggies from their garden. Tonight, it was pork roast from a local farm, mustard greens we brought from another friend’s garden, and a wonderful baked combination of apples, figs, mushrooms and egg white. They also gave us some home-cured pepperoni and sausages to take home with us – complete with a description of how they were made.

You don’t want to know.

Humble pie

Being a person who works with words all day, every day, I tend to have some opinions about correct use of the English language. And, when someone makes a mistake, there’s at least a tiny part of me that raises an eyebrow and begins to feel superior. Even though I try not to. Everyone has their strengths, right? Someone may write “they’re” when they mean “their,” but they might be brilliant at crunching numbers, or manipulating all those pipes under the sink until the plumbing works again, or getting the balance of fruit and cornstarch just right so the cherry pie doesn’t run all over the place (if anyone knows this trick please call me).

Still, it’s hard to quiet the voice in my head that mentally edits a person when he or she says, “I couldn’t care less” when they really mean they could care less. And so on.

Except now, I really have to hold the judgment, even the unspoken kind. Because now I am making the same sorts of mistakes myself. 

For some reason, my fingers have been slipping on my keyboard. I type “hear” instead of “here.” This is not just spell-check gone awry. It is some subconscious mechanism that keeps making mistakes I thought I would never make, not since fifth grade. Today, my keyboarding fingers made up an entirely new word: disatisfication. It reminds me of “comfterful,” a word my cousin Susan made up. Comfterful, comfortful, comfortable. Or “draweau,” my little-girl word for bureau. It has drawers, so why wouldn’t it be “draweau?” Also Clara’s adorable “Pizza Hot” for Pizza Hut.

I actually like disatisfication. It sort of draws out the idea of being really dissatisfied – and then I don’t have to use that evil word that some teacher somewhere declared unnecessary and which I subsequently consider amateur:  “very.”

But I digress. Another pet peeve. 

This humility extends beyond language. Some imbecile driving in front of me neglects to get in the left turn lane on time, but I cannot fume, because I did the same thing just yesterday, looking sheepishly from the right lane as I tried to cut in front of the line of left-turning cars. Or, I feel disdainful of the women who pass the check around after lunch in a restaurant, reluctant to calculate the tip themselves (“math class is tough,” whines Teen Talk Barbie) – until one day (despite the fact that I really do know how to do this!) I somehow manage to tip the waiter 50 percent instead of 15 percent.

Good thing the check was a small one. Even so: That’s some expensive humble pie.