Living the weirdo dream.

You all are well aware of the existence of our farmshare and my ongoing obsession with my vegetable garden so it shouldn't come as any surprise to you that we have crisper issues.

As in, our crisper drawers, of which we have two, are constantly in rotation and usually full to the point of requiring extra hands and a careful strategy to close (slamming the fridge door sometimes works) and it is my dream sometimes to have empty crisper drawers so that when I look in the fridge I don't have a limp looking leek or something with its face smushed against the plexi-glass drawer staring at me and pleading to be rescued.

I long for empty crispers, is what I'm saying. So that I don't have to feel the dread and pressure of WHAT AM I GOING TO DO WITH ALL THOSE TURNIPS staring up at me when I go in for the tonic.

I come up with all kinds of strategies for using up the vegetables, because you may also know how I loathe waste, and it is sort of a sick obsession of mine to get to the bottom of the crisper with time to spare before the farmshare shows up again or my garden barfs up another 60 cucumbers.

So you should be able to understand how much I was looking forward to the three week break from the farmshare over the holidays. Right before Christmas and through to a week ago, the farm was "off" and so were our shares. And while some people might get all BUT I WANT TO EAT CHARD AT CHRISTMAS, I do not.

No. I don't want to eat chard ever and the blinking lights and idiots in big red pants don't convince me otherwise.

But even if I did, I doubt I'd get to it because I'd be too concerned with eating all the other stuff in there that's actually good. 

Which is what we did over those blessed three weeks. We ate our way to the very bottom of both crispers.

The fuckers were empty before the farm came back "on" and LO I even cleaned the drawers and re-lined them with paper towels because I'm fancy and trashy like that.

Never have I loved paper towels so much.

I spent a good amount of time looking at the glory of the clean, lined, EMPTY crisper drawers before the obvious issue that you've probably already arrived at came into my head: We have no food.

Yeah. That's a problem.

While it's nice to have clean, clear crisper drawers ready to accept the fresh bounty of the farm, my garden or whatever neighborhood fruit tree I decide to molest whilst out walking the dog, it does instill a bit of panic when one goes to make dinner and realizes that Oh, beef is not a vegetable and HEY neither is pasta, chicken, canned beans, these leftover taquitos from god only knows when or these pesto cubes.

Well, I guess pesto cubes could be considered a vegetable, but only in the way ketchup was considered a vegetable by the Reagan administration, though without all the sugar.

So, I'll tell you - it was slim pickins there for a while with regard to the vegetable portions and I got fairly creative with cabbage based salads. I guess I should be thankful that cabbage keeps so long and makes a good salad when paired with apples or carrots and that, when we picked up our last share in December, we got a bunch of enormous heads of cabbage.

I wish I'd taken a picture of these fuckers. It was like having the Cabbage Patch Kids in my fridge. The goddamn heads were so big they wouldn't even fit in the drawer. Had to prop them up next to my tonic on the big shelf and it was weird.

Anyway, so I made a lot of cabbage salads. That's not really the dreamy part. I lived the weirdo dream of emptying the crisper down to nothing and then, today, I lived the other weirdo dream of going to pick up the farmshare to refill the crispers ON MY BIKE.

Yes, friends, I've long harbored this fantasy of being the fruit on the bike that goes pedaling over to the neighbor's driveway to load up her bike bags with cauliflower and carrots and leeks and then fill up bags with the cartons of eggs and turnips and preserves and whatever else they give us to stuff into the basket on the front so that I can bike on home having not consumed a drop of fuel.

A whimsical holistic experience is what I was after, I suppose, and today I (ironically) raced home from work in my car, shoved food into the dog and saddlebags on Tulip (the bike, KEEP UP) and went madly pedaling off to pick up my produce from the neighbor's yard.

All while still wearing my work clothes which, you said it, included 4 inch wedge heeled boots, a long orange wool coat and navy blue leggings.

Yeah. I was whistling the Wicked Witch theme song, too, in case you were curious.

Crazy Bitch Alert.

But, I was losing daylight and don't yet have a proper headlight for my bike, so it was a race against the setting sun, which I won by only a very slim minute.

Scares me a little knowing that the eggs were in that front basket, there.

Though I was very proud to show off my haul to the dog, who was suitably impressed for half a second until the cat made a move for the door and she felt the need to block her entrance.

I may be inspecting this bag of sweet potatoes, kitty, but I'm tracking you.

These pets. Really, now.

So, I do hope you all will live the dream with me a little bit and enjoy the bounty which can be hauled home via Tulip and my own high-heeled chicken legs.

If only the Knog people knew the cauliflower carrying capacity of their bike bags.

This looks nicer than when it's jammed into the bike bags, but not by much because I keep taking photos with my phone. I'll stop that.

Now that these weirdo dreams have been fulfilled, I guess I'll have to come up with something else. Like, I don't know, growing my own grapes or something.