Reality Bite
Taurus season update: steamed parsnips are delicious
Last night after dinner Jakob and I went out to pick up our weekly delivery of vegetables from our neighborhood organic farm co-op. The streets were dark wet and shiny with streetlights. I wheeled our red shopping cart and Jake wore the blue hiking backpack filled with empties (yogurt, milk, cream) so we could take last week’s bottle deposits off of this week’s order. As always, there was no one in the cellar; we let ourselves in with the key in the lockbox on the front of the building and flipped on the yellow lights. The week’s orders of all members were printed out and taped to the wooden table in the middle of the lager, behind which crates of things on slanted shelves were draped with thin blankets for freshness.
I got a pen and a calculator and we started fulfilling our order, starting with a dozen eggs. The root vegetables were caked in dirt, we weighed them out type by type: two kilos of potatoes, two of carrots, one kilo of beets, one of yellow onions, ¾ kilo parsnips, three kilos sweet potatoes. The old-fashioned scale I prefer to use measures in “dekagramm” and requires you to balance the items carefully on a wooden board while watching the little arm move right to left. Round things do tend to roll off onto the floor. Jake prefers the electronic scale and tare-ing the weight of a wooden bowl into which he dumps his items. We pile the vegetables into cotton tote bags and set the bulging bags into the wheeled cart.
The leeks are really big this week, and seemingly filled with dirt. At home when I cook with them I slice longways into them from the top and then open each layer and run water through their filleted sides. The dirt melts off easily. The beets and celery root and parsley root require scrubbing with steel wool, the sink gets messy. Making soup is an ordeal with many steps. But once the vegetables are prepared, the cooking happens fast, and the result is rich, deep, sweet, and fragrant. I haven’t made beetroot brownies yet, not since joining this co-op. We bought a jar of cream honey from Burgenland last night too, the price was right. And we sliced of a piece of strong-smelling mountain cheese from its heavy round wrapped in paper and damp cheesecloth.
I calculated our total and went over to the binder and turned to our receipt page and entered a new line of purchase and calculated how much was left in our account after that. Then I wrote our purchase total on a new line in the other pad of paper next to the date and time and our name, indicating that we were last in the cellar and how much in wares we took with us. Jake noisily dragged our heavy cart up the few cement stairs while I cut the lights. Jake closed and locked the door and returned the key to the lock box and rolled the little metal numbers to something random and shut the door to obscure the combination panel. I picked up the cigarette of raspberry leaf, mallow bark, blue lotus, and apfelminze we had started on our walk over that Jake had stashed on the windowsill beneath the lockbox, and we relit it and walked home, smoking and talking. You can see stars in Vienna even in the middle of the city.
