Cute Vegetable Overload

Locavore or just plain loca? 

Here's how I spent high double digits on Wednesday (not including the chicken in the fridge and the scone which I scarfed down before the photo shoot and the foraged cranberry chutney which is hidden so that not just anyone can eat it right out of the jar).

Unedited, UnPotoshopped, UnInstagram'd!
Local produce from the local Farmers' Market.
Doesn't it look good enough to blog, I mean, eat?

Yup! It's summer and it's time for Veggie Pr*n ("pr*n"because of course we don't want to spell out the "p" word do we? I think I can do without comments from anyone who lusts after unseemly, albeit organic, acts with tubers, cucurbits, brassicas or deadly nightshades.)

I'm not such a curmudgeon that I want to return to the days of pallid crunchy "Cello" tomatoes or lettuce=iceberg of my childhood, but sometimes the Farmers' Market is all a bit much. I don't need my produce curated into precious little bunches, and arranged just so on the tables. I don't need the customers who monopolize the attention of the vendors with self-congratulatory questions and eventually move on, coffee in hand, without buying anything else. I really don't need them waltzing around with their vile little dogs, on leashes of course, but on leashes that are a hazard to navigation for those of us who actually want to buy something and get the hell out of there.

I have a vegetable garden and I understand there is nothing cute about the process of getting food out of the ground. Nothing cute about the heat, the humidity, the mosquitoes, the cabbage moths, the lettuce slugs. But no one wants to think about all that when they're buying a beet, and I certainly don't fault the farmers' marketing efforts. I just wish it wasn't such a tourist attraction for dog-walking idlers, and, starting this week it'll be packed with urban parents  with their binky-biters in tow explaining how K is for kale and kale is green and don't worry, I won't actually make you eat any. Bah, Potato Bug!


Bonus Vegetable Content

This didn't make it into the beauty shot, either:  a Caraflex Cabbage, a Welsh variety of the "Conehead" type. Much as I would like to claim credit for the mot, I didn't make that up.

"Tell them you're from Wikipedia."

 "Tell them you're from Wales."