The Bin of Doom

I married a brown food man. He was raised on potatoes and refried beans. The only vegetable my mother-in-law ever has in her house is usually a jar of onion powder. When they heard I was a vegetarian, they assumed I could still eat chicken, since that's obviously not meat. And when I explained that vegetarianism excludes all animals, including foul and fish, she bought me egg substitute and soy milk. She learned quickly not to interfere with my relationship with cheese.

So in an attempt to regulate my husband's bowel movements and keep him from gettin' the scurvy, I signed us up for a produce delivery program. Every other week, the vegetable fairy leaves a green plastic tub full of seasonal, organic, and local (when possible) fruits and vegetables on our front porch. And every other week, I am overcome with the panic that accompanies cooking and consuming everything in the bin before it goes bad. When I see that thing on my porch, I feel like I'm being grounded to the kitchen for the next four days. The feeling of superiority one gets from being a seasonal locavore does nothing to soothe the cracked knuckles from too much handwashing, sore back from standing for hours at a time, and headaches from the smoke alarm that likes to remind me I'm boiling water. And despite my own strange garden of misfit flora and fauna, some weeks, I am unable to identify several things in my bin, particularly the root vegetables.

Root vegetables are the trolls of the vegetable kingdom. They're generally misshapen and dirty, having shunned sunlight, clinging to the underworld with veiny tentacles. So when I opened my bin last week and discovered something that looked like a character from Pan's Labyrinth, I could only think that perhaps I'm meant feed it my blood and keep it under my bed so I can conceive a child.


Having no desire to conceive children at this time, I decided instead to cover it in cream and cheese, and bake it until it no longer resembled a creepy puppet in a scary movie. It was only after several failed soups and casseroles (beet soup, boiled brussel sprouts, parsnip casserole, etc.) that I learned I could edit my bin. Looks like next week we're getting a bin full of kiwi.