Farm luxury

We shit in a bucket that we must empty medieval-chamber-pot-style every few days. In the loft of a barn, we co-reside with dust, fleas (thanks to the feral cat and her five kittens who have learned what cat food is), a bat that occasionally flies into our room, bees that have colonized the central beam of the roof, and relentless mosquitoes. We wake up at six o’clock every morning to work a ten-hour day of planting, weeding, seeding, and/or harvesting fifteen acres of organic produce. We often do the same activity in the same position—kneeling, bending, stooping, standing, lifting—all day. We work in one hundred degrees, thirty degrees, sun, rain, and snow. We shower once, maybe twice a week. We earn minimum wage and receive no overtime pay. Farm life, for all its surface beauty, is difficult.

But then, there are the evening hours. Watching the sun cast its dying glare over the fields that are our backyard. Listening to the frogs on the banks of the pond commence their choral croaking. Sitting. Drinking. And, of course, there is dinner.

How fortunate we are to enjoy regular meals made almost entirely of organic food produced right outside our window. Last Friday, I snatched some of the first ripe tomatoes from the two 144-foot-long hoophouses in an eager frenzy to make fresh tomato sauce. I grew up in an Italian family, and there is no food that makes my knees weaker than my mom’s meat sauce (it is the only dish that I could not refuse during my two years as a vegetarian). I made some recipe revisions: I used local, grass-fed Italian sausage instead of store-bought beef chuck roast, some fresh basil, oregano, and parsley instead of the generic dried Italian seasoning, and, most importantly, I replaced canned tomato sauce and paste with the real thing fresh-from-the-vine. But I maintained the integrity of mom’s execution—first browning the heavily salt-and-peppered sausage in some olive oil, then removing the meat, adding the crushed tomatoes with a bit of water and the herbs, bringing it to a boil, placing the meat in the sauce, and finally letting it simmer.

To serve, I tossed it with some whole-wheat penne alongside a fresh sauté of just-picked yellow and costata squash with kale, and a glass of 2006 pinot noir from the Willamette Valley in Oregon (not local, but it was a gift). The wine was smooth and the sauté was crisp, but the sauce was bold—a medley of flavors independent yet harmonic. And oh, the tomatoes—how can I possibly go back to canned now? We finished with a simple dessert of newly-ripened raspberries from the field and dark chocolate. Engrossed in gustatory pleasure, we hadn’t talked much through the meal, but Dylan, holding a berry, appropriately punctuated the experience by saying, “This is why we do it.”