Real produce, real answers

What do you do about the tiny black bugs in the organic broccoli? asked a foodpickle writer.

I know the answer, but I couldn't bring myself to post it there.

We had these same tiny black bugs in our homegrown cauliflower when I was a kid. I would spend minute after minute at the kitchen sink, plunging the white heads into cold water and inspecting each and every floret.

This sort of effort was fruitless, and my father would tell me so. Then he showed me his way. Like me, he plunged the cauliflower under the water. Unlike me, he left it there and went to the cupboard. He returned to the sink, an open tin in his hand. He shook the tin above the surface of the water, let the cauliflower soak for a time, and then pulled the whole head from the sink before draining the water, grinning.

So to the foodpickle person, I say this: pepper the broccoli. No one will ever know the difference.

Mellow

I am enjoying the quiet of my life this week.

Last week I whirled through the unusual. Teaching, writing for a deadline, interviewing and being interviewed for a class, going away without the kids for a food/shopping weekend with my mom and sister: four things that are not regular parts of my schedule, piled onto the usual. Something had to give.

My priorities shook out as follows:
1) My husband wanted to stay home Saturday. This meant grocery shopping for husband-friendly food.
2) A deadline must be honored, class due dates must be met, but cleaning never ends. I decided cleaning could wait. This might sound like a rationalization, and maybe it was, but understand that I hate going away and coming back to a dirty house.
3) Certainly I rationalized this: If you are going shopping for clothes, then you don't really have to do laundry or pack. You just have to shop. I submitted my deadlined story at the wire on Friday night, with children pounding at the door. I posted my class assignment Saturday morning, threw a pittance of attire into a garment bag and ran out the door.

I came home Sunday night to a flipped script. I found my house in better shape than I left it, my family in a good mood, my pick to win the Super Bowl victorious. I breathed.

This week rings strange, but it's a welcome sort of strange. Mellowness. Getting things done, but without having to run or push or scale back. It's traveling by inner tube rather than speedboat, and it's a welcome pace.

A Sense of Revival

December heralds a season of preparations and celebrations, bursting with family and friends and fun. For some. For me, it is a harbinger of doom, an implosion of dread. My husband works for a shipping company. 

We are thankful for my husband’s job, but our gratitude does not change the fact that it is tough work in December. The weather, the volume, the long hours, all this devours our Christmas. For him, the music comes too early; the decorations come too soon; instead of smelling cinnamon and vanilla, he breathes fumes of diesel and cardboard. People complain of late night soirées and near-gluttony, he’s getting home as the kids are going to bed and eating whatever can be rewarmed. His fingers crack and split. His body is still cold after a hot shower. He dreams of boxes and wakes exhausted. His sense of humor shrinks. He is infected by a holiday-induced Scrooginess.

Revival comes from unexpected places. Over the weekend, he attacked the house: scrubbing, cleaning, tearing through backpacks. Among the dirty clothes, uneaten snacks, and balls of paper, he unearthed a homework assignment for our kindergartener, requiring the attention of the whole family. 

We were to decorate a large construction-paper Christmas tree, keeping in mind the current “Five Senses” unit at school. The kindergartener wandered as the rest of us tried to think.

“What does that mean?” I said. “We need to decorate it with noses?”

“Or fingers?” said our oldest.

“Toes!” said my husband. “Big toes.”

The kindergartner returned and my husband asked her, “Which sense do you want to use?”

“Pennies,” she said. She held out her hand, and showed them to us. She had found exactly five.