Dear John,
I’m trying to spend down our fridge stash. And freezer stash. And pantry stash. It goes against so much of my instinct! I don’t know why I’m like this, but I know it’s not just food. I mean, I think the pom poms in my craft tackle box are the ones originally in it when my parents gave it to me. When I was eight years old. I was saving them for….the perfect craft? Inspiration? Just admiring them? For thirty years? I don’t really know, but endeavor to use the craft stash too.
On top of that saving tendency, add in that my first out-of-college home was a half hour drive to the nearest grocery store, an hour to the better grocery, and I stocked up on foods (like more variety of yoplait yogurt flavors) when I was in a “city” with a Walmart 100+ miles away or visiting an actual city a day’s drive away. I didn’t want to run out of a favorite ingredient! Or lemon yogurt.
Then, just after a year of living with you, there was the shutdown where we tried to minimize the frequency of our shopping trips. And since then we’ve had two and half years or so of trying to stock food when we have energy in anticipation of exhaustion or sickness or life reducing our capacity for cooking another day.
Layer on the ever increasing interest in not wasting food. Plus a hobby of preserving that started when I learned to make jam in high school.
Mix it together and you have a kitchen very full of ingredients. Some prepared (the zucchini we roasted last week). Some, like the pom poms, serving as inspiration (the squash powder that I totally want to try incorporating into a pie crust). Some, also like the pom poms, taking up space they maybe shouldn’t any longer (the watermelon rind ferments that are in the back of the fridge and no longer taste quite right).
So I’m cooking with pickles. Baking cookies from dough frozen last summer. Tossing frozen cubes of cucumber guts into a smoothie. Flavoring popcorn or roasted chickpeas with the curry powder mixes that we bought to support a local spice shop. At some point, I fantasize in the near future, we should do a fridge audit and clear out the jars with just a little bit more vinaigrette that are cluttering the shelves. Nevermind the other mysteries.
Today’s Box
- Mini Red Seedless Watermelon
- Yellow Peaches
- Bicolor Sweet Corn
- Gold Grape Tomatoes
- Green Leaf Lettuce
- Green Zucchini
Things in the fridge
- Apricot
- Cauliflower
- Greens: Lettuce, Cabbage, Kale
- Roots: Carrots, Fingerling Sweet Potatoes
- Alliums: Garlic scapes, Green garlic, Onions
In the Garden
- Collards
- Green tomatoes from pruned vines
- Herbs: Dill, Basil (as pinched), Zatar, Rosemary, Oregano, Mint
- Plums and grapes from the communal sections
- Calendula and Cosmos
Open Preserves
- Ha! We need to do a fridge check. I’m just going to leave this as a placeholder.
Summertime sustenance
- Zucchini, tomatoes, and corn. High summer is here. (I mean, from the heat we’ve been having, it’s done been here. Now the produce tastes like it.)
- I’m thinking of the Half Baked Harvest corn and blueberry salad. But this week doesn’t have blueberries. Let’s do a corn and tomato salad from Six Seasons instead. I think he has one recipe in the corn section and another in the tomato section. (Or, um, not. I wrote this before seeing the box and there’s aren’t that many tomatoes.)
- Pivot to corn on the cob and a succotash salad.
- Peach jalapeno cornbread with coconut shrimp from Pulp.
- Is it cool enough to roast the zucchini one night? I kinda think not. In which case, we should make pasta instead.
- Time to make another pot of beans to go with greens. So many greens.
Love,
Sarah
Planning Inside The Box 