FOOD & DRINK FLASH IN THE PAN
SQUASH BEAN STEW
Creamy Beans are Made of These BY ARI LEVAUX
F
oods that grow together go together, so goes the old saying. It’s become the locavore’s anthem, your cue to coax whatever plant life you can from your home ground and figure out how best to cook it all. And live happily ever after. The seed catalogs that will soon arrive in the mail will tempt you to dream big, and you should. But in which direction? We can’t plant everything. Planning, and alas choosing, is an important part of gardening. You can’t order your seeds if you don’t know what you want to plant, which means you must ponder what you want to eat, and what you can’t get anywhere else. I can always buy carrots at the 28 | SHEPHERD EXPRESS
farmers market, summer and winter, so I don’t need to grow carrots. But it’s harder to get red cranberry beans, to choose one of many heirloom vegetable varieties that one might choose to grow. If I want to eat beans like that, I might just have to grow them myself. Luckily, they grow well in my area. And I know where to get seed. My friend David Lau is a seed farmer, which sounds pretty lonely, even by farmer standards. I kept him company one afternoon at his operation, called Red Tail Seeds, in a field behind a self-serve farmstand on the outskirts of Missoula. His rows have an overgrown, gone-toseed look to them from a distance. That’s
the point, of course. But up close the plants are less messy looking and appear to be more actualized. Full grown tomato bushes, never harvested and laden with fruit, staked against the weight, look like what Norman Rockwell would paint if he painted gardens. The seed heads of flowered lettuce towered over the garden, larger than life like Popeye after a can of spinach. And pods of cranberry beans, cascading from the plants in their unharvested bounty, dried slowly in the August heat. Lau sells the cranberry bean seed to Fedco Seeds, which calls them “one of the very best baking beans.” After they had dried and cured, Lau dropped off a sack for me Photo by Ari LeVaux.
