Keeping Up With the Vegetables

Just look at this lettuce, picked the same day we got our box

Before we started buying a box of produce a week from some local organic farmers, our idea of vegetable consumption was to pick up some frozen peas and maybe some iceberg lettuce at the grocery store. Note that I didn't say anything about eating them. They just hung around, peas in the freezer (they are supposed to last forever, aren't they?); and the lettuce down inside the Invisible Vegetable Drawer until I cleaned out the fridge and tossed the moldy remains away a few weeks later. 

Ah, that was then, and this is now. Every Friday afternoon for the last few months, we've been taking a lovely ride through orchards and fields down to Mesilla to pick up our box of produce from farmers Charley and Emily. Now this is real food--it's beautiful, it's produced locally (for the most part), it's grown organically, and it tastes delicious. 

Until I tried this stuff, I thought that carrots were supposed to taste kind of soapy, which is the way supermarket carrots taste to me. Who knew?

The trick is to keep up with it all. This week's box contained apples, valencia oranges, carrots, garlic, snap peas, lettuce; red, yellow, and green onions; mixed stir-fry greens, chard, tangerines, and turnip greens. 

Here's how I've learned to deal with it all--I divide everything up right away. Fruits get separated--fruits to eat out of hand and citrus to juice (we just can't keep up with all the grapefruits, oranges, and tangerines otherwise).

I sort all those vegetables for roasting, steaming (Freshly washed and still wet greens go into a covered casserole in the microwave for 4 - 5 minutes--foolproof method, and it never burns!), stir-fry, salads, and some to eat raw. I roast a big pan full right away (my recipe is here), and eat those for lunches all during the week. We have salads almost every day, and build menus around the rest of the vegetables rather than the way we used to cook, with the menus built around meat. Last week I chopped up bok choy and added it to my recipe for potstickers, and they were outstanding!

Beautiful vegetables ready to roast: Sweet potatoes, red and green onions, colored peppers, carrots

The Cost of Vegetables

For two days I watched these farm workers with hoes make their way down each row in this field of newly-planted cabbage across the road from our place. There were at least three times as many workers as shown in this photo. They started at sunup each day and stopped work eight hours later when it was too hot to do any more.

That's an awful lot of man- and woman-hours just to grow cabbage, and this isn't counting the days of plowing--slow-moving tractors spend a lot of time grooming this field--and the planting and irrigating. Of course, there is still the cost of harvesting, processing, and transporting the cabbage to market.

This has given me a lot to think about whenever I look at the cost of vegetables.

Why We Won't Eat Veggies

We love the idea of eating fresh, organically grown vegetables and fruits. However, we don't always do what we should, and house guests in the past have asked where we keep the vegetables and do we, in fact, ever serve any with meals?

Thanks to an article (no longer available online, I checked) published in the local newspaper, we have recently discovered that we can buy a weekly harvest box directly from the growers in Mesilla. [Later note: Some of the produce comes from their "partner farms"]. We are pleased to report that it contains an amount of fresh produce that we can actually eat in a week. No more strange, soggy unknown masses down there in the vegetable drawer--this produce is so lovely that we actually want to eat it, and we are learning to eat fresh fruit for snacks instead of cookies. Really.

The contents of last week's box--kiwis, roasted chile peppers, mushrooms, baby spinach, etc. 

Do we get stuff we have never tried? Yes--how about collards and green cabbage! I discovered that collard greens don't have to be cooked forever with fatback--they can be steamed. I also found that green cabbage can be made into a lovely vegetable stew that smells pretty darned good while it's cooking.

However, I think it's an insult to label this good stuff with that modern slang word--"veggies." It's entirely too familiar a form of address. These dignified and beautiful vegetables deserve our respect, and I insist on calling them by their proper names. "Veggies," indeed!

*****

Harvest boxes ready to pick up on Friday afternoon. Nice farm guy, too!

You might want to spend some time visiting the Los Poblanos website. Here is the link for the Las Cruces page. You can also read about how the Los Poblanos Ranch got its start. 

A Modest Proposal

Those luscious peaches again--put some of these in your cart!

In 1729, Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal (for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and For Making Them Beneficial to the Public) satirically suggested that the impoverished and starving Irish sell their children as food for the rich.

Fast forward a few hundred years to our population, which is oftentimes "starving" on junk food, and lose the satire...

Researchers at our very own New Mexico State University here in Las Cruces have been looking into ways to help people make healthier food choices when shopping. They hit on the perfect solution--so easy, it seems almost ludicrous: They simply painted a line down the middle of grocery shopping carts and labeled one side "fresh fruits and vegetables" and the other side something like "everything else."

That's it. That's all there was to it. They found that people bought 102% more fruits and vegetables, with no other encouragement, and that the profitability for the grocery stores wasn't affected.

It takes a simple idea, sometimes, to make a big difference. Ever since I read about that study, I've looked at my grocery cart in a new way. I find that I am eating more fresh fruits and vegetables. You just need a little imagination to see that line down the middle of your cart, and you might just find yourself eating better and getting a little healthier.

To read about the study, click here. Interestingly enough, the last time I looked at that link there was an ad for a junk food meal right in the middle of the page; the researchers were right, we are bombarded with messages to do the wrong thing.

How to Get Your Kids to Eat Their Vegetables

My son is now collaborating with me on my other blog, Recipes for Ben, and we've been having lots of online chats to make our plans for recipes to add. He always has a long list of recipe requests for dishes he remembers from childhood. The other day, after sending another list that ended up with Pineapple Upside Down Cake and Gingerbread with Warm Applesauce, he suddenly asked: Did we only eat desserts? Didn't we ever eat any vegetables?

I was kind of embarrassed. I have always tried to be a good mother, but when I think about my performance in the vegetable department, I realize that it has been kind of lackluster. Vegetables were always an afterthought in our house, even on Thanksgiving. We'd look over the table, all laden with festive dishes, and realize, yikes! No vegetables! We would hurriedly slap some frozen peas in a bit of boiling water and there! Vegetables, check!

Thinking back to my own childhood, I see that I can blame Clarence Birdseye for my vegetable issues. My mother was a busy working mom, unusual for those days, and she took advantage of all the newest labor saving products. We ate TV dinners, frozen chicken or tuna (remember those?) pot pies, and little packages of frozen Birdseye vegetables--peas, corn, and the dreaded peas 'n carrots.

Once I had kids of my own, I just had no vegetable recipes to fall back on, so we continued on with the Birdseye tradition. As any parent knows, kids tend to crave what they don't get at home, so it's no wonder that Ben is now a superb eater of vegetables. He even invents his own recipes and they are good. Take that, Clarence Birdseye!

Please skip on over to the other blog and check out Ben's first post there, his recipe for Sauteed Brussels Sprouts with Bacon and Onions. You'll really like his way with vegetables, and I'm pretty sure you'll love his sense of humor, too. Sick vengeful glee, indeed!

Fun fact: I'll bet you didn't know that Clarence Birdseye started out as a taxidermist. The man was interested in preserving practically everything...

Here is a quote from an About.com article on Clarence Birdseye by Mary Bellis:

Clarence Birdseye was born in 1886 in Brooklyn, New York. A taxidermist by trade, but a chef at heart, Clarence Birdseye wished his family could have fresh food all year. After observing the people of the Arctic preserving fresh fish and meat in barrels of sea water quickly frozen by the arctic temperatures, he concluded that it was the rapid freezing in the extremely low temperatures that made food retain freshness when thawed and cooked months later.

In 1923, with an investment of $7 for an electric fan, buckets of brine, and cakes of ice, Clarence Birdseye invented and later perfected a system of packing fresh food into waxed cardboard boxes and flash-freezing under high pressure. The Goldman-Sachs Trading Corporation and the Postum Company (later the General Foods Corporation) bought Clarence Birdseye’s patents and trademarks in 1929 for $22 million. The first quick-frozen vegetables, fruits, seafoods, and meat were sold to the public for the first time in 1930 in Springfield, Massachusetts, under the tradename Birds Eye Frosted Foods®.