Week 2: Pick-Up Day & Veggies With Personalities

Still riding high from our first week's success, we were excited to pick up more of nature's bounty for our next meal plan. To help our kids understand the mysterious cooler exchange that happens in the Korean Church parking lot, we decided to unleash them from their car seats and let them help us inspect the goods. There was no stopping our children from descending on the cooler like a lifetime supply of Skittles was inside, so I was more than happy to show them the big reveal. To my shock, they were genuinely elated to see the beautiful produce piled inside. My daughter even exclaimed, "Look! More rabishes!" Considering she literally cried after biting into a radish only seven days prior, I was awestruck. In this week's delivery was mustard greens, turnip greens, purple kale, green kale, red romaine, green romaine, radishes, green onions and arugula.

I really wanted this week's clean-up to go more smoothly than the last. But try as I might, it was like climbing a mountain. So I decided to take it in baby steps: remove the cooler from the car, watch Tangled; remove the produce from the cooler, go to the playground; rinse the produce, bathe the kids; let the produce air dry, order Thai food and put the kids to bed; sip a glass of wine, enjoy my meal. And then it dawned on me that the produce still needed to be chopped and stowed away. So I was well into Saturday night and had a solid 30-45 minutes to go before completing this task. The hubby was in his own personal purgatory with pool maintenance, so I was on my own.

Probably due in part to the wine and the fact that I had run out of options, I had a critical zen moment while chopping and storing. Like a whisper in my ear, it occurred to me that vegetables have personalities. Yes, romaine is spry and playful, each layer revealing masses of zest and crunch until you reach its perfectly delicate little heart. Green onions appear graceless and a little unkempt, but are really a force unto themselves –– strong, confident, even standoffish. Radishes are cunning –– small, inviting and vibrant, yet one taste bites you with a spicy, almost unfair twinge. And then there are the greens. Greens are the inner sanctum of the vegetable kingdom. Take mustard greens, for instance. They don't have a beautiful hue, they are rough with prickly edges and have a root system that resembles a roadmap. They seem moody and unyielding. But the moment you pour hot water over them, they give. They give until you begin to worry that they have given too much and will soon disappear into the recesses of the pan. They surrender their strong, bitter taste with just a dash of brown sugar and become downright delightful when stewed or sauteed with vegetable broth and a dollop of butter. There are noble, attractive greens like rainbow chard, whose very name imbues a sense of joy. But the unsightly greens hold a secret: they are desperate to be tasted, adored, discussed. And so now my heart aches for leafy greens. And I have a newfound respect for green onions; a charming comrade in romaine. The moral of the story is this: pick-up day might have seemed like one big chore, but when I gave myself over to it, I was repaid in a way that I will not soon forget.