Pawpaws Behind the Shopping Center

Look closely. Do you see them? The pawpaws are back. This native North American fruit grows in deciduous forests all through the eastern United States, even though hardly anyone knows about them. From those who do, I hear a lot of “oh, I remember that pawpaw song.” It’s a goofy old folk song. Myself, I don’t remember it, but it goes like this:

Pick up a pawpaw and put it in your pocket…

Right now I will tell you not to put a ripe pawpaw in your pocket. Also, most of the pawpaws you find on the ground are bruised and just a hair or two past ripe. There’s something cloying and bad-funky about them. A perfectly ripe pawpaw will fall off the tree, but you probably can’t be there to catch it when it does. The next best thing is to harvest the pawpaws that separate from the branch with no resistance. They yield to your nudge.

The pawpaws in the bag surprised me. I went to scout out a nearby spot rumored to have lots of fruits, and the rumor was true. Those suckers were ready, and when a pawpaw is ready, it will not wait. You have to pick it right then. So I did.

This is my pawpaw anniversary. I’d never tasted one until this time last year. It was purely an accident, just me walking in the woods and running across this goofy fruit a few friends had told me about. I wound up succumbing to a manic pawpaw state. It’s not just about fruit. It's about total immersion in one moment. Gathering pawpaws, I don’t think about what music to listen to or what I should make for dinner or the people I need to send follow-up emails. I just think about getting more pawpaws. Pawpaws are around for a few short weeks, and then they are gone. After that, most of the leaves have fallen from the trees, and it’s cold and the skies are grey and the grass turns brown and everything’s a giant bummer until late March. I feel like pawpaws are summer’s last hurrah.

Pawpaws are homely little fruits with a distinctive tropical flavor. A longtime sucker for misfits, I fell for them hard. Last year I decided I should write a pawpaw cookbook, which lends this pawpaw season an even greater sense of urgency. At times, I’ve wondered why I’m so compelled to write a pawpaw cookbook, when other, more normal people write cookbooks about gluten-free brownies or Paleo salads. And then I realize I’m the normal one.

These pawpaws came from the woods behind a shopping center I’ve always hated. There's a grocery store and a DMV and a laundromat, and past those a compact network of hiking and biking trails. The trees back there are crawling with pawpaws. At first you don’t notice them, but once you do, you spy them everywhere. It’s like earning a set of pawpaw goggles. I got all scratched up from rummaging through multiflora rose and poison ivy to get to the pawpaws. It’s prudent to wear pants, not shorts. Next time, I will. And the time after that. Having the fruit is only half the point. Getting it is the real treat.

The Garden and the Wormhole

I’ve come to regard our garden as an ongoing experiment; this is our first year in this house, with this yard, with this baby Frances. And so the limited time of a new parent and the limited gardening knowledge of a lax urbanite has given way to a throw-it-in-the-ground-see-if-it-grows approach, and though it does not yield any landscaping that a lush gardening magazine would touch with a ten-foot pole, it has produced some food, some fun, and a welcome reality check.

The garden plays host to many cathartic hours of slapdash effort. It’s an investment that has paid off in experience more than crop yield, or in gorgeous produce. Manny Howard wrote a book about the year he spent trying to convert his Brooklyn backyard into a micro-farm bountiful enough to sustain his family. (Spoiler: it wasn’t.) He had access to, and spent, thousands of dollars in creating this tiny farm, which strikes me as obnoxious even though I'm not happy to admit it does. But his heart was in the right place. "Green markets can be a kind of food pornography," he said once in a Time magazine article. "You buy a big bushel of beet greens without a wormhole in it, and that's just not what farm food looks like."

 The wormhole, to me, is the entire point of growing your own food. It’s not hard work to stick some seeds and set-outs in the dirt and hope for the best, because a few plants most likely will survive and grow into something edible. But it is very hard work to grow enough food to make a well-rounded meal, or a bunch of meals for a family, or enough bushels to share with a neighborhood. In the process of navigating the territory between a weed patch and a Better Homes & Gardens-worthy backyard of beautiful food, I’ve come to realize that the wormhole in the Swiss chard is the stamp of something real and pure. The scattershot hours I’ve put into weeding and watering have showed me how precious and miraculous food is, and what a sin it is to waste it, and that the places food grows are not always pretty. They are dirt and mud and weeds and bugs, and so what? Before vast Central Valley acres of chemicals and brackish water and trucked-in bees, there were plots in backyards and modest family farms.

A single, misshapen cucumber was my garden’s afterthought. Of the entire packet of seeds I planted, one lonely seedling showed its face. I kept watering it, just to see what would happen, and lo and behold: it produced a gimpy, bulbous fruit, no bigger than a finger banana. Observing its progress (or lack thereof) over the summer months entertained me, because I never knew if the plant was going to suddenly give up the ghost. Finally I picked the thing, and it was inedibly bitter. Into the compost it went, and I bought a waxy, truck-farm cucumber from the grocery store. 99 cents, a little less than the packet of cucumber seeds had cost.

Other items we planted were not so fickle. Radishes, summer squash, parsley, Russian kale, butter lettuce, Swiss and rainbow chard, and sugar pumpkins have been very plentiful, if not photogenic. A stranger gave me a flat of strawberry plants, which I put in because hey, they were free! And I found out that strawberry plants are more or less garden pets, things you grown for fun, for the little morning ruby snacks they give you.

There’s some lamb’s ear growing in the garden, too, which I neglected to pull out because of its flocked, soft leaves. My garden is neither lovely nor lush, but it rejuvenates and centers me. Some people go to a pedi-spa for that kind of feeling. Me, I prefer callused hands and dirt lodged under my toenails. As for the wormholes, once those greens are cooked, no one is the wiser.

That’s what a garden is. Organic food with a lower-case “o,” and sweat, and whatever luck and labor partner up to give you.

Pasta with Tomatoes, Corn, Herbs & Feta

I am guessing it’s not easy being married to me. My temper can be short, and I have a habit of insisting on getting my way. But Joe’s soldiered on in our union for nine years. There are times I figured we might not be married by now, still. This may be normal, as far as marriages go. That every marriage is a locked box both perplexes and delights me, because there’s no need to measure what Joe and I have against larger yardstick: if it’s working, hey, go with it. I have friends who I look at and assume they must be living in harmony and bliss, but you never know. I have other friends who I marvel are still together. Knowing why and how is not my job, though; it’s theirs.

In those heartfelt odes to spouses I see people post on Facebook, this notion of a husband being “my best friend” comes up a lot. And fine if it is true for them, but Joe is not my best friend, because I already had a best friend when we met. There are things I tell Joe that I’d never tell a friend, and there are things I tell friends that I’d never tell him. It works because he gets that. I don’t want Joe to be everything to me. That seems unfair.

Today’s our anniversary. Earlier, I’d told Joe we were going to have tortilla Española with romesco sauce and a big tossed salad for dinner, and he was enthused. Our initial hope was to go to the Buckley House, which is our town’s dependable fancy-pants restaurant, but we’re low on cash at the moment, and a Buckley House dinner is not for lean times.

Some unexpected construction at my daughter’s daycare facility threw off my schedule, though, and I realized making romesco sauce would take longer than I’d like and create unwanted stress. So I switched to pasta with sweet corn and tomatoes instead. To me it’s the pinnacle of Ohio recipes, because sweet corn and tomatoes are the best we have to offer. Joe didn’t want to move here to Ohio, but he did. He’s still ambivalent. But I feel like I’m in my element. How can two people be so compatible yet never fully happy in the same location?

Joe does not do well with sudden changes, but he was okay with our dinner switchup. It resulted in fewer dirty dishes to clean, always a plus. We drank a $5.99 bottle of Spanish Tempranillo with our pasta. The herbs and tomatoes had come from our backyard; the corn, from a field somewhere in our county. It’s definitely GMO corn, engineered to be as sweet as a cold glass of Southern iced tea, but you can’t win ‘em all. And so goes marriage. You can’t have everything in one person. Spending life with a boring husband, to me, would be a terrible fate. Out marriage has been anything but boring, so we must be doing something right. Maybe I’ll make this pasta again in another nine years, for our 18th anniversary. Maybe we’ll go to the Buckley House instead. Does it matter? An anniversary is one day a year. It’s the other 364 days that really count.   

Pasta with Tomatoes, Corn, Herbs, and Feta

Serves 4

It was only after residing in a handful of other states that I realized the superiority of Ohio-grown tomatoes. This pasta cannot be made with grocery store produce; it is a summer-only dish. You can throw together sweet corn and beautiful homegrown tomatoes—the most coveted of summery Ohio foods—to make an incredibly fresh, flavorful pasta dish in a flash.

• 3 to 4 large, ripe tomatoes, cored and chopped
• 1/8 teaspoon Aleppo pepper
• 2 to 3 ears fresh corn, or 1-2 cups cooked corn cut from leftover cobs of sweet corn* (and cripes, please don’t use grocery store corn or frozen corn. Not this time.)
• Kosher salt, as needed
• 8 ounces angel hair pasta
• 4 large cloves garlic, sliced very thinly crosswise
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 cups loosely packed fresh basil leaves, thinly sliced, or a combination of fresh basil, thyme, and oregano (go heavy on the basil and lighter on the other herbs)
• 4 to 6 ounces feta cheese, crumbled

Place the chopped tomatoes in a medium bowl. Add the Aleppo pepper; season generously with salt. Toss to combine and set aside.

Bring a large pot of salted water on to boil. If the corn hasn’t been cooked already, plunge the whole ears of corn into the water and cook for five minutes. Don’t drain the water; you’ll use it for cooking the pasta. When cool enough to handle, cut the ears from the corn and set aside.

Cook the pasta until al dente; drain..

Meanwhile, in a 9- to 10-inch skillet, heat the garlic and olive oil over high heat, stirring occasionally, until the garlic is a light golden-brown (do not allow to burn). Add the corn and cook until it’s heated through. Add the tomatoes and cook for just a minute. Remove from heat.

When the pasta is al dente, drain it. Add the saucy tomato-corn mixture; toss with the feta cheese and basil. Season to taste with more salt and pepper. Cover for a minute or two to let the pasta absorb the juices form the tomato sauce.

Divide the pasta among serving dishes. Crumble the feta cheese over each bowl and serve.

*Sometimes, leftover corn that’s been cut off the cob and stored for several days (or frozen and thawed) can be soggy. To dry it out and perk up the flavor, I toast it a heavy, dry medium skillet (preferably cast-iron) over medium-high, stirring occasionally, until charred spots appear on the corn, 2 to 3 minutes.

Are Ohio Tomatoes Really the Best?

In the public mind, Ohio is not ubiquitous with tomatoes. You don’t read heartfelt odes to Ohio tomatoes in Saveur or see them on the menu in some Wagnerian dining experience at Alinea. This lack of attention from the non-Ohio world makes Ohio tomatoes the country’s biggest secret amazing food. Here, it’s a given. Tomatoes are the state fruit.

Ohio is not keeping these tomatoes secret on purpose, mind you. I didn’t even care about them myself until I moved out of the state; as a girl, I recall the South Carolina friends we vacationed with every year raving about the cardboard box of homegrown tomatoes we brought down to the beach house. “Ohio tomatoes!” they’d sigh, and it baffled my youthful mind that people who lived within spitting distance of a wonderful beach and wild-caught shrimp could crave anything from my humble home. I didn't become a tomato convert until I grew up and moved across the country to the San Francisco Bay Area, where gem-like heirlooms of every shade were bountiful at markets and grocery stores. I bought them and enjoyed them, but they didn't make me dizzy like the unassuming red globes I savored on visits back to Ohio. Scarcity leads to mystique. There is no Ohio tomato like an Ohio tomato in the palm of a expat Ohioan. 

I should clarify that the biggest, most pulsing fists of tomatoey lusciousness hail from the dense red clay of the Mid-Ohio Valley, in the southeast corner of the state. Nothing against heirloom tomatoes, but the ultimate Ohio tomato is just a run-of-the-mill beefsteak, red, shiny, and perhaps a bit knobby and misshapen. They grow in family gardens and the fields of tiny family farms all along the river, baked under the summer sun and bathed in thick humidity.

Any homegrown tomato is a treat, but the (admittedly lovely) tomatoes I grew in my various Oregon backyards just didn’t measure up. I’d like to ask a horticulturalist why, scientifically speaking, Ohio tomatoes dazzle so—is it soil pH? chemicals from the industrial plants downriver?—but I’m afraid the truth will disappoint.  Maybe my fine Oregon tomatoes would have stood up in a blind tasting to their Ohio counterparts, and it was really just a vanished summer idyll I was yearning for.

It’s August, and all over town, the inimitable smell of tomato leaves withering in the heat betrays no hint of the acidic sweetness and almost buttery flesh to come. I’ve been eating enough to give myself an ulcer: thick raw slices on a plate, more substantial than any filet mignon. Neighbors gave them to me; I give mine to friends. Summer will vanish, and Ohio will get boring and shitty again, and so we all dive into the intoxicating cosmos of seeds and pulp our precious tomatoes offer us in this eternal now.

Mid-Ohio Valley Summer No-Cook Tomato Sauce

Serves 4-6

Get one 12-ounce package of eggy Rossi Pasta Capelli d'Angelo. This can be purchased at their gift shop on Front Street in Marietta, or at any one of a handful of grocery stores. When I was 20, I worked at Rossi Pasta making gift baskets, and I got a lot of free pasta, and pasts tastes best when it’s free. In lieu of Rossi Pasta (free or not), use 8 ounces of ordinary dried angel hair pasta.

 Next, procure about one and a half pounds of quite ripe, very red homegrown tomatoes—beefsteak or the likes, and luscious enough to eat a plain slice of as if it were cake. Maybe you grew them yourself, maybe your best friend’s parents left a bag of them on your back porch like the tomato fairy. These tomatoes should be at the stage of ripeness that’s just before squishy. At least half an hour and up to two hours before planning to eat, chop them up (on a cutting board with a groove if you don’t want to make a swampy red mess of tomato juice). Put these chunks in a large bowl, along with a pinch of red pepper flakes, a large clove of garlic that’s been mashed to a paste, and a generous amount of kosher salt. If you have fresh oregano around, mince up about a teaspoon of that and add it. If not, no big deal. Let this all sit at room temperature; the salt will work on the tomatoes and make a soupy, saucy mess.

Boil the pasta according to the directions on the Rossi Pasta package. And drain the pasta, and although I normally would reserve some of the pasta cooking water, we’re not going to do that now, because we want the pasta to absorb the very liquid part of our splendid tomato sauce so that every bite offers an explosion of summery tomato flavor.

Return the pasta to the pot you cooked it in. Add the tomato sauce, along with a few tablespoons of very good olive oil and a big fat handful of thinly sliced fresh basil. You need lots of basil, which will collapse in the heat of the dish and wind up not looking like nearly as much as you began with. Taste this and add salt or whatever to make it taste right.

Divide the pasta between big bowls and top with freshly grated parmesan cheese. Feta or soft goat cheese would also be acceptable, but I like the parm. Then dig in. That’s it.

This recipe absolutely will not work in parts of the country with crummy tomatoes, or after late September, or if you use the wrong shape or type of pasta; the network of angel hair pasta strands lock in the sauce like a sponge so you don't miss a drop of flavor. This also will not be quite as good if you consume it in a location other than my parent’s screened-in back porch, where an unseen chorus of cicadas drone in the background, to a mesmerizingly creepy, jungle-y effect. But if you get all of the variables right, your dinner will be like a big plate of adult candy. No salad, no bread. Just the pasta, maybe a glass of white wine. Amen.     

A Lovely Wreck of a Summer Sandwich

A summer sandwich is all about the moment. The whims of the person building it and the stuff that happens to sit on the counter or grow in the garden at that exact time result in that most personal of constructions, the produce-heavy Dagwoodian mess bookended by bread. It's about the watery tomato liquid mingling with mustard that drips down your arm and all over your magazine or paperback book as you sit outdoors, or wherever your happy place is. It's about the satisfaction of putting together a bunch of ingredients that make sense to no one’s mind but your own. Its about the ephemeral pleasure of wolfing the thing down before it collapses all over your lap, a slithering mess of cucumber slices and lettuce and relish and god knows what else.

My dearest wonderful wreck of a summer sandwich came about because of a story I heard on NPR last year. They held a contest for the ultimate summer recipe, and finalist Marti Olesen’s entry was for a crazy assemblage of tomatoes, sweet onion, cucumbers, and white cheddar cheese between whole grain bread that’s been smeared with peanut butter. As with any great sandwich, the order of the ingredients is as important as the ingredients themselves; it’s got to do with the messy mechanics of what hits your tongue first when you sink your teeth into the thing. Olesen assures listeners that the sandwich functions best when built thus, from top to bottom: cheese, tomato, cucumber, onion, peanut butter.

The other two finalists in the NPR contest offered recipes for strawberry trifle and Baja slaw. Trifle is trifling; slaw is slaw. A sandwich is a meal. I rooted for Olesen, and she won, to the great satisfaction of sandwich aficionados across the nation.

But I didn't make her sandwich. She inspired me to adapt it, and maybe that's the point. As an alternative jammy-sticky-sugary PB&J, my mom started making peanut butter and cheese sandwiches for my daughter. They’re not bad if you’re four years old, but an adult needs something more. Likewise, a sandwich of homegrown tomatoes and cucumbers sounds magnificent on paper, but in practice it’s wan and bland. 

So I combined the two. Lightly toast two slices of whole-grain bread (I prefer those circular flatbread/bun hybrids sometimes marketed as "sandwich skinnys", since the slight crumb of the bread makes the filling the star player). Generously spread crunchy natural peanut butter (it has to be salted) on one slice, and tomato-squash chutney on the other slice. (You probably don't have tomato-squash chutney; classic storebought Major Grey's can work in a pinch, or you can make your own squash chutney). Then shingle thinly sliced cucumber on the peanut butter. This is your base. Top the cucumber with thickly sliced ripe red tomato (beefsteak, please), then with one slice of Swiss or pepperjack cheese. Place the chutney-smeared bread over it all, then grab a lot of napkins. You will need them. Note: this sandwich does not travel. At all. That’s what makes it even more special. You need to be at home to enjoy it. Preferably on a porch, taking in all the ephemeral joys of summer.

Dr. Chicken's PCT Cookies

It’s raining in Ohio right now, but it’s probably not raining where my big brother is. That would be somewhere between Kennedy Meadows and Tuolumne Meadows in California’s High Sierra. He’s thru-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. Every now and then as I go about my daily routines—walking the dog through the cemetery, driving to pick Frances up from preschool, washing dirty pots and pans—I think to myself, “What’s Mark up to at this moment?”

Only he’s not Mark on the trail; he’s Dr. Chicken, or D.C. This trail name of his has a legitimate origin, though I forget exactly what it is. I imagine Dr. Chicken scrambling up a jagged path of scree, taking in noble, wild scenery that most of us only see on wall calendars. Or I imagine him emerging from his ultra-light tent at 4am to get a head start on the day. But usually I picture him eating. Thru-hikers blast through calories and need plenty of fuel.

A few weeks ago, my mother and I put together the food resupply box he’d requested us to have ready . “I’ll need 5-6 days of food” he’d texted me. “Best send by May 17.” Yes, he has a cell phone, and it has come in handy, even though I know Dr. Chicken’s impetus in taking to the PCT was, in part, to escape the frippery of technology and constant communication.

Thanks in part to Cheryl Strayed’s mega-successful book Wild, the PCT is hopping this season. The film adaptation comes out in December, and PCT traffic will probably increase after that. Which is not bad, but the character of a thing changes as more and more people show up. That’s just the way it works.

My brother, D.C., is changing, too. A nonconformist and borderline ascetic, he’s felt trapped in his past few jobs coordinating trail maintenance workers in the backcountry of Alaska and Washington. As the old song goes, he was born the next of kin to the wayward wind. He yearns to wander. All those footsteps on dry desert earth and rocky soil are leading him to some kind of resolution.

I wanted to meet up with D.C. on the Oregon leg of the PCT for a few days, but it’s just not going to happen. I have a kid and a husband and work to do; I long ago squandered all of my wayward-wind days. The best I could do was bake cookies. I packed them up in Ziplock bags and tucked them into the box Mom and I jammed with way too much food, despite his texted assurances not to go too crazy.

I love telling people what my brother’s up to. He’s doing the thing a lot of us wish we could do. I doubt he wakes us up thinking what his sister and little niece are up to, but you never know. He’s out there hiking this thing for himself, but he doesn’t know he’s hiking it for me, too.

Dr. Chicken’s PCT Cookies

Makes 3-1/2 dozen large or 5 dozen small cookies

Plenty of hearty rolled oats, big chunks of roasted almonds, and a generous volume of dark chocolate chips make these modified cowboy cookies hit all of the right textures. I like them for a mid-morning snack. Hopefully Dr. Chicken did, too. To get the most coconut flavor, use extra-virgin coconut oil. It’s not cheap, but its tropical aroma alone is just divine. Some brands of coconut oil are flavor-neutral. Use those and your cookies will still taste pretty great.

• 1 cup extra-virgin coconut oil, solid
• 2 cups rolled oats or quick oats
• 2 cups all-purpose or white whole wheat flour
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• ¾ teaspoon table salt
• 2 tablespoons finely ground flaxseed or chia seeds
• 4 ounces (1/2 cup) applesauce, preferably unsweetened
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• ¼ teaspoon almond extract
• 1 cup brown sugar, light or dark
• 12 ounces (2 cups) chocolate chips (check to see if they are vegan, if that’s a concern)
• 2 cups whole almonds, toasted and roughly chopped
• 1-3 tablespoons water

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Position baking racks in the top and bottom third of the oven.

If it’s warm and your coconut oil is quite liquidy, pour one cup into a glass measuring cup and chill in the refrigerator for an hours or so, until it’s firmer.

Place one cup of the oats in a food processor or blender and pulse on and off until the oats are in smaller pieces, but not too powdery. Put all 2 cups of the oats in a large bowl. Add the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt and stir to combine.

Stir the ground flax or chia seeds together with the applesauce and vanilla in a small bowl, and set aside to thicken.

Meanwhile, put the coconut oil in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a paddle attachment. Beat until it’s relatively smooth. Add the brown sugar and beat on high speed, scraping down the sides with a rubber spatula from time to time, until the mixture is lighter in texture and has a somewhat pearly look (about 3 minutes). Add the applesauce mixture and beat another minute.

Scrape down the bowl once more, than add the oat-flour mixture. Beat until combined (this dough will be a bit crumbly, but if it looks particularly dry, add one or two tablespoons of water.) Add the chocolate chips and almonds and beat just until they are distributed nicely through the dough.

Scoop out balls of dough that are about 1-1/2 inches in diameter for large cookies, 1 inch for smaller cookies. Place the dough balls on an ungreased, unlined baking sheet, 12 to a sheet. Flatten each dough ball with your palm a little (these cookies will not spread much during baking). Bake about 8-10 minutes, rotating the sheet from top to bottom and back to front halfway through baking. Let the cookies sit on the baking sheet 5 minutes before transferring them with a thin metal spatula to a cooling rack. Cookies will keep, tightly covered, for about a week. I think. They’re usually gone by day 5 or earlier.

Blame It on the Range

I have sweated over the flickering blue gas of Wolfs and Vikings and Thermadors. I have uttered curses at the glowing coils of Kenmores and Maytags and GEs. I have sautéed and deglazed and seared and poached all manner of flesh over hulking prehistoric beasts of no known provenance, things so foreboding and monolithic it seemed the kitchen walls must have risen up around them.

I have rocked recipes and ruled over flames. I have battled and burned ingredients that undid me and undid meals. I have had intimate interactions with ranges ranging in cost from the tens of thousands to the low hundreds.

Some were sleek stainless steel, and some were coated with decades-old crusts of grease as black as death. Some were shabby and scuffed, in tidy but run-down rental homes; some were in restaurants where mingling aromas of vaporized fry oil and Ecolab sanitizer prevailed over sizzling garlic and baking dough. Some had six powerful burners and a well-seasoned flattop. Some had three spotty burners and one undersized dark horse champion. All of them had quirks.

When you do everything right and your dinner still turns out wrong, don’t blame your cookware. Don’t blame the cookbook. Don’t blame the cook. Honey, blame it on the range.

Does it take forever to heat up? Is the biggest burner lopsided so all of the oil pools on one half of the skillet? Do you have to ignite the gas with a match every frigging time because the pilot’s always out? Do the controls have a layout so counter-intuitive you’re always adjusting the heat for the back burner when you mean to be adjusting the heat on the front? Does the power source short out from time to time so your pasta water quietly plummets from a churning boil to a tepid muck? Man, screw that stove.

And I can’t even get started on ovens. I bought a cheap oven thermometer—two, actually, just to cross-check—and discovered that the oven at our last house ran, on average, fifty degrees hot or fifty degrees cool. Which direction was anybody’s guess. I had to rotate pans and peek and prod like crazy just to get evenly browned cookies.

Yet there was a restaurant, one with an aforementioned prehistoric monster range, where we had two ovens triggered by two indecipherable, misshapen knobs, their dials long ago rubbed or melted off. We called one the “fast” oven and one the “slow” oven. I baked pies and cakes and bubbling little cauldrons of artichoke dip, and they all came out looking just the way they were supposed to, and to this day no one knows what the hell temperature those ovens were. It had good mojo, and that was enough.

You deal with the range you have. This is the skill. The skill is not identifying the range you want. Master the range you have. Finesse it. Understand that it will never be perfect, even if it’s the big expensive one and a foxy celebrity chef endorsed it in that glossy ad in Saveur. A range is just a tool. You are the operator.

Our current range in our current house is white, a budget Roper by Whirlpool. It’s adequate. I grapple with its knobs, which I manhandle enough that they are apt to fall off. I know how to get a decent stir-fry out of the thing, using the biggest burner in the back corner where the wok barely fits, and where I have to crank the heat up to eleven and let it sit for a good while just so the burner can muster up enough energy to approximate wok hay, the elusive crisp-crunchy-juicy-tender quality that a good wok technique imparts to meat and vegetables. (This is why decent take-out so often trumps our well-intentioned attempts at various ethnic foods at home. Our genteel Western ranges achieve wussy BTUs.)

The drip pans are rusty and the enamel is scratched. The oven has a self-cleaning feature, though I never run it, and so there are charred hazelnuts and carbonized remains of dripping pie juices. It’s not fiery, the affair I have with this range, but it gets food on the table, and for now, that’s enough. Because there will be another house someday, another job, another kitchen, another range to decipher and then dominate. Another notch on the wok handle, another day spent facing the stove, another blazing give-and-take with the most animated inanimate object we loathe and love.

This post originally appeared on Food Riot, where I contribute.

Gather Ye Ramps While Ye May

Like nearly all highly coveted foods, ramps have a crevice of calendar days when they appear in titillating abundance. Their delicate green fronds rise from the leafy detritus of primeval forest floors, signaling spring. And thus the mania begins. Every year, those wise in the ways of ramps take to the woods, seeking their precious, restorative quarry.

A ramp is as slender as the most refined pinkie. It shyly pokes its head from the ground from late March to April. They grow in fertile, shady woodlands all over the eastern United States and southeast Canada, though I think of them as particularly Appalachian. It’s possible to cultivate ramps, but they are finicky. The majority of the ramps harvested every year are foraged. These alluring wild mountain leeks have grown for centuries, so if you are rolling your eyes and thinking how very 2011 it is to extol the many culinary and spiritual virtues of ramps, you may be dismissed. Only those pure in heart can enter the magical portal to this pungent Brigadoon. It’s been a hell of a winter. Go gather ye ramps while ye may.

That the heartbeats of an entire group of humans—young and old, hillbilly and hipster—can quicken so at the mention of an untamed vegetable that shares a prosaic name with a simple machine perplexes many. My husband, for one. He does not object to ramps; in fact, he will gladly eat them. What he does not get is the mighty ruckus people like me raise over a feral edible plant. The concept of combing the hillsides in search of elusive alliums and then investing dirty hours on hands and knees extricating their slender roots from the chilled spring soil holds little appeal to him. And since the treasure hunt is half of the point, he’s only experiencing a shadow of the ramp when he ingests it.

Appalachians pride themselves on their self-reliance. To glorify the ramp is exquisitely Appalachian. To glorify the ramp is to recognize the generally unnoticed wonder that quietly rises up from deep, dark, ancient hollers where living mindlessly is not advisable.

So ramps are not just a food or a fever of spring. They are an emblem and a practice and an edible manifestation of a tribe. You don’t need to live in a shack in the woods to belong to that tribe. All you have to do is get why there’s a tribe in the first place.

And yet the flavor of a ramp offers enough stinky-breath allure to pay off the emotional hype surrounding it. Ramps are scallion-esque, but not oniony. Their emerald fronds are herbal, but not chive-y. There’s some garlicky assertiveness in the white root, but it’s not as sharp. That’s what’s foxy to a chef about a ramp. It’s an aromatic and a cooking green all in one, familiar in concept but and exotic in spirit.

The Appalachian tradition hinges upon having access to heaps and heaps of ramps. Heaps, literally. This amount is known colloquially as “a big mess of ramps,” or even more colloquially as “a messaramps”. A messaramps shrinks dramatically when exposed to heat, and the result is somewhat like very pungent cooked spinach: green, but zingy with that good stink.

These cooked ramps are often served alongside cornbread and beans at church fundraising ramp dinners, where many hands make faster work of the digging, sorting, cleaning, and cooking. A common way to prepare the ramps is to first blanch them; it’s fast, and it’s said to tame these little buggers. I prefer to chop the white root ends into segments about a centimeter long and saute these gently in a big skillet filmed with olive oil. After a few minutes of this, when the roots are good and aromatic (they won’t become translucent as chopped, cooked onions do), roughly chop the greens and throw them in. They will wilt yieldingly. Season this with salt and a few light grinds of pepper; now you can enliven a frittata, risotto, pizza, sandwich, omelet, quiche, home fries, et cetera.

A raw ramp is an entirely different beast from its mellower cooked sibling. Raw ramps emit vapors that intoxicate some and polarize all. If you have only a dozen or so precious ramps to in your hot little hands, I recommend using them as crazy-intense herbs. Make ramp aöli, or mince them and gently knead them into a hamburger patty with a dash or two of Worcestershire sauce (and then serve it with ramp aöli). Or chop up your scant little bundle of ramps, flash it in a little olive oil, and cook eggs sunny-side-up right on the rampy nest.

The only way to go wrong with ramps is to disrespect them. When you find a patch in the woods, don’t go decimating the whole thing like a heathen. Dig up a few ramps here and a few ramps there, allowing the patch to maintain its numbers from season to season. And it’s best to leave some of the root end in the ground, if possible, to facilitate next year’s growth. I sense that the trendiness of ramps in urban markets peaked last year, but there’s still a need to preserve, not deplete, the wild rampshed.

Should you not be privy to the secreted lands where ramps thrive, take heart. Certainly there’s something else equivalent in your life. If not in flavor, in essence. Ramps present themselves to those who choose to be aware of what surrounds them. You can’t enter Brigadoon by looking for it directly, but you can’t enter it without wandering, either.

Mash up a big, rich pot of potato-ey ramp champ to enjoy some rib-sticking spring fodder. 

This post originally appeared on Food Riot, where I am a contributor.