Thursday, January 20, 2011

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.

9 comments:

  1. OhMyGosh, I probably missed most of what you were saying because I'm having a papertoweldrawerliner epiphany! I SOOO need to do that -- you've probably posted it before and I've missed it.

    I did catch the part (and laughed) about the WitchCrazyBitch riding the bike though. And what's up with those tires -- having fun with drawing tools???

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  2. I dream of riding my bike to the farmer's market but I opted for "cute bike" instead of light weight & reasonable. I need to keep working out if I want to make it there & back in one piece. I don't know if you've considered this but at the end of the garden season, I take whatever's left & make veggie broth. Good way to use up some of that chard!

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  3. Allow me a moment to weep some (frozen) tears at the thought of riding a bike OUTSIDE.

    On the up side, we do grow grapes.

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  4. I so wish I could have seen you riding your bike with your farmshare. I would have tooted obnoxiously at you. In a good way, of course.

    I think I neglected to tell you the tale of our fridge and its over-full drawers. Well, all of our drawers have broken because of the weight of food I subject them to. We had to replace one a few years ago because it wouldn't work broken anymore. (It was like $50+ for ONE drawer!!) Well, on New Years Eve, another drawer broke beyond use. It's gone. And we haven't ordered a new one. I have all my food "stacked" in the area where the drawer belonged. We're rednecky for sure. If I *had* drawers, I might line them, too.

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  5. Wow, I was proud of myself when I bought "organic" vegetable broth from a box this week for my soup. The last time I rode a bicycle it had a banana seat (Brooklyn, 1977). We rode to get Italian ices. I do take spin class twice a week. That counts! Love ya Finny! Jealous of the warm weather. It's 11 outside now.

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  6. Wait...is your front tire of the ground due to the size of the load on your saddle bags? Daaaang girl! I ride my bike to the grocery store, if that counts. And I've never broken an egg! I think the nearest farm is like 50 miles away lol. Not very biker friendly. Boo hoo.

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  7. Very cool! I wish I could ride my bike somewhere constructive. Sucks living so far from town.

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  8. love this post . . . and i was thinking of you (not in a creepy way, i swear) because i used my immersion blender in a lovely vegetable soup (that included cauliflowr, which you will also appreciate) and remembered that it was a soup recipe of yours from like a year ago that inspired me to buy the thing . . . and I've been happily immersion-blending every since!

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  9. Anna - Yes. Aren't they a sight to behold? I love it when the drawers are clean and lined with new towels. They look so, I don't know, hopeful. And clean. Mostly just clean. I love that.

    The tire effect is what happens when you use a flash on reflective material. WEE!

    Jenny - I'm proud to say that I don't grow chard anymore. One season was plenty.

    My end of season crops are WAY easier to deal with now. And, you're right, veg broth is a good way to stew away a garden's worth of leftovers.

    Kris - WHAT KIND OF GRAPES???

    Lera - No one tooted at me, but the other folks picking up their farmshares and shoving them into the back of their cars certainly looked jealous of my little farmshare go getting rig :)

    I will, meanwhile, wish for a new drawer for your fridge because the thought of you "stacking" things where the drawer used to be is downright sad.

    TR - I thought of you this weekend while we were riding our bikes everywhere. It was glorious - 70 degrees - and I was loving it extra for you with your 11 degrees. You are stronger than I for sure.

    Meg - So, my front tire's off the ground because the kickstand props it up that way so that you can load the bike evenly without it tipping over, like it would with a normal kick stand. Meanwhile, it looks super extreme, right?

    Mom - Yeah, that would definitely be a bummer if we moved farther out of town. Though maybe then we'd be closer to the farm itself?

    Melissa - I LOVE THAT. Immersion blenders have changed the way I eat. For reals. I make a million soups now. So glad you're loving yours :)

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[2013 update: You can't comment as an anonymous person anymore. Too many douchebags were leaving bullshit SPAM comments and my inbox was getting flooded, but if you're here to comment in a real way like a real person, go to it.]

Look at you commenting, that's fun.

So, here's the thing with commenting, unless you have an email address associated with your own profile, your comment will still post, but I won't have an email address with which to reply to you personally.

Sucks, right?

Anyway, to remedy this, I usually come back to my posts and post replies in the comment field with you.

But, if you ever want to email me directly to talk about pumpkins or shoes or what it's like to spend a good part of your day Swiffering - shoot me an email to finnyknitsATgmailDOTcom.

Cheers.