Today I received the first delivery from my CSA farm subscription; the woman who delivered the box was a shade apologetic, since it has, as she explained, been a cold spring so far.
The box consisted of the following:
two heads of lettuce (which we will consume this evening)
five radishes (delicious: I even followed Fergus Henderson in making a salad from the fresh radish greens)
four small bulb onions (or fat green onions)
a small bouquet of Kale (for tomorrow, when we make smoked pork chops with onions and apples)
Not much-- and hardly the 25 pounds of Kale I expected when I signed up-- but it all looks perfect, and it's all been cleaned and presented beautifully. I am sure that in two months the 1/2 peck box will be brimming with all kinds of summer squash (there's much humor in the area about "drive-by zucchini hits": leave your car parked anywhere rural, or hell, just drive slowly enough, and you'll find zucchini in the back seat). For now, the yield is about a meal and a half.
Indeed, a slow start, but I have high hopes for the weeks to come. It has been a cold spring, after all. And we did only buy a half share.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
I have several comments to make, which I have been storing up like a layer of blubber under my skin.
1) Just reading your blog makes me fatter.
B) The only thing more vile than Salad Cream from a sachet is Salad Cream from a sachet that has been opened, left in the sun, and sat upon by a man who is trying to win the prize for longest time without a shower or change of underwear and who is describing himself as "a bit leaky". For a wonderful film on race and salad cream, I would recommend Undercover Brother.
iii) Inspired by your stories of slow cookers, I purchased one and made a very respectable beef stew (using Molasses in my cooking for the first time). Still, I was not entirely happy with the slow cooker and feel a bit anxious about leaving it on all day. I hope I use it more.
FOUR) Your CSA story has me wondering whether I would subscribe; it is a double commitment, is it not? A commitment to purchasing goods and then a commitment to making use of them. I admire your energy, but after a long day of working and not in the mood to rummage through my barely-used Dean and Deluca cookbook, I can't quite imagine summoning the energy to figure out what on earth I would cook with eight radish, three squash and the mustard seeds I didn't use up on last night's cauliflower.
#5. I think that your brief discourse on Wagamama's was brilliant as an evocative polemic on behalf of aestheticism, and so betrayed a hint of what I am going to call Cheney Environmentalism. You see, Dick Cheney goes to ranches owned by friends, ranches that are thousands upon thousands of acres, full of quail (farmed, of course, but then released onto these thousands of acres), and he spends vacations in those parts of the country and world that are carefully preserved to the horizon, but not beyond the horizon - that is, if you spend a day or two there, you'd think it's a vast reserve, but ecologically, it's small and isolated. He cannot understand the limits of the environment or the depletion of the environment or overcrowding or any of these things - he doesn't get it because he can afford not to get it. Wagamama's is a chain: it is indeed delicious, attractive, user-friendly, cool, hip, and all these things, but we like it because we can afford this chain and don't see its connection to the cheaper chains.
Yes, you right in your implicit swipe at knee-jerk reactions against chains. But you choose an interesting image:
has it choked out other flora? It would be more accurate to say that it has simply taken over some open space, and made it pretty. Well, maybe it hasn't, but its cousins have choked most of its competition to death. Add to this pleasant image of prettiness your references to its cleanliness, and you have precisely the problems of homogenisation and shiny surfaces that have spread McDonalds and Dominos like weeds across vacant lots - dirty as they may be, they seem cleaner because of their corporate branding. So my point is this - the very concept of the chain undermines the local, preying on our fears of dirtiness and difference and, indeed, the diffidence of the local.
That's the thing about advertising - I don't know if anybody has said this before or you heard it here first: it doesn't matter what is being advertised, it all benefits large chains. Our exposure to advertising accustoms us to prefer the sparkling cleanliness of the familiar, so that we would rather go to a McDonalds or Applebees when pulling off a highway than the local diner, simply because we think we are safer at and more familiar with the former.
We are in a bind: to support a chain, any chain, however much we think it is better than the vile Wendys and Panda Houses that spew out their oversalted, over-corn-starched, factory-farmed, government subsidised corn-byproduct in strip malls, is in part to acquiesce in the destruction of the local.
Yes! I was most ambivalent about the chain status of Wagamama's-- but since it remains (I think) at least for the moment a British anomaly, I could still consider it from the "outside" as a phenomenon that seemed connected to its roots, its initiation: I could see the moment of its formation within the restaurant itself.
Did the restaurant overwhelm suspicion through its culinary interest? No. (But if a chain's food DOES manage to be good enough to overwhelm suspicion-- if it's simply THAT good-- then we tend to safeguard the presumption that one can sheepishly sneak through the drive-through during the protest. ((Hasn't this been the McDonald's allure? The Qp w/Cheese is just THAT good... or, I dunno, Dunkin Donut's coffee...or whatever other myth)).
Wagamama's wasn't a guilty pleasure; it was a purely corporate experience. But-- and here's my point-- a corporate experience worth learning from. Indeed, I feel that there's something in the Wagamama business model that would help, rather than exterminate, the flora and fauna of local businesses.
All the same, I agree that there's a problem here that surpasses the qualities of the individual chain-- i.e. that suggests, as SW says, that we must consider the damage done by the epigones as well. Ay, it's always the epigones that are the most dangerous: the result of the business model, but uglier and less scrupulous.
But, to the credit of the operation, and from the point of view of a small-town Pennsylvania yokel, I should say that it was the business model that impressed me most. While I wasn't blown away by the food-- which was, I think I said, 'clean"-- there were some features worthy of serialization: attentiveness and (dare I say this without invoking the history of world labor) hustle. There was an athleticism to the service that I noticed for its rarity in today's epoch of underpaid, alienated labor. Now, to talk about "Hustle" in the service industry recalls a period during which service was considered unequivocally to be second-class, at best. But at W-mamas there were "hip," "young," and "artsy" waitron- types who worked hard without seeming underpaid or mistreated. Unalienated? Who knows. But something was being addressed.
It's a new level of chainification: rather than commodifying the food, they commodify the labor ethos-- or at least recognize and deal with the effect of commodification on the staff. And thus it's compelling for its difference.
In the land of Wal-Mart and the like, it's something that looks different and new.
I agree, though, SW, that it's no less of a chain.
Still, it's good to buy CSA veg.
I didn't want to be mean-spirited about you appreciation for Wagamama's, although I am glad that it forced you to say that you like "hustle" in your waitstaff - surely in the old days that claim would be accompanied by a significant downward glance at a hustling young tush as it bobbled off towards the kitchen.
I just wanted to - ahem - complicate the notion of your appreciation for Wagamama's, and let me hastily add: I have this same problem with the chains that I frequent. I don't believe that Dunkin' Donuts coffee is any good and I don't believe that "Mickey D's" quarter pounders are nearly as good as I once did, either - but there are some chains that I do like, and I think the problem with liking them is, as I hoped to say and probably didn't, that chains are the problem per se, not how good or bad any particular one actually is. And, this I did say, that the notion of cleanliness and staff efficiency is advertised as a sort of remedy for the dirtiness and diffidence of the local.
I'll go for CSA, but I'll be complaining in the comments section of this blog if I come home from work and find that I have to make a dinner out of three radishes, a leaf of kale, and two fava beans.
Ah, but you should have seen the SIZE of those two fava beans. Like full-grown possums, all puffed up and ready for carving.
And they *hustled,* too! (That is, until they laid down and played dead. And then we ate them).
-G
((PS: Very keen to hear more of your trials and tribulations with the slow cooker. A. across the street is still scarred by my experiment with tripe in calvados at a super bowl party over a year and a half ago. I feel I still have more to give...))
Post a Comment