Wine Country Home Cooking: Our Garden
The story of our garden, why Sauvignon Blanc is the “gardener’s wine,” and some favorite recipe cards for wine country home cooking.
Sauvignon Blanc is the gardener’s wine. Notes of honeydew melon, kaffir lime leaf, and lemongrass, plus bold acidity, match any garden green or juicy tomato. Sauvignon enhances everything you create from the garden (pasta primavera, ratatouille, zucchini and goat cheese tart, tomato pie, even salads and difficult-to-pair green vegetables like artichokes and asparagus, when bridged with creamy dressings and lemon zest). Skip to the end for our recipe cards for wine country home cooking. Right click on a card to print or save. We’ll add more from time to time.
one flat acre
The beating heart of our lives here in Napa is our verdant garden and orchard. It didn’t come easily. I don’t think it’s possible to write about gardens without writing about sacrifice. Twenty years ago, Kristof was a young winemaker celebrating his tenth harvest. We had a one-year-old daughter. If you’d asked us both what we wanted at that point in our in lives, I would have said: homebirth and homeschooling. Kristof would have said: as much land as we could possibly afford to buy. You might think these goals would align perfectly, leading to homesteading. But if you drew a Venn diagram, the intersection would be there, sure, but it would be slimmer than you might imagine. Because, as a young winemaker who wanted to buy land in the Napa Valley, what he needed was a rich wife to help him (not a wife who wanted to raise kids and write), or at least one with a corporate job and benefits. We compromised.
The amount of land we could afford turned out to be one flat acre in the county with a tear-down, ranch-style house from the 1950’s. At least, most people would have seen it as a down-to-the-studs remodel, but not us. This was during the housing bubble of the early 2000’s, and there were bidding wars. Prices increased every week. The elderly homeowners liked us because Kristof promised not to cut down their plum and peach orchard. Plus, our offer was “as-is.” When they asked if they should bother having the kitchen cleaned, since we were likely going to gut it, we said, “Please, clean it! That’ll be our kitchen.” As it was, for the next ten years, until we finally could afford the big remodel.
goal misalignment?
I don’t think Kristof planted a garden that first year, other than a half-wine barrel or two of tomatoes; he put all of his efforts into amending the hardpan soil around the peach and plum trees, which had been saturated in herbicide, covered with sheets of plastic—old swimming pool covers—and mounded with decorative lava rock. When Kristof tilled the soil, birds gathered in the tree branches, anticipating worms or insects, only to be disappointed. The soil was lifeless.
We had another issue: the property was a local low spot, and every winter when it rained, the crawl space beneath the house would flood, triggering a sump that pumped the water out through hoses. The solution to both problems came when construction began on a new housing development on a neighboring street; Kristof arranged with the contractor to have all their clean fill dirt dumped on our property. This went on for years—a steady progression of dump trucks—until he had increased the height of our land by about three feet. He then created a series of dry river beds that funneled water away from the house so that the crawl space never again flooded.
Every spring, he sowed (and still sows) mustard, clover, fava, and other cover crops. He tills the crop into the soil, along with two truckloads or so of compost. The once hardpan soil has turned light, fluffy and rich and houses a smorgasbord of insects for the quail, blackbirds, blue jays, and doves.
Our second daughter was born at home one summer evening, two years after we moved into the house. On the night the she was born, wild peacocks from the nearby dry river bed alighted on our rooftop, roosted in the trees, and promenaded grandly down our driveway, crying like cats. There was a garden that summer, I remember, because my mother came to visit and made salsa from the tomatillos. The baby was colicky, and I wore a groove into the linoleum walking up and down the hallway with her, past a bowl of lemons that were covered in velvety blue and purple mold, and that filled the air with the peculiar, acrid scent of rotting citrus. I was too tired to dump them out or to move an expired chicken I’d never had time to roast from the fridge to the trash. My mother came in from the garden carrying a bucket of tomatillos.
“Did you know you have tomatillos?” she asked. They were overgrown, and the sweet, sticky fruits had burst their papery husks and fallen into heaps on the ground.
“I’m too tired to care that I have tomatillos,” I said. “Can’t you play with Pella?” I asked. Our toddler had carefully arranged a sea of Schleich figurines, each of whom had a complex backstory, on the floor and watched me expectantly, even as I walked the screaming baby. After playing with the dragons, tigers, and fairies, my mother roasted and chopped the tomatillos, added cilantro, green olives, salt, and lime. Roasting the tomatillos enhanced their sweetness, which contrasted nicely with the briney, meaty olives. The salsa was still warm when I dug in with tortilla chips.
Unlike Kristof, with his green thumb, I’ve always been a reluctant gardener. I don’t enjoy gardening. I enjoyed having gardened. Over the years, I would feel guilty about every ripe tomato that dropped heavily from the vine, splitting its skin and rotting on the ground. In the middle of the night, I’d wake and think about our sometimes semi-neglected garden. It seemed to me I could hear the squash, growing to the size of yellow submarines; tomatoes thudding; pea pods shriveling and giving up the ghost; lettuces and unsnipped basil flowering and going to seed.
house poor, garden rich
Our house, in case I hadn’t mentioned it, was no prize. It was a warren of small, dark rooms on different levels, three steps up or three steps down, with walls covered in fake wood paneling and handrails in the hallways, which were covered in crimson-red carpet that looked like it belonged in a church. Before we bought the house, a fast and dirty remodel had been done to turn the garage into a living room, carpet laid directly on the concrete slab. I don’t know how they did it, but every night, ambitious snails, mealworms, and Jerusalem crickets the size of my thumb found their way into this room, burrowing out from under dull brown carpet, the snails criss-crossing it with their trails. There was an uninsulated bunk room addition of two bedrooms and a bath that we kept closed off much of the time because it was too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. The former homeowners’ 8 children had slept in those rooms, one for girls and one for boys. The sinks and toilet were child-sized.
Outside, there was a rickety deck where our kids would play, riding their tricycles and running around barefoot; I followed after them with a hammer, tapping the uneven nails into the boards so the kids wouldn’t skin their toes. And a fiberglass pool from the 1970’s seemed more a liability than a blessing with its chain link fence; I determined never to let the children out of my sight.
I might have preferred something smaller and easier to keep clean.
The mortgage on this house, along with exorbitant California property taxes, took a larger than recommended chunk out of our income. Kristof had recently left a difficult employer and taken his first job as a consultant winemaker for a start-up boutique winery. We were happy with the paycheck, until we realized that by the time we paid for health insurance and business insurance, there was nothing left to live on. On top of that, we had started our own Cabernet Sauvignon label in 2002, and instead of launching it into the Great Recession of 2007-09, we decided to keep cellaring the wine.
So, he found another client, then another client, and another. If there is such a thing as a “first wives club,” then there should also be a “founding winemakers club” because the risks and work undertaken are great, starting from scratch in hopes of building a successful brand. But he thought it was great fun. Harvest was the hitch. Kristof worked three to four months straight without a day off. Sometimes, if the grapes were all ripe at the same time, he worked 20-hour-days and slept in his truck.
Things in the house started to break. When we realized that the septic system pipes were no longer sound, Kristof redid the piping himself, along with two vineyard workers who picked up extra hours helping him in the yard between their real jobs. Dying Sequoia pines in our front yard dropped branches the size of small trees during a windstorm; it would have cost $20k per tree to have professionals take them down, so Kristof rented a cherry picker and did it himself. One weekend, he used a sledge hammer on our stone fireplace, which had cracked in an earthquake many years before. He tacked up a sheet of drywall, and I let the children draw on it with crayons while I cooked dinner. We lived differently than most people.
Instead of taking a summer vacation, we had the garden. All summer long, our youngest, Sanna, camped in the backyard in a tent. She dyed her fluffy white rabbit pink by giving it a bath in cherry Kool-Aid. Our daughters grew up pruning trees, gluing pipes, using power tools, helping their father patch and backflush the fiberglass pool, and running a neighborhood produce and fresh egg delivery business out of a bike trailer.
the reluctant gardener
Gradually, without my being fully conscious of it, the curves in the Venn diagram of life goals must have shifted until eventually they overlapped, creating one circle. This happened in 2020, the year of the COVID-19 shutdowns. The children looked like wraiths by the time they finished their digital schooling, all the blood drained from their faces. Pella was a junior in high school, Sanna a freshman. As soon as Pella clicked her laptop shut, she headed for the garden. She made gallons of barely sweetened, highly-acidic (a true winemaker’s daughter) plum jam that year; fashioned whole, round ratatouilles and tomato pies. Pella was the one who finally got me to learn hot water bath canning. I had to overcome an ingrown fear of botulism. “Botulism prevalence is a myth pushed by the Big Food industry so that people won’t can their own food,” she said (my daughter, sounding like me). We canned, pickled, lacto-fermented, sun-dried. For the first time ever, we used every bit of food we grew.
During the summer peak season, l’ll dive into making side salads from Jane Coxwell’s Fresh, Happy, Tasty for weeks at a time. We’ve made mounds of Yotam Ottolenghi’s corn slaw, zesty with mint, cilantro, and red Fresno chili peppers. My sister, a vegetarian, recommended Mollie Katzen’s Vegetable Dishes I Can’t Live Without, and even though I’m not a vegetarian, I think you would do very well cooking from that book all summer long and adding a side of simply grilled meat as an afterthought. If you have a thriving garden and a freezer full of meat, you can go weeks without grocery shopping, until you realize you’re out of coffee or milk. Mix in a few classic cookbooks like Perla Meyers’ The Seasonal Cooking: a Return to Fresh Foods or Nourishing Traditions, adapt recipes with the flavors around us (Mexican, Vietnamese), then stop using recipes altogether and cook simply and intuitively, and you’ve got a mash-up I call wine country home cooking.
This year, we’ve planted as many of Brad Gates’ Wild Boar Farms heirloom tomato seedlings as we could find. The potatoes and beets are in the ground, the beans and peas starting their climb. I’m reminded of a friend of ours who is a mushroom hunter. There’s an enormous glass jar on his kitchen counter that is filled with dried chanterelles. It’s like looking at a jar filled with gold coins, as far as I’m concerned. That’s the feeling of being vegetable-rich.
Lavender Lemonade Tiramisu is just me experimenting and playing around with all the tropes of summer desserts (ice box cakes, no cook trifles, juicy berries layered with white sandwich bread and whipped cream, grilled peaches stuffed with mascarpone) and winking. Except…it’s good. (Obviously, for those who are easily confused—and who isn’t these days?—this isn’t the real tiramisu. I’m just asking a question: what if we swapped the espresso out for something else? What would happen? And why not lavender lemonade, the trendiest of summer drinks?) It seems mandatory for summer desserts these days that they be dusted with lavender buds, and I have no problem with that. Lavender lemonade makes me laugh because my daughter once worked in a very conventional, stodgy sandwich shop that served menu items like chicken pot pie soup. If something (like chipotle aioli) made it on the menu, you knew it was mainstreamed now. One spring, the proprietress, with a glint of prosperity in her eyes, got the idea to sell cups of lavender lemonade to college students for $5 a serving. Lemonade is not enough, now, but lavender lemonade is. I made this dessert with plain white sandwich bread, but here’s the thing: I think it would make an awesome wedding cake. Possibly the best wedding cake ever.
There’s a story behind the name “Aspirational Tomatoes” because I once aspired to make them. I was reading Australian Gourmet Traveller in the 1990’s, and I really thought I was on to something special with my imported magazine. I came across an editorial spread about a charming, rustic, Italian farmhouse meal alfresco. Luxuriant branches of roasted cherry tomato branches decorated each plate in front of lithe, attractive people. I took note. This was the first time I realized that, no matter how hard I persevered, I would not be able to replicate a recipe. I’d never seen cherry tomatoes on the branch for sale, anywhere. Not even farmers’ market. Money could not acquire these tomatoes; one would have to grow them.
To me, these simple tomatoes were the equivalent of a supermodel rolling out of bed and saying, “What? I just wake up like this.” You either have it, or you don’t. (A garden or even a potted tomato plant.) I can see them now in a posh Napa restaurant, on a stark naked plate, settled next to a slab of (say) snowy halibut commanding $50. Go ahead and laugh at me if you want, but those boughs of cherry tomatoes signified something to me. What? They were enough to get the wife of an assistant winemaker living in an apartment next to Jiffy Lube dreaming.
Last week I made jalapeño jam because the bush was full of ripe peppers. I added padrón, orange and red pimento, and regular green and yellow Bell peppers, too. I didn’t think much of it, other than it was an effective way to preserve peppers, if by means of a fusty, old-fashioned recipe, the sort of appetizer moms used to bring to neighborhood Christmas parties when I was a kid.
But then something unexpected happened when we cracked open a jar, spread it on brie cheese and crackers, and paired it with the ‘22 SANNA Sauvignon Blanc. The combination of jam, cheese, and wine was incredibly augmenting—almost alchemical.
“I can’t believe the wine pairs with the jam,” I kept repeating. The jam improved after a sip of wine. The delicious wine tasted even better after a bite of jam. Anything sweet or spicy begs for an off-dry white wine, yet our wine has zero sugar. So why did it work? The jam does have a kind of botanical, gin-and-tonic depth of green flavors, plus a refreshing seashore salinity that matches the wine’s profile, and the acidity in the wine cuts through the creaminess of the cheese. We were really onto something, snack-wise.
Then Kristof said that the combination of flavors brought him back to an exact place and time: he was 13 years old, working as a ranch hand in Montana, and he and the other ranch hands went to the hot springs.
“I can’t tell you why,” he said, “because we weren’t eating or drinking anything, but this combination of flavors just activated a very specific sensory memory, and I can feel and smell what it was like to be there again.”
This is an example of involuntary memory, which Proust famously described in his incident about tea and the madeleine; different, too, because it bought back the sensory memory of an event that didn’t include flavors.
I closed my eyes for a moment and tried to conjure up sensory empathy. Yes, I could almost feel the sense of relaxation and well-being one feels upon slipping into hot mineral water, could almost smell pine in the cool air and the hot steam, after a bite and a sip of our pairing. It didn’t make logical sense, but it made sensory sense.
Many times I have navigated life with the aid of dimly-remembered, murky emotional memories, which are perhaps similar to sensory memories. I sometimes remember an emotion—positive or negative—and my intuition with its complex intelligence beyond anything artificial intelligence will ever possess helps guide my rational decision-making. Wine is extraordinary for its part in activating and augmenting emotional and sensory memory, and I think time spent refining and developing a sensory vocabulary is well-spent. And yes, the winemaker really does go home and talk to his wife about flavors, nuances, and scents. This has been our life together for 35 years.
Can reading a recipe alter a person’s life? I think it’s possible. Recipes, at any rate, are compressed forms of communication that often include generational experience. I’ve owned Elizabeth David’s cookery book French Provincial Cooking (first published in 1960) for 30 years but never read it until this summer because it’s over 500 pages of dauntingly tiny text with only the occasional black and white drawing. And yet, it’s rewarding reading, for her wit alone. How different our cookbooks are today with giant glossy photos and everything broken down so that a third-grader could follow directions. I like it when someone says, “add a seasoning of salt and a lump or two of sugar,” trusting that I’m adult and can figure out how to season.
It’s her chapter on soups that really gets me, as she remembers “vegetable soups…composed of cheap vegetables such as carrots, potatoes, and leeks, enriched with good butter and cream and faintly flavored with parsley or chervil, made into purees of about the consistency of thin cream…they were soups which embodied so much of the charm, the flavours and scents of a country house kitchen garden.” She goes on to explain that, “this is one of the dangers of a good soup…people are astonished by the true flavours of a well-balanced home-made soup and demand more helpings if only to make sure that their noses and palates are not deceiving them.
I made her Cream of Tomato and Potato Soup with our garden tomatoes and new potatoes that are unlike any potatoes I’ve used before because they are juicy and crisp and snap when you cut them, leaking juice like a ripe apple. I couldn’t wait to indulge in the monastic simplicity of this soup, which surely would be transforming. And yet. She warns you, towards the end of the recipe: “For all its simplicity and cheapness, this is a lovely soup, in which you taste butter, cream and each vegetable, and personally I think it would be a mistake to add anything to it in the way of individual fantasies.”
No sooner did we take a spoonful of this satisfying, pure, and comforting soup into our mouths, than we began to think of things we’d like to add to it by way of individual fantasies. For me, that was croutons and crème fraîche, for Kristof red pepper flakes and cubes of fresh tomato. No, I reprimanded him. You must not! Show restraint! I’m reminded of the Sauvignon Blanc we make. I have suggested to Kristof, from time to time, that if we aged it in oak, we could call it a Super Sauvignon and charge $80/bottle like other Napa producers and probably have an easier time selling it. Nope, he says. Nope. Nope. Nope. It’s pure. It’s fresh. It’s perfect. Many people will not understand that, but we do.
Her soup recipes mean something to me, the ethos of them. And yet, on the continuum of flavors we love, the spareness and purity of her beloved vegetable soups lies on one end, because on the other, we love the riotous bursts of complex flavors in, say, an Ottolenghi salad with black limes or pomegranate molasses. One of my favorite food memories, in fact, came about the year Kristof and I were put in charge of making a salad for the annual Christmas Eve Swedish smorgasbord at his parents’ house. Every year his extended relatives gather and dine on homemade potato and pork sausage (potatis korv), a struggle food if ever there was one (along with lutefisk, a rehydrated fish), herring, meatballs, boiled potatoes with white sauce, rice pudding, Jello-O salad, lingonberry sauce, hot fruit soup (made from rehydrated fruit), and…oh, yes, we should probably have a “green salad.”
Kristof had given me a copy of Yotam Ottolenghi’s Plenty More the Christmas of 2018, along with a mandoline for slicing vegetables, with the idea that we should cook together more; perhaps he was concerned our interests were drifting apart. That’s a gift of active love, more so than a diamond necklace, I think. So, we were assigned the task of making a “green salad” (is there any other kind?), but we made something so colorful and show-stopping that relatives had us pose for photos by the giant dish of vibrant purple cauliflower and greens mounded with red Fresno peppers and mint, dill, and cilantro. Swedes don’t like tall poppies (so to speak) or anything that calls attention to itself, but everyone was captivated by the fresh flavors of our salad.
