Melissa's Place

Vegetablly Challenged

This year, Mark and I bought a vegetable share at a local, organic farm. (www.myfarmer.ca). Every week, we will have organic vegetables, fruit and eggs delivered right to our door. Last week, while I was in Peterborough, the first crop was harvested and delivered. In fairness, it IS early in the growing season. So the vegetables weren't exactly numerous. We had some rhubarb, some beautiful brown eggs, what we presumed were beets, some oniony looking bulbs, lettuce, parlsey and some more greens and sprouts in a jar. There was also a newsletter with recipes.

Eager to leap into this new adventure of trying recipes we haven't had before and broadening our vegetable palatte, Mark and I leafed through the newsletter and decided to make wild leek and parsley risotto.

The recipe called for two cups of wild leeks. I said, "Mark, I don't think we have two cups of wild leeks." He said, "We do if you include the greens." I looked in the bag of vegetables we'd been given. There were many things that could be called "greens". So I cut up the most leeky looking things I could find, which were not, incidentally attached to anything, but were long narrow green pieces, and included those in the count. "Which ones are the wild leeks, Mark?" I asked. I had seen store-bought leeks before and they looked like fat green onions. Nothing like that was in the bag. Mark pointed to the bag of shallot-y looking bulbs. Okay. I began cooking. The newsletter then called for shallots too though. Hmmmmmm. We didn't have any shallots. Unless what I was calling wild leeks, were, in fact, shallots. And what about those "leek greens"? Were they, in fact, chives? If so, they were oniony and could, perhaps count as shallots, which were kinds of onions, right? I was so confused.

I came upstaires and googled "wild leek". Wild leek stems do not look like chives. What I had counted as wild leek greens were chives. I should know better. I have seen lots of chives. I am growing chives in my garden.

The risotto was delicious, despite the confusion about the leeks, shallots and chives. In the end, expensive parmesan can cover any small slip-ups in the vegetable department.

What was left to eat this weekend? Beets. Actually, just a very small bag of teensy beets. I had thought beets were larger. I had also thought beets were harvested in the fall. I had not known beets were so beautiful when you cut into them. Like fuscia marble.

"Should we make borsht or baby food with the beets, Mark?"

"Borscht," replied my Ukrainian husband.

I phoned my father. He had a good recipe for borscht which included the beet stems and leaves. We needed four small beets with tops. I think we had three. But soups are forgiving. We purchased the other ingredients and then I began to chop. However, when I pulled the beets, by the greens, from the bag, I realized that the beets were different shades, one was purple, one was red, one was even white. And their leaves were different lengths and shapes. That is definitely not right. It seemed, in fact, that there was only one beet, several bundles of beet greens and....perhaps three radishes? But the radishes were not all red. One was white!

Back up to the computer. I googled "radishes". Then I googled, "beets". Yes, what we had here was one, very miniscule beet and three radishes. So I went to the grocery store and bought four "small" beets, which were four times the size of our one, organic micro-beet.

I got to the check-out counter with my beets and the cashier, who was a young gum-chewing, apathetic-looking teenager glanced at my produce and said, "These are radishes, right?"