My farm share reproaches me. Yet another waxed box full of lovely, crisp, fresh greens. If I was a better person - greener, earthier, more politically correct - if my Birkenstocks were more worn, if my hair was longer (or much shorter), if I subscribed to Mother Earth instead of O, then I would view YET ANOTHER box of kale, beet tops, and some unidentifiable bitter green (which should be eaten as part of a salad, if only it didn't taste quite so....distasteful), all these, with joy. "Kale chips!" I would say to myself. "Kale stew! Quinoa 'n' kale! Tempeh kale stir fry! Kale stuffed peppers!" The possibilities are endless!
O, Jess, why did you have to move? You always took the kale.
I realize that giving away kale is not truly within the parameters of the stuff project, but since I've been putting energy - week after week - into getting rid of kale, I feel it belongs here as a marker of this year. If I didn't have a farm share, but merely had a friend with one - a friend who would give me kale once over the summer - I think I would like it. I have fond memories of kale. When I was a child, we always had a vegetable garden in the back yard of our sixties colonial. The soil hardly deserves the name: our vegetable garden was planted in fill dirt. My father used to flood our little patch of fill dirt with water, and we would stomp around in the mud. It was our way of breaking up the soil. We'd plant tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, carrots, peppers, zucchini, corn. And kale.
Despite our best intentions, kale was our only crop. Everything else tried, but between the fill dirt and the big trees, we were lucky to get a cherry tomato or two. So kale it was, night after night. Luckily, Mom subscribed to Ladies Home Journal and Family Circle. She had The Joy of Cooking and The Fannie Farmer Cookbook. She had recipes.
For whatever reason, I loved all manner of vegetables when I was a kid. Was it because of my grandfather's one acre garden, how we'd walk in the rows of corn, pull them off the stalk and eat them, our teeth squeaking on the raw kernels? How my grandfather would pull the onions out of the ground, wipe away the dirt and eat them like apples, his breath pungent for hours after? The tomatoes and beets like red candy, sweet and firm? Zucchini and cucumbers like drops of water on a parched tongue?
The kale was okay, too.
But not every week. No.
Not week after fibrous week.
One thing I'll say for the chickens. They haven't given me an egg in weeks, but at least they like beet greens.
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