Calabacitas

Serve on a crisp fall day when the cottonwoods are lining the rivers with gold and the aspens have crowned the mountains with light.

1 splash olive oil – enough to cook the onions/garlic

1 large onion chopped

4 cloves of garlic minced

4 medium zucchini, or any summer squash

4 plum tomatoes chopped, or one medium can

1 12 ounce bag of frozen corn or kernels from 6 boiled ears

4 roasted green chilies or 2 small cans of chopped green chili

2 teaspoons Mexican oregano, pinch salt, 1 tsp red chili powder,

Optional toppings:

piñon nuts

fresh cilantro

grated jack cheese

1) Heat oil, in a satisfyingly heavy large iron pot if you’ve got one, though any pot will do if you don’t.  Add garlic and onions and cook until they soften and beginning to get translucent.

2) Chop up the squash and add to pan – I like to slice zucchini in half lengthwise and cut into small half circles, to conjure the half moon and things between times

3) Chop up the tomatoes, add to the pan – use canned if it will help you get past snarling politically correct friends who may fly into a rage and block the path to the stove top if you attempt use of fresh-tomatoes-that-are-out-of-season for this fall dish.  (But fresh tomatoes are nice… sneak them in if you can)

4) Add corn, chopped green chile, oregano, salt and chili power: simmer

5) Serve with toppings (or not) on a crisp fall day.

Music to cook by: Cherokee folk song sung by Walker Calhoun of Cherokee, North Carolina, recorded at the Berea College Celebration of Traditional Music in October of 1990

Attending to Corn:

        7000 years ago corn began to leave behind its grassy ways to evolve under the First Farmer’s hand and begin its slow transformation to a perfect vegetable. Shielded in green husk and silk, kernels plump and sweet and comforting, corn found its way from the distant past to our pots and to our bellies. I once heard rumor that when the early green shoots push up new and fragile, on days the Hopi sun is hot beyond heat, a Hopi farmer might build each of his tiny corn plants a small flat rock lean-to, to keep a cooling shade over the little ones through the shimmering heat of the noon day high desert sun.  I hope it is true.
          A wonderful pueblo artist, Roxanne Swentzell, keeps a variety of ancestral corn, bean, and squash seeds; she gathers them from her people and other native peoples, grows them up, keeps some seeds, and stows them as living treasures tucked away in her fridge. Ms. Swentzell is a guardian, her fridge a rare portal of now that holds the way open between the past and present.  She is a good woman, and her garden, a good garden.  She is gentle.

Another fine woman and friend to corn was Barbara McClintock. She discovered the ordered wonder of gene regulation and transposable elements hidden in corn’s kernels; corn taught, she listened, and the ideas inspired in her were so profoundly new to mankind that it took many years before any of the rest of us to even began to understand what she was on about. We finally got it, and for her profoundly original and careful research she got the Noble prize. Corn said, “Gene expression is ordered, gene regulation can shape the nature of life, genes and the things that control them can move about, making something new.” These are things every student of biology now knows, we take them for granted and sometimes can loose sight their beauty, ideas cloaked in their textbook Ordinary. But these ideas first sparked in Dr. McClintock’s elegant mind through the study of maize, through her fascination with beautiful corn and its many cousins, many races, relatives just distant enough to reveal their relationships. She went off for a while to study the range and variety of corn in South America, retracing the emergence of its forms. I hope she enjoyed the colors of corn, the blues and reds and gold.  I hope someone took her dancing, though maybe not.  I gather she was a serious sort.