The Mighty Vegetable
Like many people, my spouse and I have been rotating through various pandemic hobbies… Mind you, we’ve both been working full-time and dealing with pandemic exhaustion and a certain natural tendency towards inertia, so our hobby attempts have been pretty minimal. (Wordle is good for that.) No new side hustles or DIY remodelling here…though we did get this done: Now? It’s on to vegetables. See, cooking is something we do together, to decompress after work (or at lunchtime, while we’re lucky enough to both be working from home), to get out of our heads and away from our screens/keyboards, to spend time together, to do something hands-on and also delicious. And I’ve become passionate about eating local. A few months after the pandemic started, we signed up for a small grocery delivery service that partners with local farmers and other producers. (I first wrote about them here.) Between that and our vegetable garden, we’ve been doing a lot of seasonal eating. This winter we’ve eaten so many roasted carrots and parsnips and squash that, uh, one of us finally rebelled. To be honest, the other one (me) was getting bored of our go-to vegetables, too. So I’ve started adding one new-to-us locally grown vegetable to every biweekly order. (Full disclosure: In the alternate weeks, we get delivery from one of the big chains and buy some non-local produce.) It started with rutabaga/swede [the big yellow and purple root vegetable, not the smaller white and purple root vegetable–apparently there’s some overlap…