I spent much of yesterday outside--planting garlic, rolling up hoses, clearing out dead lily stems, emptying flowerpots, spreading compost, then riding my bike across the neighborhood to pick pears. Now a half bushel of hard brown pears sits in my living room, next to the dwindling harvest of green tomatoes, and later in the week, after I get back from Monson, the fruit should be soft enough to process--probably mostly as sauce, but maybe I'll get a pie out of them as well.

It is a treat to have such good ingredients to work with, but now that I'm on the road so often, I have to be smarter in how I plan for meals--how I use the freezer, for instance. I've taken to stocking up on fish, which doesn't require a ton of space (all we we have is a basic old-style refrigerator) and thaws and cooks relatively quickly.  Last night's meal was an example of ease: salmon marinated in miso and maple syrup, then roasted on a sheet pan with green beans (mine, from the freezer), a side of mixed grains (mostly quinoa and millet), a salad of yellow and red tomatoes, and apple crisp for dessert. Lots of cilantro and mint were involved, and even a bit of late basil . . . it was one of those meals that tastes like the season. And if I hadn't dawdled, I could have made the entire meal in under an hour; the crisp was the only item that required significant cooking time.

Probably it's silly (also boring) to spend so much time reprising meals, but except for my four years in college housing and the handful of years when I was working full time, I have always been the cook-in-chief. As everyone who holds that position knows, it's an endless and complicated responsibility.

By the time I was in high school, I was regularly cooking family meals--not all that enjoyable a task as my father has food issues and it was impossible to experiment with anything outside his customary diet. Also, I had no control over grocery shopping or garden: what showed up on the counter was the material I had to work with.

Still, it was a start. And then, in our first apartments together, T and I undertook our apprenticeship to cookbooks: Julia Child's, Marcella Hazan's, John Thorne's, Richard Olney's. I learned a few skills. I made spectacular errors. By the time we moved to Maine, I had learned how to grocery-shop, and now I began to learn how to garden. Of course, Harmony was a terrible place to be a gardener--too much tree cover, stony acid soil, a short growing season--but the wild foraging was magnificent, and after a while I figured out what I could and could not grow there. It was hard, though. My arms were full of babies, my barn was full of goats, my hours were full of firewood.

So despite its raggedy edges, this tiny plot in Portland can sometimes feel like Eden. Without children at home, I have more time of course. But I also have full southern exposure, rich soil, and a seaside climate. I don't have the space to grow a lot of produce, but what I do grow is far more lush than it was up north. Finally I am learning what it means to make a kitchen garden: not a farmer's garden but a cook's garden . . . a very, very different thing.