It’s like I spend my time thinking of very little other than food, what we have, what we need, and what I can do with it, and yet I turn around and find that the food blog has gone neglected for weeks. How does that happen?

Quickly then, let’s recap…

Man, week 8 really made a beautiful-looking pile on my kitchen table. Three grapefruit, three beets with luxuriant (and tasty!) greens, a head of green leaf lettuce, a bag of onions, radishes with their greens (sharp and peppery when cooked; I love radish greens), six apples, three cucumbers, kale, spinach, eggs, bread (Great Harvest oatmeal this time), and this was a bonus week so we also got cheese, a lovely white cheddar.

I think we managed to eat everything from this week except the radishes (doing fine in the fridge so far) and one onion.

Week 9: even more green leaf lettuce, three grapefruit, green beans, potatoes, more kale, mushrooms, apples, carrots, eggs, and bread (Breadery sourdough). Generally when I see kale and potatoes, I make colcannon almost by reflex, but I think I overloaded my household with colcannon the last time I made it (we were eating leftovers for days).

But this was the week that I found out, to my delight, that the kid loves kale chips… both to eat, and to fling into the air like confetti. We had to have a stern talk about that.

Here’s a quick shot of last week’s meatless Monday meal: sauteed spinach with grilled mushroom and eggplant, tossed with a splash of soy sauce, served on a toasted hot dog bun that’s been spread with a layer of ricotta cheese. On the side: a bowl of chilled beet soup with a dollop of sour cream. We’ve been having more meatless meals these days, almost by accident; when you have this many vegetables to get through, you tend to make very vegetable-centric dishes.

Today so far has been another meatless day; for lunch I had a giant slice of delicious spinach-mushroom quiche, and that was after a breakfast of Deb’s amazing bran muffins. (With frozen berries baked into the middle, the muffins were a big hit with the kid, until he ran out of berries and demanded a “new one.” He was not impressed when I told him he had to finish his first. Life is tough for two-year-olds.)

Anyway, frozen berries are all well and good, but I can’t wait to try that recipe with strawberries; the strawberry harvest is just around the corner. Right around early-to-mid-May, I start daydreaming about strawberries all the time. It brings an extra bit of joy to spring, which is a delightful season anyway. I love being in sync with the harvest calendar; everything is at its freshest, and you really feel like you’re plugged into the world.

Oh, and today is the first day of the market at Miller Library! And then tomorrow there’s the next CSA pickup as well as the market at East Columbia, and then Friday the market at the hospital, and then Saturday the Old Town Market in Ellicott City will start up… I won’t be able to get to all of these, even though I want to, but it’s lovely to be surrounded by so many opportunities for fresh local food.