But how it retains its texture, flavor and nutrition is more alchemy than mystery: In a makeshift lab in the center of her Cedar Mill house, vegetables are fermenting, taking on a new life as pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi and kvass.
Smith, 46, believes in vegetables. And she believes in preserving them.
"All a cabbage wants to do his or her whole life is become sauerkraut," she said. "Left to its own devices, it would."
Her pickled goods, along with fresh vegetables and herbs, make their debut when the Beaverton Farmers Market opens for the season Saturday.
Curious Farm, the small plot of land on Northwest Leahy Road where Smith lives with her 6-year-old daughter, husband and 16 chickens, came about organically.
When her daughter, Eloise, was born, Smith left her publishing job to stay home. Since then, she's grown the majority of her family's produce on their two-thirds of an acre. Last year, the garden's harvest was so great, she started selling it to neighbors.
Get details on days, hours and locations of Portland area farmers marketsSmith loved sharing the flavor of just-picked produce, and many neighbors were eager to take home eggs from hens that spend their days clucking around the banks of a tiny creek running along the back of the property.At the farmers market, however, she's excited to broaden her reach and find a few like-minded pickle-lovers in the crowd.
Think pickle, and you might conjure an image of a Vlasic dill sidled up to a barbecued burger at a summer cookout.
That's a pickle, sure, Smith would agree. But it's nothing like the pickles she came to know when she lived in New York for three years.
In New York, pickles are everywhere, she said. And they're "real," preserved through fermentation rather than heat-processed and steeped in vinegar.
When she moved to the Northwest, she set out to re-create the pickles she missed.
"I'm passionate about these pickles," she said. "And I'm excited about them."
A delighted laugh follows. Pickles themselves are funny, she said. Small green cucumbers -- the quintessential pickle -- have a funny shape, texture and skin.
BRENT WOJAHN/The OregonianCathy Smith slices beets for kvass, a nutritional beverage, in the kitchen of her Cedar Mill home. But soft-spoken Smith is earnest, even philosophical, about pickles. They are, after all, serious business."This is scary to a lot of people, because you're managing rot," Smith said. "It's thoughtful rot."
Her husband David, a former Intel engineer who's working on a startup, has helped her understand the science of fermentation, she said.
She turned her home into a mini processing plant and earned a domestic food processor's license so she could market her pickles.
She's taken a serious angle to a funny food because Smith has found that there's a flip side to gardening's joyous rewards: the fleeting season.
"When you spend three months coaxing the snow peas, it's sad and you want to preserve that season's bounty," she said. "Sometimes I'd cry when I couldn't figure out a way to save the produce I love so much."
In a pickle, though, she can arrest a moment and extend a vegetable's life.
So it follows that the more she's gardened, the more she's pickled: beets, carrots, garlic, turnips, peas, blueberries, grapes.
She works with a palette of flavors and colors that seem endless, spanning sweet, salty, tangy and spicy, orange, purple, cream and every kind of green. Such is the art -- and science -- of pickling.
"I love how it captures a season so beautifully," she said. "How it captures a moment in the garden."
-- Emily E. Smith
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