Whew! No Kale
Coming back from the farmer’s market today, I peeked into our grocery sack, and…NO KALE!!! It’s a lot like winning the lottery.
I guess you’re probably wondering why.
Last fall, we signed up for a half-plowshare of vegetables at a local farm, under a typical community-supported agriculture (CSA) system. Basically, for about $275 we get a largish grocery sack full of veggies each week for around 32 weeks. This is actually a pretty good deal, because organic produce is actually one of the most expensive things (leaving out things like beef roasts and such) on our grocery list in most weeks. Our half plowshare works out to about $8.50 a week.
It’s been a very interesting experience, in a lot of ways. First, I had thought that we ate a lot of vegetables in a week. Wrong. A lot of vegetables is what we get each week now, and let me tell you, more often than not, we have what we’re beginning to call Veggie Saturday. This is the day where we eat something like salad and wilted spinach for dinner…and nothing else. We have to do this if we’re going to use up the previous week’s veggies. It’s unexpected, and a little intense.
Another unexpected side effect of this whole experiment has been learning just how ignorant I am of produce. You can walk through the average grocery store’s produce section and not feel too bad about your culinary knowledge. You may only see one or two things that you don’t recognize, and you can feel justified in this because those things are the latest hybrid, frankenstein combinations of things like cauliflower and carrots…why the hell would you recognize it?? But woe betide those who feel confident in their produce-identification skills who decide to join a CSA. Our grocery bag doesn’t come with labels, and the application form didn’t have pictures, so more than once, we’ve been left wondering, “What in the hell is that?” We even bought the closest thing we could find to an Audobon Field Guide for produce: a book, literally called “Produce.” Thumbing through this book was no help for some of our week’s allotment, though. In the end, the only way we could find out that we were the proud new owners of a fistfull of Red Russian Kale was by going through the list of veggies from our CSA application, and looking each up on Google Images until we found something that matched.
Now, how to cook it? No clue. We tried a recipe we found on Google Books, but that called for boiling the kale to the point where it tasted a lot like the spinach from lunch at my grade school when I was a kid. No way I was eating that, and if you’ve seen me, you know that doesn’t happen often. So we find ourselves still in the middle of kale season, and without anything represented a tried-and-true, winning kale recipe. It makes me a little nervous, I don’t mind admitting.
Now you know why I rejoiced when I saw no sign of kale in our grocery sack this week. WHEW!