I Ate the Garden

MacGyver has been out of town for days, and if I don't have someone else to cook for, I tend to not cook at all. Last night I had precisely no food in my fridge, not nearly enough to fill my empty belly.



My first step to remedying the situation was to pick a big bowl o' snow peas. Our first planting is currently producing like sex-crazed rabbits, and the pods are weighing the plants down. It's so beautiful. Wasps kept flying out of the pea patch and toward my head, at one point I was dancing around yelling "LET'S BE ADULTS HERE!" and tried to reason with them to leave me the hell alone. Back in the kitchen I heated up olive oil with a heavy-handed dash of red pepper flakes and globs of minced garlic - the classy kind from the jar. After a quick stir-fry my snow peas were bright green and dotted with the flavorings. I ate the entire bowlful with my hands and felt sinful doing it.



I grabbed a knife and thinned the lettuce in the backyard. The greens are more mature than baby but far from full-grown. I washed them up and picked out the weeds and slug, then dried them (five paper towels later I remembered my salad spinner, d'oh!) and inspected them carefully for more slugs. I drizzled the lettuce with Caesar dressing and chewed thoughtfully - the leaves were crisp but not chilled, the texture was nearly buttery, and the babiest leaves were sweet.



Still hungry, I headed the the strawberry bed. I picked the overripe berries, the berries that were dark, dark red and had lost their luster. I selected a few of the younger, vibrant ones to eat right away, but the majority went into the mini-blender with some cheap vanilla ice cream and milk.

I didn't once regret not ordering pizza.