Category: vegetables

loose ends

Here I sit on my couch. Watching one of my favorite kick-ass women movies, laptop on my lap so I can jot down notes about a fight scene and look up the term “pigtails,” and eating a bowl of raw turnips.

Isn’t that what most people do on a Sunday night?

I’m hoping to have a post together for the blog event I mentioned yesterday. I’m also hoping to get some sleep. It’s been a rough week. Phoebe was sick most of the week, and not sleeping so well. She had to stay home from daycare on Tuesday, and some of Wednesday and Thursday. Also have a bit of a cold myself. Overall, I’m behind in both my work and my sleep. Which of course explains why I’m sitting here watching a movie and blogging at roughly eleven at night.

Tomorrow I go pick up my second load of veggies from the farm. As might be expected, I have not quite finished the first load. However, I have not done too terribly.

Here’s what I’ve made (prepared/cooked/eaten/served) of last monday’s crop:

  • a bunch of radishes and accompanying greens, sautéed with garlic and chives (first time eating cooked radishes. They were tasty.)
  • a head of bok choi, sautéed with sunflower seeds
  • a bunch of turnip greens, sautéed (the ones plucked off the turnips I’m now snacking on)
  • a bunch of dinosaur kale (again, sautéed)
  • a small bunch of something called Tat Soi, a dark green leafy vegetable that tasted a bit like arugula, and seems to be a relative of broccoli.
  • a salad of baby lettuce (which I did not sautée. Ha! See how creative I am?)

    • Here’s what I have left:

  • lots of flowering chives (which I’ll freeze for later)
  • a bunch of Red Russian Kale. Which is actually not red. But perhaps it is communist.
  • sitting here next to me in the bowl, two small turnips.
  • 2 and a half heads of lettuce. (I even gave one away)

    • Here are some recipes I’m considering for this week’s remaining lettuce:

  • curried lettuce stew
  • grilled marinated lettuce
  • lettuce kabobs
  • Cajun blackened lettuce
  • deep fried lettuce
  • lettuce popsicles
  • lettuce cake with whipped lettuce frosting
  • compost

    • I yam what I yam

    It’s time for another helping of Themed Things Thursdays. It being vegetable week here, in honor of my first pick-up of my CSA veggies, this Thursday Theme for Things is vegetables. Okay, the list is a bit heavy on the onion bits (with apologies to those who don’t like onions), but you can pick them out.

    some vegetables

  • beans
    Jack and the beanstalk, a fairy tale featuring magic beans that grow a towering beanstalk.
  • corn
    Children of the Corn (1984) A movie based on a Stephen King story. Horror in the corn fields.

  • spinach
    The cartoon character Popeye (The Sailor Man) gets super-duper strong when he eats a can of spinach. Even has a little song he sings when he gets all juiced up: I’m strong to the finish, ’cause I eats me spinach…
  • broccoli
    Powerpuff Girls episode 17 “Beat Your Greens“. Alien broccoli attacks.
  • cabbage
    The Kids in the Hall offers Cabbage Head, a man with cabbage for hair. (There are also the Cabbage Patch Kids, scrunched-up looking dolls that were all the rage in the 80’s, and that now have their own urban legend.)
  • pumpkin
    Peter Peter pumkin eater. A nursery rhyme. Also a song you can play on the piano using only the black keys.

    Peter Peter pumpkin eater
    Had a wife and couldn’t keep her
    He put her in a pumpkin shell
    And there he kept her very well

  • peppers
    Peter Piper A nursery rhyme and tongue twister: “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers”
  • carrots
    Bugs Bunny is known for his trademark carrot-munching. But did you know that his carrot-munching was a Clark Gable immitation?

    bugs

    Bugs Bunny’s nonchalant carrot-chewing stance, as explained many years later by Chuck Jones, and again by Friz Freleng, comes from the movie, It Happened One Night, from a scene where the Clark Gable character is leaning against a fence eating carrots more quickly than he is swallowing, giving instructions with his mouth full to the Claudette Colbert character, during the hitch-hiking sequence.

  • potato
    Everybody’s favorite spud has got to be the ever-dignified, interchangeably featured Mr. Potatohead (Apparently, there are many new Potatohead varieties that have sprouted, including the venerable Star Wars Darth Tater
  • sweet potato
    “Sweet Potato,” by Cracker. (Off the album “Kerosene Hat”) A rockin’ romp of a song. Be my sweet potato, I’ll be your honey lamb

  • yams
    Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe. Yams play a central role in the Nigerian community depicted in this novel. (See? I can get all literary, too.) (By the way, these yams aren’t the same as sweet potatoes, which are often called yams in the US)
  • turnip
    You can’t get blood from a turnip, or “You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip” (You can also find more garden-variety cliches) An expression meaning that it’s not possible to extract something from a source that doesn’t contain that thing.
  • onion
    1. The Onion (“America’s finest news source”) My own favorite Onion article? This eerily prescient one from January, 2001.
    2. Shrek (2001) An animated movie featuring an ogre who likens himself to an onion:

      Shrek: Ogres are like onions.
      Donkey: They both smell?
      Shrek: NO! They have LAYERS. There’s more to us underneath. So, ogres are like onions.
      Donkey: Yeah, but nobody LIKES onions!

    3. The End: Book the Thirteenth, the final installation of A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket begins with the following layery, teary-eyed, oniony sentence:

      If you have ever peeled an onion, then you know that the first thin, papery layer reveals another thin, papery layer, and that layer reveals another, and another, and before you know it you have hundreds of layers all over the kitchen table and thousands of tears in your eyes, sorry that you ever started peeling in the first place and wishing that you had left the onion alone to wither away on the shelf of the pantry while you went on with your life, even if that meant never again enjoying the complicated and overwhelming taste of this strange and bitter vegetable.

  • bok choi
    Bok Choi Boy, the story of a young lad raised by vegetables to become a legendary leafy-green fighter for truth, justice and better nutrition. (Okay, I made this one up.)
  • a whole bunch o’ different oversized veggies
    June 29, 1999 written and illustrated by Caldecott award-winnder David Wiesner. A picturebook featuring gigantic vegetables raining down from the skies. A beatifully illustrated, beautifully absurd book:

    Cucumbers circle Kalamazoo. Lima beans loom over Levittown. Artichokes advance on Anchorage.

    Check out some of the illustrations on the publisher’s webpage for the book.

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    vegetable medley

    greens_album.jpg I went to collect my first CSA vegetables this evening: an impressive selection of greens, greens, greens and more greens. Fresh, fresh off the farm.

    To celebrate, I thought I’d put together a musical tribute. We all know that green-friendly classic “give peas a chance,” but do you know some of these other vegetable hits?

    A Medley of Vegetable Songs

    1. we got the beets
    2. it ain’t easy being greens
    3. smells like teen spinach
    4. rutabagas keep falling on my head
    5. give my regards to broccoli
    6. are you lonesome tomato
    7. can’t take my eyes off arugula
    8. I never loved a man the way that I love yams
    9. saving all my leeks for you
    10. when a man loves a radish
    11. first time ever I saw your kale
    12. the dawning of the age of aspargus

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    putting my money where my mouth is

    Yick. That sounds gross. I will not actually be eating money, or putting any in my mouth. But I will be eating lots and lots of other green stuff.

    I’ve taken the produce plunge and signed up for a CSA (Community Sponsored Agriculture) share. This means that I’ve paid a subscription¹ price to get regular assortments of freshly harvested vegetables from a local farm. In doing so, we’re not only going to be getting lots of really good, seriously fresh vegetables, we’re supporting a local organic farmer in her efforts to farm sustainably.

    I’d been planning to try to buy more local produce this year, and was thinking of making trips to some local farmstands rather than forking over my usual baskets of money to Whole Foods. However, when I came across a post at Can we kick the bar here? about CSAs a few weeks ago, I realized that this could be something for me. I followed the link to look for CSA opportunities near me.²

    I’d heard of CSAs before (though hadn’t retained the name of them) from my sister, who knows a thing or two about vegetables (especially about cooking them). A friend of hers had signed on to a CSA a few years ago, and started a blog to chronicle her vegetable adventures: Vegetablog. But somehow, it didn’t sink in as something I wanted do until I read that other post.

    So, tomorrow, we start. We’ll head out to the farm and collect our veggies. Then will come the trickier part.

    I realize that I’m in for a big challenge. For me, for the past few years, cooking has usually involved throwing some brown rice in the rice cooker. That’s when I’m getting more complicated than a bowl of cereal. I’ve gotten a bit better with making food for Phoebe, and have regularly steamed up vegetables for her. But this endeavor will be big. Big. I do have a plan, though. I’m hoping to have friends over for dinner at least every couple of weeks to help us eat our vegetables. And what we can’t finish off, I’ll hopefully be able to pawn off on my guests. Every dinner guest can take home a head of lettuce or a parsnip as a parting gift.³

    ———————————

    ¹ Oops, almost typed prescription. “I’m sorry, those vegetable are not sold over the counter.”

    ² I’d also like to share that I came across that post by way of reading the last round up of Just Posts. So I’d like to offer this up as evidence that writing about issues that matter to you can make a difference.

    ³ So, if you are a local friend, you’ll be hearing from me soon about getting over here to get your veggies on. If you are a long-distance friend, and planning on travelling to New England in the next few months, you also get an invitation.

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