now we’re cookin’

So you’ve convinced yourself that you know how to cook, and after an afternoon trip to PCC spent thoughtfully squeezing tomatoes and knocking on cantaloupe, you find yourself $70 poorer and in over your head.

A CSA box bursting with potential…for you to disappoint yourself.

To make matters worse, you’ve folded under peer pressure and have signed up for a CSA box,a weekly reminder that not only do you not know anything beyond the most common vegetables, but that you have no idea how to cook these exotic specimens of “kale” or “fava beans”.

Now they’re all wilting in the fridge; you’d be better to skip the middle man and buy compost.  Fear not, we’ll get through this: make some pasta with a side of kale, single guy style.

 

1-    Triage the fridge.  Eliminate expired foods or those that straddle the rules of established taxonomy.  Quantities are halved as is the possibility of a midnight ER trip.

2-    Google how to cook fava beans, because they came in your damn CSA box.  Learn that not only is the pod inedible, but so is the outer coating of the seed.  Depod and begin steaming them.

3-    In the meantime, put on water for pasta and bring to a boil.

4-    Cut up zucchini.  Place in other steamer I forgot to mention you had.  Forget to set the timer.

5-    Back to the fava beans, which now look like lima beans with jaundice.  Attempt to move super hot steamer with tongs.  Lose grip and dump on counter to cool.

A counter offers a great opportunity to cool fava beans and flesh out one’s vocabulary.

At the same moment, watch helplessly as the pasta water boils over and flash-grenades on the burner.  Lose visual.  Feel way through cloud of white and grab pot without potholder.  Invent new hybrid curse word.

Steam is an excellent exfoliant, removing unsightly layers of skin, living and dead.

6-    Retrieve potholder; drain pasta, and open window to let cloud of steam out and neighbor’s orange cat in.  Yell at cat and throw handful of extremely hot pasta at it.  Run hand under cold water and apologize to cat.

9-    Remember that you have not started a tire fire in the living room and that this smell is the bottom of your steamer pot charring.  Rescue zucchini.  Throw molten pot in sink and turn on water.  Use new hybrid curse word for ensuing steam burn.

10-Return drained pasta to original pot and add the two cans of stewed tomatoes you forgot to buy.

11-Begin peeling the parboiled fava beans to remove the inedible outer skin.  Marvel at the stunning inefficiency of preparing this side dish. Sympathize with Hannibal Lecter’s desire to kill people. Start slicing beans in half and smushing them out.  Adopt “good e-fucking-nough” into your vernacular.  Use liberally.

“good e-fucking-nough

 

12- Add pine nuts and pesto to pasta.  Heat.  Abandon hope of using fava beans for anything presentable.  Eat in handfuls or use as cat deterrent.

13-Muse over how you could possibly still be single with such culinary skill.

14-Sit down and take a look at your meal.

Dinner is served, and you choose to disregard the kale you forgot to write about. It burns anyway, which makes you feel ok about it.

15-Compost meal, eat some frozen waffles, and retire to your room to practice being funny instead.

 

 

 

 

 

Want to try it?  Why?

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