For me, for us, this story is hell of germane. I always feel like we're on a timer getting through all the produce we get—from our CSA, from the store, from the market—and living up to its promise:
Vegetable anxiety can strike anyone at this time of year: C.S.A. subscribers, compulsive farm-stand stoppers and even vegetarians. “All this produce arrives with a deadline,” said Benjamin Elwood, a lawyer in St. Paul. “It’s like when a DVD comes from Netflix. You feel like you have to watch the movie ASAP in order to get your money’s worth, but the pressure makes you not want to watch it.”
...
At her school, Purple Kale Kitchenworks, Ms. Welsh counsels her students to cook vegetables the day they come into the kitchen, peeling and roasting them separately in plain olive oil and salt. “If you mix them together, you’ll have a great side dish for one day, but it won’t be so appealing the second day, and on the third day you’ll hate it.” Try to shop in stages, or schedule a C.S.A. pickup when there are a free couple of hours at the end of the day. Set the oven to 375, use large half-sheet pans and fill the racks of your oven to capacity.
Already-cooked vegetables are the key to a refrigerator filled with usable, tamed ingredients that can immediately be turned into other dishes: pasta sauces, pizza toppings and composed salads, to name just a few. Raw, they are just slouching toward rot; cooked, they are tools you can use.
I used to think Sean's panic over unwatched shows on TiVo's hard drive was funny. I'm glad he got past that.
Cooked vegetables are tools. That's why all the raw food people are either munching or napping. Something has to cook those vegetables into calories. For them, it's their own starved, sinewy bodies.
Posted by: Tom | Thursday, July 19, 2012 at 07:35 PM