Mooo

As some (okay most) of you already know: We're ordering one quarter of a grass fed local cow and splitting it among 8 people. This cow will meet its demise in one week. We will be able to pick up our meat on July 9th. You'll notice that I keep calling it "the cow." This is because I can't bear to give this cow, which I will never even see, a name for fear that I'll refuse to eat it when we actually get the meat. Because I am weird like that. Maybe we could call the cow "Dinner" or "Porkchop" or something. No, I think I will stick with "The Cow."

The reason for getting this cow is because I read In Defense of Food, we both watched Food, Inc., and Shawn read Food Rules.

Shawn still thinks it's all a crock though--the buying of a grass fed cow by the quarter. Since I went in with friends on getting the cow behind his back, he didn't find out about it until this last Saturday at a party. Good news: If your spouse finds out that you're ordering a quarter cow while at a party, he's less likely to kill you.

The one thing that has come out of Shawn reading Food Rules is that he wants to try his hand at making homemade bread. I think that will be something that happens this weekend. Maybe I'll even throw in making homemade pasta.

The thing that has NOT come from reading these books is the desire to eat more veggies (I, for one, think we need to eat more veggies. Shawn, while agreeing that we need to eat more veggies, does not agree that it should be in the form of fresh veggies).

Case in point: Farm to Work produce.

Now then, for $25 one usually gets an amount of vegetables and fruit that a family of 4 would eat in a week (give or take). When I do Farm to Work, I'll usually split the basket with a coworker so that there isn't a massive amount of veggies we have to go through. This is mostly because it's damn near impossible for us to go through a full basket of veggies. Especially when the basket it made up of kale, mustard greens and Swiss chard.

Anyhow, as mentioned before, I ordered the basket last week. And we managed to use all quick-perishable items (in fact, this will be the first time ever that we didn't have to throw something away because it went bad...we did, however, give away some of the veggies to his parents, also mentioned earlier). The only thing left from the order this week is the potatoes, which will last a while. The thing I didn't mention earlier is that this basket of veggies caused "The great produce crisis of 2010."

On Tuesday, for some unknown reason, Shawn got it in his head that there was no way we were going to eat all the veggies before they went bad. Because of this, he went and decided to freeze what amounts to one serving's worth of green beans. I don't know why. I would have made the green beans the next day when I cooked the corn, but whatever. So now we have one single serving of frozen green beans. Green beans that were not prepped other than being washed and having tops cut off. One serving of green beans, apparently, is the difference between "We're never going to finish it in time!" and "okay, we can eat all these, no problem."

That Mr. Shawn, sometimes he's a weird one.