Can I Just Crawl in the Damn Box?

So, the box came and I have done almost nothing interesting with it. Emotionally, I haven’t the wherewithal. Chet has been in and out of the hospital four five times and we face the gravest concerns about his health. Whiskey, not to be outdone, has developed some health issues of her own. And, the Unit, of course, is still in Greece, where the economy is imploding. The worry has pretty much sucked the creativity out of me, so instead of eating out of the box, I just want to crawl in it.

At this point, I must note how utterly fantastic the emergency veterinary staff is at Ocean State Veterinary Hospital and at Povar/VCA, my regular vet. Drs. Huelsman, Trow, Worhunsky, Svilek, and Wash have all bent over backwards to help me and my sweet cats.

Back to the box. It contained swiss chard, beets, fennel, jewel-like yellow and red cherry tomatoes, garlic scapes, kolhrabi, and an adorable purple basil plant, whose heady aroma thoroughly infused my car on the ride home.

Snap peas, fennel, chard, beets, kohlrabi, purple basil, garlic scapes, and tomatoes.

And here’s what I did:

The scapes and chard went into a chicken soup, along with a few carrots and an onion. I love the bitter greens in brothy soup. Much like our beloved collards in the South, these greens improve with the addition of salt, acid, and heat. It’s one of the reason collards are cooked with a ham hock and served with pepper vinegar. I added a healthy dose of my most recent acidic obsession, the Serrano Honey vinegar from Olive del Mundo in my neighborhood, but I also would have enjoyed this with a glug of the brine from a jar of pickled jalapenos.

Chard soup, nose-tingling vinegar.

The beets and fennel I roasted and then slathered with the same miso-tahini sauce I used on the roasted vegetables in my last post. That stuff is like crack. I’m pretty sure I would eat that on an old running shoe and it would still taste great.

I brought the tomatoes, kohlrabi, and snap peas to work for a few days of lunches and snacking. The colors remind me of Skittles.

Nature’s Skittles.

And the basil went, julienned, with garlic and orange zest into a jar of marinated olives. The plant still grows, so perhaps I’ll revisit it in a future post.

My Nessie soup ladle.

If you don’t mind, I’ll beg your indulgence and ask for prayers and good intentions for my sweet boy. With any luck, by the time I tackle the next box (this week—eek!), I will have some good news to share.

I’ve been listening to a lot of old Bellx1 over the past weeks. I’ve always loved this song, which features the genius lyric, “Why is my ass the perfect height for kicking?” It’s a sentiment my poor cat must be feeling right about now.