Now some actual green stuff

As I wandered down to the village store today to get some onions for my chickpea soup, I bumped into Alice of our local organic River Brook farm and told her how much we were missing her delicious food since she closed for the winter.

Fabuous news: she's open on the quiet for the loyal few on Saturdays selling all the usual local organic meat, dairy and soup as well as her own root vegetables - carrots, spuds, kohlrabi, etc. (I said that like I buy kohlrabi all the time but in fact I've never bought or cooked with it before in my life. So I googled 'kohlrabi recipes' and found some very appetizing options including this one for stuffed Kohlrabi, this one for Greek-style Kohlrabi and this for roasted Kohlrabi and butternut squash, if I can find squash in January, we'll see.)

So we'll go on Saturday and stock up.

What a relief - not only will there be no more despondent rifling through the meat and produce sections of Wal Mart and unappetizing meals full of hidden pesticides, but I'll actually get to live my 'shop and eat local' dream again.

It does seem completely ridiculous that when we live in the middle of loads of farms and round the corner from what is surely one of the best small-scale organic farms in the country, we've been ferrying in food parcels from New York. I suppose this is where we should take action and plant our own, but have you been in our back garden lately? I refer you to fig 1: the picture of the river from earlier. Trust me, you wouldn't be gardening in those conditions either.

Neil, Alice's husband, offered to help me learn to grow my own if I wanted. "We find that once we've shown people how to do it, they never complain about our prices again," he said. Especially not when it's 0 degrees F out there. That's F for frostbitten fingers.