duck-shaped pain

12 November 2000
Kale, Clothes, Topics of Extreme Unimportance

More snow yesterday � my prediction that yesterday would be a shorts-wearing day for many people proved to be correct. You see, lots of folks around here pride themselves on their ability to wear shorts year-round, precipitation be damned.

I am not one of these people. I am smarter than that. I bundled up in my thick winter coat, black boots (those ones, up there at the top of the page) and black turtleneck. I realized lately that I've been using black as my main wardrobe color for almost 14 years now, since some impressionable point in middle school. When I began my monochromatic streak, it was much more of a sullen teen sort of thing. It continues to this day mainly because I can't match to save my life. Not all greens go together, and therein lies my downfall.

I just returned from a trip to the grocery store. I actually dislike going to the grocery store on Sundays, because it's really crowded and they're usually down to the bottom of the barrel with their decent-looking vegetables.

I went in to buy these things: a bunch of kale, a parsnip, two red potatoes, an onion, half and half and coffee. I did not waver from my list any � a shocker � but it took nearly two hours to get in and get out. Part of this is the fault of many other people too numerous to mention and part of it is my fault � I tend to wander around and look at everything on lazy afternoon visits to the grocery store.

I know virtually no one out there uses parsnips, but that's no excuse for the sorry examples I witnessed today. I managed to find one that was edible-looking, but some of them were slimy -- eeegh, indeed.

I need these things to make white bean and kale soup. Sharp-eyed readers might notice the resemblance between this and last weekend's soup, the aduki bean and kale soup. Despite the common bean & green theme, they're very different soups. The former is more of an Asian soup, and the one scheduled for today is more of a middle-American farmwife soup � hearty, filling, gives you the energy to go raise a barn or grow a new beard. The aduki bean soup didn't turn out too great, though. I used the soaking liquid from the dried shiitake as part of the broth, but forgot to strain it first. The tiny bits of dirt and other particulates left in the soaking liquid made their way into the soup and were not very pleasant to enounter. So those of you who keep writing asking me to cook for them should really just beware.



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