Mushrooms are the richest and meatiest food I know of outside the animal kingdom. In the past few weeks, following a number of torrential rainstorms, mushrooms have begun popping up everywhere on the Island. On a visit to a friend’s house off of Middle Road two weeks ago, friends and I stumbled upon a yard filled with chanterelle mushrooms and the black trumpet variety. We harvested the chanterelles first that day from underneath a maple tree, leaving the black trumpets to grow larger.
Our rabbits live in little cages made out of different odds and ends left around the farm. We have four cages with chicken wire covering the bottom to keep them from burrowing their way to freedom. They are placed in our fields over our spent crops with the idea that the bunnies will clean up our old greens and weeds, digest them and then fertilize our soil with their manure. One cage was built by my father for my sister Molly when she brought home three wild bunnies she had found that were abandoned by their mother.
Chez Panisse is arguably the best and most influential restaurant in the country. The restaurant’s founder, Alice Waters, has become the figurehead of the current farm-to-table revolution in America that has spread rapidly, including (thankfully) to Martha’s Vineyard. The chefs at Chez Panisse have to work their way up through a rigorous kitchen hierarchy, putting in countless hours peeling carrots and cardoons just for the opportunity to cook for those paying customers who have traveled from places near and far to sample their ingenuity.
About four years ago I was working on a landscaping project on a horse farm in West Tisbury. Word quickly spread around the farm that a horse had lain down and died in its stall that morning. There was somberness in the air on that hot summer day, with the humidity promising a thunderstorm in our near future. Horses are not small creatures, and a front-end loader was brought in to extract the animal from the barn. The scene became quite loud as chains were rigged this way and that and the engine on the machine was revved for more power.
My family has learned how to express love through food. Maybe a little too heavily on the food side, and we are still learning to express ourselves emotionally, which can lead to a miscommunication or two. Just this morning my father greeted me with oysters while he shucked them with a pocketknife. Almost every time he comes by the farm he has something for me in a five-gallon bucket or one of those orange fish baskets he finds on the beach.
