Mediterranean Women Stay Slim, Too: Eating to Be Sexy, Fit, and Fabulous! (45 page)

2 pounds fresh asparagus, stems

Salt and pepper to taste

trimmed

Freshly squeezed juice of 1 lemon

1⁄2 cup extra-virgin olive oil

1.
Preheat the grill to medium. Drizzle the asparagus with 1⁄4 cup of the olive oil and season with salt and pepper.

2.
Grill the asparagus on all sides over medium heat. Be careful not to overcook.

3.
Arrange the asparagus on a platter and drizzle with the remaining 1⁄4 cup olive oil and the lemon juice. Serve immediately.

Why Olive Oil Is Not Fattening

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√ Olive Oil: The Mediterranean Diet Secret

Okay, so I’ll say it one more time: The fat content of the Mediterranean diet works because most of it comes from olive oil and not from meat. The secret’s out. Olive oil may be a fat, but it is
not
fattening. Eat less meat, and do what Sicilian grandmothers have done since they were little girls: drizzle wonderful olive oil over fresh baked bread instead of using butter. I once heard a Sicilian grandmother proclaim that eating olive oil “oils your insides.” Maybe so . . . have you ever seen an old Sicilian face that wasn’t beautiful?

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C

5

To the Market and in the Garden

Chi cerca trova.

Who searches, finds.

I love to stroll through the gardens at Primo, choosing flowers for the tables or checking on the progress of the artichokes, cardoons, asparagus, tomatoes, and squash, or through the greenhouse where we grow exotic greens all winter long. To me, growing the food you will eat and serve to family and friends is such an important way to understand and be connected to the world around you. It makes eating a pursuit of pleasure and spirit, and it is very Mediterranean.

In the Mediterranean, food is such an integral part of life because people grow it themselves or know the people who grow it for them. Women choose their food with full attention, spending time in the marketplace carefully selecting the perfect vegetables and fruits worthy of their family table. They talk to the growers; they know the places the growers work and live. They buy food daily or a few times per week, so it is used at its peak. And they lovingly prepare this food and share it with their families.

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When you connect with your food from its beginning—

either growing it yourself and nurturing it to maturity or following the seasons and crop cycles with the growers at the farmers’ market whose tables you patronize—you are more likely to pay attention to what you eat. Food becomes more than something you bought, unwrapped, and swallowed on your way from here to there. It becomes an event and a real celebration of life.

Involvement with your food and the knowledge of its origins is powerful. It connects you to your food in an organic and natural way. Not only does food taste better and fresher when it comes from nearby, but shopping, cooking, and eating with this connection to food from its beginning helps you to lose weight—that is, when you appreciate every bite, when each dish comes from somewhere familiar and holds all that meaning, mealtimes slow down and you get more from them. You savor the very best and reject anything less. You regain balance, and so does your body.

These are very nice ways to cook string beans, but

they interfere with the poor vegetable’s leading a

life of its own.

—Alice B. Toklas, American writer

I’d like you to think about two things as you read this chapter: (1) whether you can do some of your own growing, even if you only have a tiny window box or a small space on a patio; (2) how you can take better advantage of local growers.

√ You and a Garden

One of the reasons that Price and I knew the house and land in Maine were perfect for our restaurant was due to what we ob-Mediterranean Women Stay Slim, Too

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served when we walked around the outdoor space. The acreage here at Primo is expansive and perfectly situated for a huge garden and two greenhouses. The garden is a constant adventure, always yielding new and beautiful things for us to serve in the restaurant. The food we serve is often quite literally just picked.

You can’t get fresher than that. We grow asparagus, fennel, shallots, garlic, endive, plum tomatoes, alpine strawberries, and squash, just to name a few of our crops. We also grow over two hundred varieties of flowers, both edible flowers for garnishing the plates at Primo and flowers for decorating the tables.

I love our tea garden, where we grow herbs for the teas and tisanes that we serve in the restaurant, and for our own personal use, too. (I told you that I drink herbal tea all day long.) Harvesting my own fresh herbs from the ground beneath my own feet means a lot to me. It connects me to this land, the town, and the climate. It makes me feel that I am a part of this place, and it gives me that Mediterranean sense of place, too. It’s a wonderful feeling that Mediterranean women have enjoyed for centuries.

Our gardens are all organic. Our gardener, Lucy Yanz, tends to everything, nurturing vegetables and fruits that grow easily in Maine and many that wouldn’t normally thrive in this colder coastal climate with its rocky soil, such as tomatoes, eggplant, cardoons, and artichokes. Lucy’s crops thrive because of her care and skill, her natural methods, and her intuitive way of

“listening” to the garden and understanding what the plants need.

Lucy says that what keeps her gardening is the trust that develops between herself and Nature through the process. She finds herself continually amazed at the way things grow and how gardens continue to change, evolve, and reinvent themselves with so little intervention. Lucy’s one priority is to keep the soil healthy. She uses her intuition about what the plants
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need. Lucy spends a lot of time in the Primo gardens, observing and thinking and pondering. She is an excellent example of someone who lives a Mediterranean-spirited life, even though she is not of Mediterranean heritage. She works very hard, but she also understands that work is not about speed. It can be about slowing down, waking up, paying attention, and really being present with your work and yourself. When Lucy stands in the garden, she is really
in
the garden, and the garden speaks to her. Lucy’s work becomes part of who she is, and who she is becomes a part of the earth she tends.

Lucy’s approach to gardening is really very simple. Rather than focusing on what is wrong in the garden, she focuses on what is right. She works to keep the plants healthy because healthy plants tend to resist bugs and disease. She tries to understand just what the plants need at the most basic level, staying away from treating problems (unless they are crucial, and always organically) because Lucy believes quick fixes such as chemical sprays quickly become an addiction. Tuning in to what is really going on is time-consuming but more effective and natural. Lucy would rather step back and look at the big picture.

We have two greenhouses that provide us with greens year-round. One greenhouse is heated just above freezing to grow frost-hardy greens. The other is solar, and stays warm in winter purely by the heat of the sun—the greenhouse effect, working for us all through the Maine winter!

You don’t need acreage to grow a garden. You don’t even need a yard! If you have a yard, that’s great. Dig a plot just large enough for what you are able to keep well watered, weeded, and tended. Grow some dependable vegetables for your area, but also experiment with a few that might be harder to grow. And don’t get discouraged when things don’t work.

Nature is cyclical. You always have another growing season to try something new if you learn from your mistakes.

Mediterranean Women Stay Slim, Too

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I hope you won’t let lack of space dissuade you from plumb-ing the earth’s bounty. For those who love to garden or love the idea, a backyard garden, whether extensive or small, can be a tremendously satisfying hobby. Maybe you would like to grow corn and beans, peas and lettuce, or big beefy tomatoes. Maybe a small herb garden appeals to you, or a tea garden like we have here at Primo. If you are lucky enough to have fruit trees, you probably already harvest some of your own produce, but you can also grow grape vines, plant a strawberry patch, or nurture blueberry, blackberry, raspberry, or even gooseberry bushes.

You can grow vegetables and fruits in containers on a deck, or herb gardens in a sunny window.

Growing your own food adds a whole new dimension to understanding where your food comes from. You not only know your food’s history, but you make it happen, nurturing the plants until they produce rewards. Gardening can become an almost spiritual pursuit if you let it, and there is no better way to eat your vegetables and fruits fresh.

I think this is what hooks one on gardening: it is

the closest one can come to being present at the

Creation.

—Phyllis Theroux, American essayist

Here are some tips from Lucy to help make your own home-gardening efforts a blossoming success:

1. Make compost.
Composting is easy, even though some people have the impression it is difficult. Find a place in your yard for a pile. You can surround it with chicken wire or not. Compost all of your food scraps and mix them with your yard waste. Lucy says, “Most people have a pretty good balance on hand between their kitchen scraps and their yard waste, creating the perfect
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blend for compost.” Turn it occasionally, mixing it up with a shovel. Water it occasionally, and voilà—black gold for your garden. Layer the compost over your garden whenever it is ready.

“Compost is really the most natural process in the world. Nature does it all the time,” says Lucy. You can even make small amounts of compost for container gardens in a bucket on your porch or deck. Alternate thin layers of grass clippings and dried leaves with food scraps. In just a few weeks, you’ll have compost.

2. Prepare the soil.
Lucy prefers not to disturb the natural soil layers by deep digging. Instead, she aerates the soil with a fork, then mixes compost into the first few inches of soil—the nutrients from the compost filter down into the soil around the roots of the plants, creating an instant and completely natural fertilizer. That’s all Lucy uses. She also gives each plant the soil it needs. Any state agricultural extension will test your soil for a nominal fee, then tell you just what you need to add if you are growing organic vegetables (or anything else). When the soil is aerated, fed, and the right chemical composition, your plants will have the best possible chance at strength and health.

3. Don’t get discouraged.
Crop failure happens all the time, even to the most experienced gardeners. Just this year, Lucy lost a crop of artichokes. She says she put them out too soon. Artichokes are a hot-weather vegetable and they need to be managed just so. This year, it didn’t work. But will Lucy quit?

Certainly not. Lucy told me that if she had a graveyard for the plants she’s killed over the years, it would take up the whole town of Rockland! “But failures are how you learn, not a reason to quit,” says Lucy. “I know just how frustrating it can be when a plant or a row or the whole garden doesn’t work the way you planned, and that can be compounded when you have a small garden. I garden for a living, so I have to keep going no matter
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what happens—no matter what has died or isn’t coming on or gets eaten by bugs. I get very frustrated when I have to tell Melissa we don’t have this or that because it all went bad at the same time, and I have to keep being positive, but when you are working in your own home garden and nobody is paying you to do it, you can get very frustrated.”

Lucy believes that gardeners’ failures are often due to poorly prepared soil and to planting too early. “Gardens tend to catch up if you plant them later than you think you can. You might feel like oh, it’s too late, I didn’t get my garden in on time, but try it. Better a little late than too early, and the garden will benefit from the longer days.”

4. Be with your garden.
“Slow down, be there, put aside what you’ve been told about gardening and just be there. There are so many books and opinions about gardening, but it is really something instinctual that most people already know how to do, even if they don’t realize it,” says Lucy. Spending time pulling weeds, assessing plant health, spreading compost, watering, harvesting, and observing all the garden’s stages really puts you in touch with the Mediterranean way.

√ Your Guide to Farmers’ Markets

Much of what we don’t grow on the land at Primo, I get from local growers right here in Rockland. So many local or regional farmers are producing gorgeous organic produce, artisanal cheeses, spices and herbs, nuts and seeds—and not just in Maine. Some of my favorites include York Hill Farm in New Sharon, Maine, for artisanal cheeses; Wild Asparagus Farm in Whitefield for Maine wildflower honey; Watershed Farm in Ap-pleton, Maine, for organic vegetables; Peacemeal Farm in Dix-mont, also for organic vegetables; Spear Farm in Warren for
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vegetables; and Anson Mills in Columbia, South Carolina, for organic grains like their fabulous polenta and wonderful farro.

Chances are there are lots of local producers with fresh organic food right where you live.

Farmers’ markets, natural food co-ops, and even roadside produce stands are great places to shop. Many areas have a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program. You sign up, then every week throughout the growing season, you get to pick up a big sack of fresh produce grown and freshly picked by the farmers in your own community. You’ll get to eat seasonally the easy way, with all the very freshest and ripest produce handed to you. You’ll eat more fruits and vegetables, you’ll feel better, and you’ll be connected to your community in a very meaningful way.