Tomato soup. BLTs. Salad garnish. Toasted tomato and basil with mozzarella. Sandwich toppings. Straight tomatoes with salt.

Last week’s CSA and this weeks are nearly identical – corn, potatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, peppers, carrots. Each bag shows up with a wide display of colors, each week a promise of more freshness. Oh, and tomatoes. So many tomatoes.

Raw. Broiled. Sliced. Whole. Tomatoes are coming out of our ears. With our garden exploding in a fireworks display of green, orange and red, and with the ol’ CSA ramping up its collection of actual usable vegetables, including, of course, tomatoes, we’re nearly drowning in the Fruit that Would Be Called Veggie.

They’re the crown jewel of the growing season, in most cases – a perfect combination of ease, versatility and taste. We have several different kinds throughout our garden – Roma, full, three different types of heirloom – and we have a cornucopia of tomatoes spilling out on our counter; red, orange, yellow, green, like a terror alert scale gone wrong. Unfortunately, one that’s nearly always peaking on red.

And here’s the paradox. I’m greedy. I want them all. I don’t want to give any away.

Oh, don’t worry. I’m forcing myself to part with some of them. I know I couldn’t possibly eat them all, and our family is only so big. We could have tomatoes for every meal and still make an unidentifiable dent.

So we’ve been handing them to our family, offering them to friends, always with my hands over my eyes, my fingers crossed behind my back, unable to believe the words coming out of my mouth. “What am I doing,” I find myself saying afterwards. “These are royalty, these tomatoes, the most valuable vegetables in the stash!”

I get over it. Eventually. I only hoard because I understand that, when we’re out of town, the garden will be picked clean. Family will arrive like vultures to snatch away the forgotten fruits. We welcome this, but I can’t help but think that everyone would be a lot happier if we’d just go away on vacation for a month or so, leaving the garden wide open, free for the taking, simply lousy with tomatoes and the people who love them.

Don’t ask. We have too many tomatoes. Yet, it never seems like we have enough.

At one point in my life, I had gotten over corn.

It was like the dark ages, a corn-free zone. It wasn’t that I didn’t eat it – I would, if given no other option, but sometime during my senior year of high school I just kind of seeing it as a viable choice. It wasn’t a conscious decision, I don’t think – it was just an organic result of a decade’s worth of cafeteria corn. Loose kernels, floating in corn-juice, with little yellow specks clinging to the spoon as you pulled it out of the serving line. Ugh.

And on the cob, things weren’t better. I never made an effort to purchase corn on the cob, would pass it up in buffet line, would forgo it’s messiness for something safer, like potato salad or another hamburger bun.

What makes this corn absence even more surprising is that I was a vegetarian, making corn even more important during any sort of already meat-infested meal. But aside from having corn used in a recipe, I was never crazy about it. I was non-plussed. Corn was not a part of my life.

So why am I so excited about it now?

Maybe weeks of beets and cabbage and kohlrabi have left me shell-shocked, longing for something familiar. But when I grabbed our green bag of farm-fresh groceries and I saw those tufts of corn silk peeking out the top of the bag, nestled in between a sole green pepper and bunch of carrots, I got excited. Like, really excited. So excited that I felt the need to send a text message to Kerrie, that moment, proclaiming the good news.

“Corn!”

Now, three ears of corn sit in our fridge, preparing themselves for a Friday night grilled salmon feast. I spent ages not caring about corn, and though it might seem silly to say, I’m glad it’s back in my life.

Welcome back, corn. Welcome back.

(The weekly haul, of course)
Corn
Onions
Tomatoes
Potatoes
Carrots
Various peppers
Cucumbers
Zucchini
Kohlrabi
Green beans

Sometimes, your schedule is thrown off so wildly that you don’t even remember what happened. This happens a lot more frequently when you’ve raised a child for a year – things are forgotten at such wildly quickening speed that you find yourself looking around for the time, as if you simply dropped it somewhere between the car and the front door.

I went to the Farmer’s Market twice this week. Within three hours. And I can barely remember it.

Oh, sure – I had my reasons. I was in the middle of a runaway wild hurricane, a twister caused by an impending First Birthday Party. And I was shuttling back and forth all day on Saturday, unaware of where I was from one moment to the next, working three errands at once, sweating profusely as the heat pressed harder on my skull.

The first time I went to the Market I was simply looking around. My father had never made it down to the booths, so I offered to take him down, knowing full well that I’d be back later to make any actual purchases. We wandered, we gawked, and we discussed the seemingly high price of organically grown vegetables and why the amount is generally worth it.

Later that morning my mother and I took our regularly scheduled trip to pick up our CSA, and it was like a new experience. Everything seemed new, as if I hadn’t been there since last week. And our share sent me further into the past. Back was the kohlrabi. Back was a too-big batch of beets. Beets. You’ve got to be kidding me. Our pepper stock had shrunk, and our cucumbers had as well. It seemed as though we had hit a rough patch in the weekly harvest, leaving us with nothing but the usual.

We’re getting tired of the usual.

Don’t get me wrong – I enjoy the weekly harvest. But at some point, you have to say “NO MORE!” to cabbage and kohlrabi and beets. Give us double carrots. Or, I don’t know, more tomatoes. Even onions – hell, it will give me an excuse to make French onion soup again.

(Which reminds me. Last week’s urge was for the onion soup. This week’s urge comes right off the top of the “now that I’m an omnivore again I can eat this” stack: the BLT. The real BLT. With real bacon. And with that urge in mind, I purchased my first package of non-grilling meat. Beef bacon. I didn’t even know there was such a thing.)

Most of our veggies from last week still sit in the fridge, aside from a handful of cucumbers and other sandwich- or pizza-friendly items. It was rough, to say the least. So we’re on catch-up this week.

Of course, that’s just the thing. I can’t remember what we ate last week. Just like I barely remember going to the Farmer’s Market. Just like I can’t remember anything else from that day. So maybe we’re okay – maybe we’ve forgotten what we ate, and we’re only a few beets from a successful week of vegetable nutrition.

For our own sake, I hope that’s true.

The haul:
Onions
Tomatoes
Beets
Potatoes
Carrots
Various peppers
Cucumbers
Cabbage
Green beans
Kohlrabi

One bag for two families. That’s what we’ve been working with for the past seven weeks. One bag, one share, one group of vegetables. We split them, we consume them, and we come back for more.

We figured that’s all it would ever be. We were getting our money’s worth, so why expect more?

Oh man.

A combination of the beginning of a heavy harvest season and a practical rain-forest-like rain level over the past few weeks has turned the Farmer’s Market into something resembling a produce aisle at the largest Walmart on Earth. Except, you know, with good produce. And a variety. All of it organic.

It left us with not one, but two bags. Two. And not just beets and kohlrabi, either. Good stuff. Stuff I actually already eat. (Though, to be fair, we ate a lot last week, with numerous pasta dishes and a sweet oriental salad made from our half-head of cabbage.)

Two bags. For two families. And we should expect this from now on.

Best of all, we were supplied with surprises. Potatoes (finally!) and broccoli! Green beans! More cherry tomatoes, cucumbers and carrots! I’ve never loved vegetables so much, never experienced such a colorful display, never been so excited to make salads and stir-fry and whatever else you do when you eat healthy!

Our haul included:
Cherry tomatoes
Beets
Potatoes
Kohlrabi
Carrots
Yellow sweet peppers
Cucumbers
Broccoli
Onions
Cabbage
Green beans

All of it for about $20, or the average cost per week of our CSA.

$20 bucks. Two bags. Two families. One hell of a healthy haul.

For me, vegetables fall into two categories. Those that I eat on a regular basis, familiar and comfortable, as crucial as milk or eggs or Cheerios. And those I gaze upon suspiciously.

For the first five weeks of our CSA, our haul consisted more of the latter – vegetables that I don’t necessarily use. Vegetables that were projects. Experiments.

Kohlrabi. Beets (yellow, red and bull’s-eye). Cabbage. These are projects. These are vegetables that require recipes. You don’t just make a beet salad – you find a recipe, you learn to roast or boil the beets, you hesitantly take your first bite, and you quickly tire of the taste after a few days.

This is what happened with our beets. We put together a very nice feta cheese beet salad, and it tasted good. It was different. But it was good. However, the second day brought more beets, and we quickly discovered that beets are both an acquired taste and an occasional treat. Eat beets one or two days in a row, you’ll poop maroon. Eat them any more, you’ll grow to hate maroon.

Lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers – now we’re talking. I’m not against variety, but sometimes I just want something familiar. Something I could find in my garden. They’re staples, with no recipes needed. Everyone knows what to do with cucumbers. Everyone can use a green pepper. There’s no research – it’s nearly impossible to screw it up.

So I was happy to see a higher percentage of familiar last week when we picked up the other half of our CSA (a mix-up led to us getting just half of our allotment on Saturday) Hot peppers, green onions, carrots, and peas. Stuff I knew how to use. Hooray! Familiarity!

And this week, even more
Cucumbers
Carrots
Green onions
Kohlrabi (will they ever stop growing?)
Beets (MORE BEETS)

I’ve learned a lot over the past few weeks, about how to use vegetables I’ve never heard of and how to open up my horizons. But now we’re getting into the meat of the summer, and it’s refreshing to enjoy some of the tastes of the season.

Because there’s nothing better than a vegetable sandwich. Tomato, cucumber, lettuce, mustard, a little green pepper, a little hot pepper, some Muenster cheese and a fresh slice of bread or bagel.

(And, let’s be honest. Nothing goes better with bacon than tomato and lettuce.)

(And, let’s even be more honest. No one wants beets with their bacon.)

Beets.

Red beets. Yellow beets.

Beets. Filling our fridge. Piling up. Releasing the pungent scent of slowly rotting vegetables, of dirt and roots and time, sticking around out of spite. Three weeks of beets. Three weeks of CSA-produced beets. In three specific stages of vegetative state. Maroon, leafy, impossible beets.

What the hell do you do with beets?

This has been the crux of our CSA. These beets. From the first week they showed up, they posed a problem. They stain your fingers, taste like pure earth and do little but stay solid and, well, beety. We’ve cut them up for a salad, but other than that they’ve stumped us. They’re one of those foods, like turnips or parsnips, that offer little but themselves. Creativity is not in the beet’s game, or so it seems.

At least, that’s how it seems to us.

Our goal this week is to rid our fridge of beets. We have had no problem with everything else – lettuce is easy to dispose of, radishes serve as the perfect picnic snack and onions are elementary. Even kohlrabi, of which we receive two each week, has been put to good use sliced on salads.

But beets. I mean, come on. This is hard!

Thankfully, research has provided us with two beet recipes, both of which could be quite good: Roasted Beet Salad with Feta Dressing and Roasted Beet, Pistachio and Pear Salad.

The problem is that we will use five beets total. Five. We have at least twelve on the bottom shelf, and that’s without taking stock of our most recent harvest.

We weren’t able to make the CSA pickup this week due to a Saturday post-Independence Day lake-cabin trip, but my mother made the trip for us. And though we received only half of our share (a mix-up on Warner’s part that has been remedied) we found a surprise – a sweet yellow pepper; small, unassuming and pepperocini-esque. In addition, we received our usual:
Onions
Cabbage
Kohlrabi
Sweet Yellow Pepper
And yes. Beets.

Those pesky beets. Those awful beets. They could taste like candy, but for now they simply sit, waiting for us to take action, for us to make the first move.

But we’re ready for battle, prepared to emerge victorious, our fingers stained red, mixed with the lifeblood of the beet. We’re ready to vanquish our foe.

And then we’re ready to not get any more beets, thanks.