Erik kindly suggested a recipe. I am constitutionally unable to follow most recipes exactly. I see them more as suggestions than orders, meaning that sometimes I end up with wonderful food and sometimes even the cats won't eat it! I am happy to report that I actually ate and enjoyed baby cabbages for the first time in my life.
Yesterday's CSA box contained a vegetable that, had I been doing the pickup, I would have left on the table. However, my husband thought that maybe I could figure out a way to cook it so that at least one of us would find it tasty - a real challenge since this is a vegetable that both of us grew up despising despite pleas from our mothers.
The vegetable in question is Brussel Sprouts. I don't know why we have both always disliked them, given that we love brocolli, cabbage, kale, and other cruciferous vegetables. It has been suggested that we have never had them cooked properly.
Hence my plea to my readership (Erik?) - how best should I deal with these fresh locally grown baby cabbages? I must admit they are really cute to look at.....
There has been so much important stuff going on around the parish lately that I haven't had the heart to get into such fripperies as food and recipes and so on. But I think it is time for a change of pace - if only for a few minutes. While Terri was being actively starved, I did not think it right to talk about food, but I am hoping and praying that soon she will be getting the care she needs and deserves. I want to share a bit of a recipe.
One of our CSA farms had a bumper crop of beets, so I made borscht. My Hungarian/Russian godmother taught me how - and it isn't that wimpy stuff you sometimes see in jars in the Kosher section of the supermarket. For one thing, her recipe uses a meat-based stock, and if available, chunks of meat, too.
Erik has some wonderful things to say about The utmost importance of food in our culture. Be sure to read the comments in the box, also.
I was raised to value sit-down dinners, despite having feminist parents who both worked. Of course, I also was the person responsible for cooking them and cleaning up afterwards from about the age of 12.
What interferes with out family meals these days is a combination of weird work hours (I stay overnight at the hospital 2 nights a week) a long commute (I drive 1 hour each way) and the multiple activities that a High School aged daughter is involved in. Still, I think we manage to sit down together for dinner most nights -even if it is at 8 or 9 PM. We also have a firm tradition of Sunday bruch as a family.
We are caught in the two-income trap. I don't think it is necessarily good, but I also think that there are good and bad ways to manage having two paying careers and a large family. (Split shift parenting, or per diem work, or home based work, for example). Many of my classmates when I was growing up had less access to their 'non-working' mothers than I did. Their mothers were involved in social and volunteer activities that took them away from home as much as my mom was gone for work. My parent's generation also often had domestic help - ranging from the weekly housecleaner to the ironing lady to the live-in (think of the Brady Bunch).
Technology and fast food is this generation's equivalent of the domestic help.
