Shannon Phillips

There were bananas in our veggie box yesterday, which made me do a double take: bananas most certainly aren’t grown locally. I made a call to Capay Farms to see if we’d been switched over their their general-organics box, which I know includes some produce shipped in from out of state. They told me no, the bananas had only been included because we told them we don’t like melons (Sam’s allergic), and the other local boxes were getting honeydews. So all the other produce is still local, which is good: and we buy bananas anyway, so I don’t mind getting them in the box.

Besides the bananas we had lettuce, arugula, three beets, a bunch of leetle carrots, a bunch of radishes, a bag of bok choy, three sweet peppers, six oranges, four small tomatoes, and a sugar pie pumpkin. The oranges are incredibly juicy, and Robin loves them: he ate three last night and by the time he was done he was drenched in orange juice.

We have a special challenge this week, which is to eat all of the produce before we leave on Friday for Baltimore, on a long-awaited trip to see my BFF Nina, her lovely little woman, and their amazing new baby. We’ll be back on Tuesday: it’s a short visit, but with the house sale still in escrow I didn’t want to be out of state for too long. I’m terribly excited about seeing them.

The house deal seems to be proceeding normally, by the way: the bank will resolve the lien, and the inspections will be done on Monday. They were supposed to be done this week, but the power to the house got turned off and we had to wait for PG&E to turn it back on. I do feel for the people who are living there now, underwater on their mortgage and behind on the utilities, to the point that their power just got turned off. It really seems like this sale would be a good thing for everyone. I hope the inspections go well; if they do, we’ll close on November 6th. Send us your good thoughts, please: it’s been a long and tiring process.

Anyway, the easiest way to eat a lot of vegetables at once seems to be in a salad, so we had one last night with the lettuce, radishes, peppers, and carrots, and we’ll do another tonight with the arugula and beets. The bananas are already gone; if there are any oranges left on Friday we’ll bring them on the plane; and the pumpkin can sit around decoratively until it is, at some future date, made into a pie. Robin and I will have lentils with the tomatoes and beet greens for lunch. That leaves only the bok choy, which I guess I’ll braise with garlic, and we’ll eat it with the beet salad. It’s maybe not the most harmonious food pairing in the world, but it’ll do.