A veggie adventure

I was thinking about death when I pulled into Darcy Morrison's driveway. But my mind quickly turned to cucumber salad and the possibility of fried pumpkin blossoms.

I'd been driving down Altamont Road on my way to Indian Ladder Farms to check out this week's local produce selection when a plywood and black spray-paint sign caught my eye: Fresh Veg 4 Sale.

Hey, I was going to buy veggies anyway, and these days I rarely get the pleasure of changing my mind on the fly. (My plans change for me all the time, but some how it isn't the same.) So I hit the brakes and turned the wheel to make a left into the driveway. That is when my minivan shutdown. Not stalled, which would imply some coasting or inertia or something. No, I mean shut down as in everything stopped including the wheels. This left me sitting directly across the oncoming lane. I looked up to see if there were any cars coming. I found myself staring at a curve in the road.

I thought about getting out and running for it, but damn if we hadn't just finished the payments on this sucker. I threw the car into park, turned the key to off, then back to on. Nothing. I said a silent prayer of thanks that my children weren't in the car. Then I tried again. All the lights on the dashboard flickered for a long moment and then the steering wheel rotated under my grip. The engine was running. I hit the gas and nothing happened. Put it in drive you fool. I pulled the lever down to D and hit the gas again. This time the van lurched into the driveway. I popped the door and jumped out. I was so happy to be out of the van that I didn't care that there were three barking dogs running toward me.

Happy, but not stupid. I waited by the car to see if anyone would come out.

A blond woman with a kind smile and a welcoming wave came out the door.

She grew up in the house. Ventured out to the West Coast, tried city life and then decided that home was the 18 acres where she knew every turn and all the stories – the barn over there was a firehouse and the previous owner had moved it board by board from Albany, the orchards are old now, but she knows the names of farmers who used to tend them. And there was also the view of the Heldeberg Escarpment. And the thick sweet summer smell. The wild black raspberries and the light.

Now that she was with me, the dogs let me approach the baskets filled with the overflow from her garden. There were cucumbers, mostly straight, firm and still narrow. The yellow on the squash was deep and bright. The fat zucchini reminded me of a joke a friend from Colorado told me last week. He said people in his neighborhood warn each other not leave their cars unlocked. Why? Because someone will fill up your back seat with zucchini.

I was focused on the cucumbers. My brother and I used to fight each other for the cucumbers growing up. We'd eat them whole, peeled and dipped, one bite at a time, in Italian dressing, or soy sauce and rice vinegar. My children have inherited the same obsession, although they like them best sliced and soaked in rice wine vinegar, sort of a quick sukemono. The cucumbers were 3 for a $1. I bought 12.

I mentioned tomatoes and she said she had some in the house. She returned with heap of perfect small round globes, bigger than cherries, smaller than beef. She offered the lot of them for $1.50. I popped one in my mouth. It burst warm and sweet with hint of acid. Sold. I'll take all your surplus for the rest of the summer, I told her. She took me on a garden tour that led to a 600 pumpkin-plant spread on one of the back fields. The pumpkins were still green, but there were blossoms everywhere.

What about the flowers, I asked.

You can have as many as you want, she said.

I've had zucchini blossoms many times, although I've never made them at home. I wonder if pumpkins blossoms taste as good. So that's my mission for this week. Figure out how to make pumpkin blossoms. I'll go back next week to pick. Or as soon as I get my van back from the mechanic.