Unintentionally Long Post On Bicyles and Gear

So, I've been riding my bike a lot lately. But as I looked through the archives of this site, I noticed that I have not posted any pictures of my bike!! How do you guys even know what I'm talking about if you can't see my transportation love?

Here's my bike. It's a Rocky Mountain RC-30. It's classified as a "city bike," but I use the term hybrid. Isn't he beautiful? (The correct answer is yes.)


When I first got my bike, I gave the boy all the money I budgeted and this what he got me:
1) Bike
2) Helmet
3) Lock
4) Water bottle cage and water bottle
5) Headlight and taillight
6) Pump for tires
7) Streamers

That was it. I have since added to this list, slowly but surely acquiring lots of gear I swore I would never need. First up, let's just discuss the above list. I need a lock because I commute and frequently lock my bike up outside. If you are solely riding for pleasure, you may not need a lock. I have a Kryptonite U-Lock. No one has ever messed with my bike. Water bottle and cage are pretty important for staying hydrated on even the shortest ride. The pump I could have honestly lived without. There is free air at a couple of places on my commute. BUT, the boy is crazy about tire pressure, so, there you have it. We have like five bicycle pumps in our household. Headlight and taillight are necessary for me since I commute, frequently at night. If you are only a daytime rider, don't worry about it. Streamers are entirely optional, but I was insistent. People think I'm friendly and smile at me because of my streamers. I always appreciate the extra smiles.

Helmets. There is a lot of debate about the effectiveness of helmets. If you hit a car that's going 40 miles per hour while you're going 10 miles an hour, the helmet is not going to help you. But at a low speed accident, it may be helpful. I figure it can't hurt, so I wear one. It's up to you. Just know that if I see you cycling without a helmet, I will probably assume you don't care about your brain. But that's just me.

Below is RC-30 modelling streamers, U-Lock, and headlight. My U-Lock does not fit directly under my top tube where most folks seem to put theirs because my bike is, errr, small. We put it on the side like that and it doesn't bother me or interfere with my pedal stroke. The placement of that lock caused some stress in our early relationship, but we worked it all out. Gotta think outside of the box.


I have since obtained a few key things:
1) New saddle
2) Rack
3) New grips
4) New stem
5) Gloves
6) Pannier (bag)
7) Bike shorts
8) Basket

The saddle came from my friend, N., whose cat I also have. I guess I take everything from her. To be honest, I didn't have a real problem with the original saddle, but the one I have on there is also fine. The saddle was never a major problem for me. I bought bike shorts because everyone said I needed them and I spent a small fortune on them, but I have only used them about twice this summer. I don't really need them. But, just because that wasn't a problem with my rear doesn't mean it's been smooth sailing with this cycling business. I have had TWO major problems.

Major problem #1: My wrists hurt like hell. Seriously, I'd ride for an hour and my wrists would be killing me. So that's why you'll note all the things we changed on poor RC in an attempt to fix the wrist issue - the new grips, the new stem, and the gloves. Originally, the boy told me that gloves were for sissies, but once I tried them, it made everything better, and I told him to fuck off. Okay, I didn't really tell him that, but all the mechanical changes we made - adjusting saddle height, changing the stem, changing the angle of the handlebars - did nothing. Gloves fixed it all.

Major problem #2: Carrying stuff on the bike. Originally, I just used a backpack. Eventually we started blaming this for the wrist issues from problem #1 (too much weight on my arms and wrists was what we thought). I also decided I should look more adult and stop wearing a backpack to school at this same time. So the backpack got donated to a worthy charity, but then I was stuck.

That's when the rack came on. The rack is heavy. It's also useless on it's own. It requires you to have a special bag to hook on it, or bungee cords, or a basket. I have used all of these things. The pannier bag I have is a giant pain in my ass. It's heavy, it's awkward carrying it up and down the stairs with my bike. But, most importantly, I couldn't fit all my crap in it. For my jobs, I frequently have three or four heavy books with me. I couldn't fit all my books in the pannier.

Then the boy found my basket!! I love my basket. It's an Axiom Faux Wicker Basket with Brackets. The brackets attach to my rack. I have put upwards of 25 pounds of books in the basket. I usually put all my books in a tote bag and then just toss the tote bag into the basket. This basket? Has made me want to commute more frequently just because of it's total adorableness.



Note: I don't have fenders on the bike. I hate fenders. They ruin the line of the bike. Plus I refuse to ride in the rain or snow because I'm a diva. So no fenders. But fenders are useful if you ride year round. I guess.

The boy does all the routine maintenance on my bike for me. He trues the wheels every season and changed all the cables and the chain earlier this season for me. He has also fixed every flat tire I've ever had. I have no idea how much all this maintenance costs, since it is the boy's job. That's probably mean, but we have so few gendered chores, I feel no guilt about this fact.

And that's that. It's probably more detail than anyone wanted to know, but I felt like I needed to document it somehow. Happy cycling!!

2017 CSA Week 20: The Final Basket

This week brings us our last basket. I'm simultaneously sad that I won't get my weekly surprise box and happy I won't have to rush around like a lunatic on Thursday afternoons to pick up the basket before I have to go to my second job.
Sweet potatoes (a bunch of fingerlings)
Butternut squash
Onions
Garlic
Carrots
Rutabaga
Chard
Sweet peppers

This basket is completely usable.

I now have pounds and pounds of carrots and I know that it seems limitless right now for my raw carrots as a lunch staple, but my guess is that I'll be all done eating what I have right now by late November and I'll be sadly purchasing inferior quality carrots at the grocery store by December. I'll also eat those peppers raw with lunch sometime this week.

The chard will be used in a frittata. No one is surprised by that, right?

The onions and garlic are good storage vegetables. The rutabaga will be used as a crunchy part of a slaw that I'll make with the cabbage I'm still working my way through. 

Those sweet potatoes are the perfect size to make giant wedge sweet potato fries. I'm pretty pumped about those. Maybe for dinner sometime this week? Or a lunch dish on a day when we're home for lunch? 

And that is the 2017 CSA Season all wrapped up. Happy eatings, my friends, and we'll be back next year with more tales from the Regenerative Roots Farm.

CSA: Week 11

In this week's basket we found the following deliciousness:
Patty pan squash (1 giant one)
Cucumbers (2)
Slicing tomatoes (5)
Eggplant (2)
Rainbow chard
Sweet onions (4)
Sage
Carrots
Red peppers (2)
Muskmelon

If you pay way more attention to photos than I do, you might notice that there are no onions pictured. That's because we are overwhelmed with onions and garlic and I put them in someone else's basket.  Sorry, person who got twice as many onions as you thought you would.

Here's the plan as it stands:

• Carrots and cucumbers will be eaten raw in my lunches.  Maybe the peppers too if they're not too hot. If they are hot, I'll slice them up and put them in the frozen bags of vegetable scraps for stock*.
• The tomatoes do not look good. A couple already have soft spots. I've been quite disappointed in the tomatoes this year. We don't get very many and we haven't actually gotten any heirloom tomatoes at all - they've all been slicers. So this is good information for me to remember when I do the survey at the end of the year.
• I'll eat the melon for breakfast, I guess. Neither of us is a big melon fan, but Dr. BB actually has mild allergies to them, so it's on me.  (In our defense, we signed up for a "vegetable CSA," not a "vegetable and random melon CSA," so I think our continued bitchiness about the melons is entirely justified.)
• We'll make a frittata with the chard and eat it for dinner on Monday and Tuesday nights.
• We're kind of over summer squash at this point, so I'll probably grate and freeze the patty pan (and the two large zucchini we have left from last week) so that I can make some zucchini bread in the fall or winter.
• It's not enough eggplant for baba ganoush. If Dr. BB can get to the Farmers' Market tomorrow (I'll be out of town), maybe he'll get another one and I can make it again. If he doesn't go, though, maybe I'll just grill them.
• I have no idea what to do with the sage.  We mostly use it in dishes with winter squash, so I'm befuddled by its presence in this basket. It reminds me, yet again, that we suck at using the herbs we get.

We did pretty well with last week's basket. I even used some of the parsley in the baba ganoush.   Let's keep our fingers crossed for better tomatoes next week!

* I've discussed how to make stock before.  I have since learned that a real cost-saving secret is to save all the vegetable scraps as I clean vegetables, freeze them, and then I don't have to buy vegetables just for use in stock.  I don't peel carrots, but I cut off the tops. I throw those in the bags. We only use the leaves of rainbow chard and kale and I throw the stems in the freezer bags. Tops of peppers go in, along with pea stems and bean tips.  I think I can easily get three or four gallon bags full during CSA season.

What is this CSA Nonsense?

I've been writing about our CSA since 2013, so if I'm doing the math correctly, this is our fourth year, but I guess I've never actually written about the basics. CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. Essentially we buy a share of a farm at the beginning of the growing season and we get a basket of vegetables every week during the growing season. It helps to offset some of the upfront costs for the farmers, but we do take on some risk because if there's a drought or plant failure we might not get some foods (there were remarkably few snap peas this year and the melon situation at our farm has never gone well, for instance).  Here are the major benefits, as I see it.

1) We are supporting a small, local business. Our farmers are Dennis and Anne at Regenerative Roots. I want them to succeed because they are great, thoughtful people who really care about the land and proper management of soil and water resources. I can't say enough about how great it is to know that our kale was planted and picked by such wonderful people.

The farm. Photo credit to Regenerative Roots.

2) We get fresh food grown locally. Sure, I'm super jealous when my friends who live in Washington state are getting garlic scapes in fucking April, but I know that when it's in our basket, it's going to be fresh and delicious, even if we do have to wait until late June to get started.

3) Joining the CSA changed how I eat. I used to wonder how people were supposed to get 7 - 9 servings of vegetables a day, but that first year we got baskets, I quickly learned. You just eat them all the time. You want a snack in my house? Your option is chopped vegetables or yogurt. Lunch? How about a vegetable soup or some more chopped vegetables? You're hungry? Great. There are some radishes in that crisper that need to get eaten.

4) It makes me branch out and not eat the same thing every day.  Life of a Doctor's Wife asked about some of the logistics of the CSA and here it goes. Our farmers send us an email on Wednesday telling us what is in the basket, along with storage tips (in the fridge or on the counter? wash first or not?), and some recipes.  Then we pick it up on Thursday and that's that.

Having a CSA has encouraged me to try a lot of new things. I really enjoy papalo iced tea, baba ganoush, and kohlrabi, none of which I had made or eaten before. There are still some troubling vegetables. Beets are a puzzle still. I just don't like them. We struggle to use all our herbs - we've wasted so much basil and sage that it's a bit embarrassing. However, overall we do use most of our baskets and we feel pretty good about it.

Our farmers also highly recommended we buy Fairshare CSA Coalition's cookbook (above), which is dedicated to recipes using ingredients local to our geographic area. We bought it the first year and used it, but honestly most of the recipes require too many steps or a combination of ingredients we get in different weeks so we don't use it very much these days, but my favorite slaw recipe came from this book.  Anyway, if you join a CSA, you should look for something similar for your area!

5) It saves us money? Okay, I phrased this as a question because I'm not entirely sure that it does save us money. Our health insurance reimburses us about half the price of our share, which brings the price down enough that I think it's worth it for us. But we do end up buying ingredients we wouldn't necessarily buy to use some of the ingredients (like pickling spice and tumeric for the pickles, tahini paste for the baba ganoush, and SO MANY LEMONS).  Our farmers keep track of how much the baskets are worth at a farmers' market and make sure we get an extra basket or two based on how much we paid up front, so it really is a deal.

Again, I think it's worth it to our family, but just be aware that it doesn't always lower our grocery bill during the season when we're getting our baskets.

6) It can build community. Our farmers usually have 2-3 events at the farm every year. They've had bonfires, potlucks, pumpkin picking in the fall, gleaning in the fields, and farm tours. We've had the chance to meet other like-minded food interested people at these events.  We don't always take advantage of these get togethers because they're frequently on weekends when I work the most, so it's not always ideal, but we do always try to get to the pumpkin picking!

Overall, I LOVE our CSA. I really do. We don't even discuss whether or not we're doing it again now. We just do it. It might not be for you or your family or it might just be the thing you need to kick you in the rear to start thinking about canning, freezing, and eating more vegetables.

2020 CSA Basket #2

This week our basket was especially usable. I'm used to a lot of early spring baskets being mostly greens, which is great, but not always something that's easy for us to incorporate into our regular diets. This basket has a lot of crunchy vegetables in it and I'm always up for something I can just snack on all day long with no preparation beyond cleaning.

Fennel (2)

Collard greens

Radishes (plus greens)

Kohlrabi (2 small bulbs)

Potatoes (6)

Broccoli

Lettuce

This is entirely doable. We used the broccoli and two of the potatoes in a frittata last night.  I'll eat the radishes and kohlrabi as snacks. I'll use the lettuce in a couple of salads. I'll saute those greens and eat them as lunch.  I'm not sure exactly what we'll do with the fennel just yet. In the past we've done a slow cooker recipe with chicken thighs, fennel, and rice, but since we're trying to eat less meat, I don't know exactly what to do with it. Maybe this fennel chickpea stew?  

And that's it. A delightful basket we'll enjoy all week long.

2018 CSA Week #7

Last week, I was on vacation, so someone else got the basket.  This also gave me quite a clean slate. I basically cleaned out the fridge and the only things remaining from previous week's baskets are beets and garlic scapes. On to this week.  We have a basket that represents the height of the summer season to me.

Heirloom tomatoes (2)
Cherry tomatoes
Green beans
Cucumbers (2)
Beets
Fennel
Lettuce
Sweet onions (2)
Cilantro (which, as you know, tastes like soap, so I actually just shoved it into someone else's basket because there's no reason for me to ever bring it home)

1) I'm just going to eat those tomatoes raw like the sweet treats they are.
2) The lettuce will be eaten in salads for lunch, probably with the cucumbers and green beans.
3) We're making a chicken fennel rice dish in the slow cooker that will use the fennel and one of the onions.  This dish is super easy (1.5 cups of soaked and rinsed brown rice, 1-3 fennel bulbs cut into wedges, 1 small diced onion, 1 tablespoon crushed fennel seeds, 1 tablespoon smoked paprika, 2.5 cups of chicken broth, and 1.5 - 1.75 pounds of chicken thighs cooked in the slow cooker for 4-5 hours on high or 6-7 hours on low) and delicious. We make it almost every time we get fennel in the basket.
4) The beets will go in the fridge with beets from two weeks ago. I know I posted a recipe of what to do with them, but I haven't done it yet. It just seems like a lot of work for something I probably won't like. Ha!  I'll do it soon.
5) If there are any green beans left, I'll eat them raw as a snack.

3.28 Cooking - CSA Vegetables

Bestest Friend and I are in the middle of a blog project. Each day of the month we will post a picture on a pre-determined theme and write a little something about it. The theme for the twenty-eighth day of each month is "Cooking."
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Our CSA is in full awesomeness right now.  What we have below is this week's basket that I very excitedly picked up this afternoon. It includes a bulb of garlic, red carrots, a couple peppers, a zillion tiny onions, kale, a bulb of kohlrabi, cherry tomatoes, some heirloom/slicer tomatoes, and a personal watermelon (it's the yellow bulb that looks like it could be a giant lemon until you remember that I live in Wisconsin and there ain't no lemons growing here).  I could not be more excited about this basket.  Well, yes, I could, I guess. I really don't care for kale, but I'll eat it. It's a superfood, so does that make me a superwoman if I eat it?

Since Dr. BB can eat exactly one thing pictured here (the watermelon), this is all mine, my friends. If we were going to be here for the Farmers' Market this weekend, I would have purchased more tomatoes and kohlrabi, too.

Here's the "use all the CSA ingredients" plan:

Carrots: I will make a carrot soup with it.  It's a variation of this recipe, but I don't have a Wonderbag, so I just keep simmering the carrots on the stove stop until they're super tender.  Then I eat this soup for lunch and die a slow death of deliciousness.

Peppers: I'll just chop them up and eat them raw when I want a snack.

Kale: I'll saute the kale for ten to fifteen minutes on medium-high heat with lots of butter, garlic, and onions.  Then at the end, I will throw on some balsamic vinegar and melt in some cheese (I'm partial to this recipe with Parmesean, but I'll use whatever cheese we have handy in the house). Then I throw some walnuts on it before I eat it. This bunch of kale will probably allow me to do this twice.

Kohlrabi: I have some cabbage left over from last week's basket, so I'll make some slaw with the cabbage and kohlrabi (maybe I'll shred up ONE tiny carrot for the slaw for a bit of color).  The dressing will be some olive oil, a smidge of garlic, maple syrup, and lemon. I'll toss in some walnuts (or sunflower seeds, but we never have those) and dried cranberries or cherries. Delicious. It keeps in the fridge for several days, too.

Tomatoes: Seriously? EAT THEM LIKE CANDY.

Watermelon: I'll probably let the boy eat it since I'm not a big melon fan. If he doesn't want it, I'll eat it with my yogurt and granola with breakfast one morning.

CANDY!!

What's at your market these days?
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To see what Bestest Friend wrote about the theme of the day, check out her blog, Too Legit to Quit.

5.17 Method - Doing Laundry

Bestest Friend and I are doing a blog project. Each day we will write a blog post on a pre-determined theme chosen by a random noun generator. The theme for the seventeenth day of the month is "Method."

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Stephany and Sarah have both recently posted about how they do laundry. It is endlessly fascinating to see how people do different chores that we all have to do and it's even more fascinating to see how people with different size families do it (Stephany is a single lady and Sarah has FIVE children).  Here's how this couple does it.

This got long very quickly. TL;DR We wash our clothes once a week. 

I. Frequency

Generally speaking, we do laundry on Sundays. We might occasionally do a load in the middle of the week (this usually happens when we have five wet towels because someone rolled in scat and/or mud, but I won't name names about who rolls around in rabbit poop) or adjust the schedule if we're going to be traveling or something, but laundry is a Sunday chore.  We do it once a week because I only have enough workout clothes and undergarments to last about six or seven days, so if we don't do laundry on this schedule, bad things happen in my wardrobe! On average, we do three to seven loads a week. Now, this is a wide range because there are times of the year when we use more clothes than others.

In the winter, we do a lot less laundry because we don't wash our pants and shirts/sweaters with every wear and so it ends up mostly being socks, underwear, and towels and the loads are small. In the summer, heaven help us all, we change clothes all the damn time because we get sweaty, sunscreen-y, and there are times when I change four times in one day.

We wash our clothes, towels, and placemats every week. We wash our sheets every three to four weeks.  We wash our duvet cover hardly ever. There are certain items I handwash (bras, hats, scarves) and those get done on a very irregular basis when I feel like the situation is getting desperate. I probably don't need to tell you that bras get washed far more frequently in the summer than in the winter, do I?  Is this unusual? Too often? Not often enough? Who knows? It's just what we do.

This is my favorite basket. I like that it fits on my hips and makes carrying it up the stairs easier. My husband, however, literally has no hips and watching him carry this basket is HILARIOUSLY awkward.

(We were married for a couple of years before we combined our laundry. We used to do his and her laundry and never the twain met. We had separate laundry baskets, used separate coins since we didn't have washer/dryer in our unit back then, and even separate detergent! But when I broke my leg, Dr. BB temporarily took over all the laundry, threw everything into the same basket, and we've never gone back to separate laundry. It felt almost as momentous as when we got a joint banking account or bought a car together.)

II. System

A. Gather all the laundry and bring it to the downstairs bathroom. We keep laundry baskets in our bedroom, in the downstairs bathroom closet, and then we'll go around and collect towels from all the bathrooms and the kitchen and the mudroom where the vast majority of the time there's a towel or four that has been used to dry off a certain canine. Strip bed(s) if necessary. 

At this time, we have to REPLACE THE TOWELS in both the bathrooms. If we don't, inevitably one of us will use the upstairs bathroom and there won't be any way to dry hands. This replacing towels step must happen before anything touches a washer or dryer.

B. Separate into whites, darks, and colors. You people who don't separate your laundry are killing me. KILLING ME.  We don't have a strict order for which loads we wash, but if we are washing sheets, we do those first because then we can make the bed for dumping out the rest of the clothes to fold them. If we are planning on working out on Sunday, we might save the darks for last so we can throw in our workout clothes into a dark load. 

Some people wash all their towels in one load. We do not. We have dark grey towels (go in with the darks), white towels (go in with the whites), and colorful kitchen towels (go in with colors). If we put all the towels together, the white ones would immediately look dingy and, more importantly, our dryer could not handle an entire load of towels. They would just stay wet forever. When we first bought these towels, we washed them all at once and we literally had to line dry the towels because our dryer just couldn't take it. 

C. I hang dry the vast majority of my clothing. I put socks, underwear and some tshirts in the dryer, but otherwise line dry pants, dresses, shirts, bras, and workout gear. Dryers eat your clothes and I'm too frugal to spend money on things, so line drying it is. We have two of these drying racks and they are generally full to bursting on Sundays. We place these racks in our dining room, which is inconvenient to say the least. In my dream world in which we win the lottery, we have a designated laundry room with enough space for these racks. In the real world in which I don't buy lottery tickets, it just means the dining room is a bit cramped on Sunday nights.

D. When our dryer is finally done drying (we need a new one, but this one technically still works, even if it takes three times as long as it should, so we keep on keeping on), we take the clothes upstairs and dump them all on the bed while both of us fold and put away immediately.  On rare occasions when one of us is doing laundry solo, we fold the other person's clothes and put the folded items on the bed on their side. I don't honestly know which closet/dresser my husband keeps his socks and tshirts, so he has to put them away.  I love that we fold clothes together because it makes it go faster AND we always end up having weird philosophical discussion like "if you were one of these items of clothing, what would you like to be and why?". Marriage, man, it's insane.

E. On Monday morning, right after breakfast, I put away everything that's hanging on the racks. If something is still damp, the racks can remain up until after work hours, but we generally like to have those racks out of our dining room as soon as possible. 

III. Products

As you know, I have skin that freaks out if I try to change any product that touches my skin. There are  CONSEQUENCES Let's not ever talk about the time I briefly tried to use Palmolive instead of Dawn for washing dishes - never again.  So, we have used the exact same laundry products for over a decade. We once tried to change from the detergent we use to a "cleaner" detergent, but that experiment led to an emergency room visit, so now we just stay the course and hope to hell none of them ever changes their formula.

Detergent: Era - I have no idea why my skin is cool with this grocery store brand, but I am grateful because it's cheap and easy to find. Even at the height of supply chain issues in the pandemic, we could find it. My late MIL used Era and I think my husband and I take great comfort that on laundry day our house smells like hers used to.

Fabric softener: Bounce Free sheets - Honestly, most of my clothes don't get any fabric softener because I line dry so many of them.

Handwashing: Woolite Delicates - This does irritate my skin, so I have to be very diligent about rinsing these items incredibly thoroughly. I haven't really come up with a better system for handwashing delicate items, though.

Tennis balls: We have a three-pack of tennis balls that we use to wash things like coats, pillows, and the like. In particular, my down coats get washed with tennis balls in the dryer once or twice a season (and then line dried).  (I don't wash our pillows very much. I generally just replace them rather than wash them. Occasionally I throw them into the dryer to freshen them up with a dryer sheet. Is this weird? Should I wash our pillows?)

Mesh bags: I have a large number of mesh bags (maybe six?) that I use for things that get tangled with other things, particularly sports bras and camisoles. 

All right, let 'er rip. Tell me how wrong I am and what I'm doing wrong. I know there are strong opinions out there!

Scenes From Fall

We didn't take enough advantage of October. It seemed like time just flew by and then we only had one weekend before Halloween. We went to one haunt (could have potential, but let big groups move through, so we just kept coming up on the big group in front of us, which meant all the big scares were ruined for us).  We went to one corn maze (fun! beautiful day!).

The promised photo of dried out corn. It just sums up everything that is perfect about autumn in the Midwest.

We carved pumpkins, we bought bags and bags of candy, and exactly no trick or treaters came to our door. Whatever. More Paydays for me.

And my Christmas cactus is in full bloom. It's totally confused about what month it is.

And, honestly, I think it's important to point out that I rode my bike every day this week even though it's November. After six years of good work, my Axiom basket broke (here's a version, but it looks like the kind I used is no longer made, but you can see what it looked like in this old post if you're interested) and I had to buy a new one.

It was windy today. Look at my streamers stream!

Enter my new basket from Nantucket Basket Company. It's so adorable. 

CSA: Week 5

This week's vegetable basket includes:
Summer squash
Lettuce (2)
Green kale
Radishes
Sage
Garlic scapes

This is even  more dire than last week's basket, but we'll do our best.

• Squash: I think I'm going to try a variant of cornbread zucchini. I'm not sure if it will work in a gluten free recipe, but I'm going to make an attempt.  The worst thing that can happen is that it won't be that good!
• Lettuce: We're going to have tacos and burgers for dinners, which will help a bit. Otherwise, this is all on Dr. BB because I still don't like lettuce!
• Radishes: I will eat them, don't you worry. The bulbs will be snacks and the greens will be used as a lunch side over leftover polenta.
• Sage: I have no real idea on this one. Maybe use some of it to marinate some of the zucchini before roasting it?
• Scapes: Well, we still have scapes from last week!  I think we'll include some of them in a polenta lasagna we're doing tonight for dinner, but otherwise I'm sure I'll tell you about how we still have them for next week. 

We did okay with last week's basket. We still have some of the scapes, all of the onions, and we haven't yet grilled the summer squash, but the scapes and onions will keep for a bit and the squash will probably keep until the end of the summer if absolutely necessary.

5.23 Writing - End of Season

Bestest Friend and I are in the middle of a blog project. Each day of the month we will post a picture on a pre-determined theme and write a little something about it. The theme for the twenty-third day of each month is "Writing."
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Today will be the last frantic dash to pick up the CSA basket in between my jobs. Today was the twentieth week of the season and it was a bittersweet moment. I will miss the vegetables, but I will not miss the not knowing what we’re going to get or how much we’re going to get that makes grocery shopping arduous. I will miss the moment of excitement when I unpack everything on the counter and dream about all the delicious things we will make, but I will not miss kale. 

We missed a basket this year (someone forgot to pick it up when someone else was out of town, despite a reminder note, a text message reminder, and a phone call the night before, but the person who forgot was very, very, very sorry, so the person who was out of town must learn to be forgiving) and we didn’t always do super well at using everything in the basket (kale, ginger, and beets are a problem for us), but it certainly did force me to integrate vegetables into my diet in ways I never have before. I know pack the largest size Ziplock container we have fully of cut up vegetables for lunch every day – cucumbers, radishes, sweet peppers, tomatoes, beans, and carrots are most common – and eat everything as if it is dipped in honey.

Here is the haul for the very last week: two honey nut squash, two butternut squash, two peppers, some kale (argh!  no more kale until next June, thank heavens), a bulb of garlic, two red onions, carrots, and some sunchoke potatoes.  We’ll bake the squash as sides with dinners, I’ll saute the kale with some of the onion and garlic and balsamic vinegar for lunch one day this weekend and make the kale go away, I’ll cut up the peppers and carrots for lunch, and I’m going to make some hummus with the sunchokes.

And this little girl helped me put it all away.

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To see what Bestest Friend wrote about the theme of the day, check out her blog, Too Legit to Quit.