My friend Stacy was looking at the Upcoming Dinners, and she asked me whether we eat any vegetables. (She didn’t mean it as an accusation.) I said, first of all, that I wasn’t always mentioning vegetable sides, but there’s more to the story than that.
This year, we’ll be eating tons of vegetables from May 14 to November 19, and very few vegetables the rest of the year. Those are the opening and closing dates of our neighborhood farmers market. It’s not that I’m dogmatic about local ingredients–since I love to cook Thai food, how could I be? But for all the usual reasons, the produce at the farmers market inspires me to take it home in a way supermarket produce never does. It challenges me.
In the winter, we eat broccoli, kale, potatoes, and frozen brussels sprouts and peas. That’s about it. The other night I did a chicken stir-fry with bok choy, and Iris loved the stems. But yes, there are many nights when we eat a main dish with with some canned tomatoes in it, and that’s our vegetable for the evening. (Not that there’s anything wrong with canned tomatoes.)
I’m not sure what a nutritionist would say about a diet that includes far more than the recommended amount of vegetables for half the year and far less for the rest. Laurie pointed out that this is just how people ate in the good old days before refrigeration and long-distance trucking. Of course, is the good old days, people were always getting pellagra, beriberi, scurvy, shingles, the consumption, and rickets.
Man, I can’t wait until May 14, if for no other reason than to cure this touch of scurvy.
Maybe you should think about buying extra this year and canning them. Or maybe we should ask the local farmers to do it, so next winter we can all buy canned organic local peas and beans and tomatoes at the farmer’s market. No more sad, empty tables in winter!
Susan, I’m just not a canner, but I’d buy good canned vegetables.
Although I think I’d still take frozen peas over anyone’s canned peas.