Summer’s last jubilee

It sure didn’t take long for me to start mourning the loss of fresh veggies. It just feels vulgar to buy them at the grocery store now, where they’re all naked and vulnerable with the dirt washed off, the bug-riddled leaves stripped away, and the stalks neatly trimmed. I can’t believe I used to find veggies like that appealing.

It’s odd that I miss fresh veggies so much because I don’t have an official veggie garden, and you know I couldn’t grow a damned zucchini this year. I think I’ll just mention that in every post until I get the chance to redeem myself.

I flirted with the idea of building some raised beds in late summer and planting some winter greens, but I decided to reign in those enthusiasm ponies and plan that project properly this winter as something to look forward to next year. In the meantime, it’s bagged lettuce for me.

I must miss the veggies so much because our friends shared their Jubilee Farms co-op allotment with us so many times. My favorite e-mails of the summer were Lisa asking if I wanted to do the Friday pickup because they were going out of town. There at the end, I’d resorted to sending them free tickets for weekend getaways, with the stipulation that they left on Thursday.

I loved loading up my market basket—which in previous years had held the extra rolls of toilet paper in the guest bath—and laying out all of those fresh greens on the kitchen counter to figure out what we needed to eat immediately and what could wait until later in the week. It forced me to plan menus and to cook—something I typically hate—but cooking seemed less like a “chore” and more like an “opportunity” to enjoy those great fresh veggies at their best.

Now all that’s left of those jubilant days is an onion and three heads of garlic. They’re like old friends. I remember brushing the dirt off the onion when I brought it home. When it started to sprout, I felt bad about “wasting” it. But then I realized that seeing it every day makes me happier than anything I would’ve cooked with it, so maybe its purpose now is to sit on the countertop and remind me of summer.

When I brought home that huge bundle of garlic, I never imagined it would all be gone by now. It was so fresh that the tissue around the cloves was still moist, had barely turned to paper. Grocery store garlic, with its half-desiccated cloves in cardboard shells is going to be a large disappointment. But I’m going to plant some of that Jubilee garlic this week, so maybe I’ll see it again next year.

And imagine my surprise when I opened the bottom crisper drawer and found two Jubilee cabbages—one purple, one green. Let’s not calculate how long they’ve been in the fridge since our last allotment, but they were still perfectly crisp and fresh, and they tasted yummy when I fried them up. Or maybe they just tasted like summer’s last jubilee.