Veggiemania

Vegetables have taken over my life.

I'm constantly worrying about our produce. Is it stored properly? Is it humid enough? Is it comfortable? Is it depressed and considering suicide?

I'm considering not going out of town this weekend as planned because I don't want our produce to have to stay home alone. And possibly rot.

We are splitting our CSA share with my in-laws, but they keep going on vacation, which results in us having more produce than we are able to eat in a week. It should even out next week when they come back - they will take the whole box - but who knows how well our produce will fare until then.

The other problem is room - we don't have enough in our fridge and we're losing track of what's in there. There is actually a list on The Jew and the Carrot that addresses this very issue - what you need to have on hand (including room) to best take advantage of you CSA share. But since nothing on the list includes someone coming to our house and cooking for us I'm not sure it solves our immediate problem.

I guess, we need to start making lots of salads to use up more vegetables at once. Of course, by "we" I mean KosherCook. Which brings up a whole other issue. For the last 4 years he has been doing almost all of the shopping and cooking. But now that he's spending all Monday dealing with CSA delivery and member pickup, we are starting the week off on poor footing. It starts Monday night with him being too tired to cook any of the actual vegetables and instead making hotdogs or mac w/cheese. Unfortunately I'm a big fan of both those dishes so I'm usually kinda psyched. But then, by the time I wrangle KosherCop into bed, I don't have the energy to do more than just unpack the box - no washing, no removing from storage bags (bad produce-owner, bad). With a beginning like that, the rest of the week just sort of spirals away from us.

On a positive note, this week we got romaine lettuce instead of the lettuce we had been getting. It's had a lot fewer bugs - I was even able to take it unwashed to work and just rinse it off before eating it with lunch. Of course watching someone wash a head of lettuce in the lunchroom prompts a few questions, so I'm becoming quite the CSA evangelist at work. Despite my own niggling fears that this experiment may fail if we can't get our act together, I have taken every available opportunity to talk up our vegetables and give a shout out to our farmer. And if the unwitting victim person who says, "that lettuce looks great" seems willing to listen, I'll continue on about our synagogue and Tuv Ha'aretz. Most people are at least really interested in the CSA. I've had several inquiries from people asking advice on how to join one or start their own.

It's very exciting! I feel like we are on the cusp of a very large cultural shift. Maybe it's just me - being immersed in this small community of people interested in sustainable living, but it seems like things are going to change dramatically - for the better - and soon.