Clearly, I have lost my mind. Last week, I spent almost $30 on vegetables at a new “green” market on Rockland’s Main Street, then in a spree at the Camden Farmer’s Market. Of course they were organic vegetables. Are there any other kinds now?
I confess to my past as a McDonald’s addict. If I didn’t have one Big Mac each day, I had two. I missed them. I had to have them to get comfortable each day. True, they only stayed digested for a very brief period, but still. Eventually, I moved on to Five Guys (when I could find them), which features heavenly cheeseburgers and the best bag of fries you could ever find.
Even an ill-informed consumer like me eventually figured out that the Five Guys-Big Mac diet wasn’t the way to go. But I never expected this big a change. I trace my new addiction back to my youth, when my favorite person and godmother, Aunt Flora, brought in green beans fresh from her garden. This was highly unusual in my city family and I remember enjoying every bite. I am talking like 1950, but the love of those beans stayed with me, despite being almost drowned in french fries.
My awakening started a few years ago in Calais, of all places, when the Wickachee restaurant offered turnip as a side dish. Turnip. I hadn’t had turnip since family Thanksgiving decades ago. Who buys turnip? Who eats turnip? I tried it and loved it, along with the restaurant’s butternut squash. Loved that, too. I started buying squash and turnip for the first time in my life. What was happening? Was I dying?
I bow to no man in my love for the mighty onion. I put sauteed onions in every single dish but my corn flakes and pancakes. I was a late-comer to mushrooms, which I once considered a carcinogen. Now every Cobb Manor dish starts with onions and mushrooms sauteed in olive oil and a few drops of Worcestershire sauce.
Blue Eyes, my faithful companion of three decades, has gone around the bend on food and healthy eating. I ignore her as much as I can. She sends me daily emails on the danger of french fries and other reasons to live. Naturally, she dragged me to the Camden Farmer’s Market, which I had always dismissed as an activity of hippie do-gooders. All right, I bought some “organic” carrots and onions. Big deal.
Boom!
The organic (still don’t know what it means) carrots were the best I ever tasted. Honest to God. The onions were whiter, juicer and tastier than any I had ever eaten. Was I drugged? Was I losing my McDonald’s mind? How good can carrots be?
Last week I returned to the Camden Farmers Market to buy organic carrots, organic onions, organic tomatoes, organic mushrooms (fabulous), even organic cabbage. In my new mania, I “braise” cabbage for an hour in a very good bottle of dark beer and the usual onions and mushrooms. Perfect football game food, if you can wait 50 minutes.
I don’t know who I am any more. My rubbish barrel has turned into a compost heap with all those skins, peels and rinds. I have fruit flies visiting from New Hampshire and Rhode Island. Look, I am not a vegetarian. Please. When Blue Eyes is absent, I throw a pork chop or chicken breast on the grill. But even then, the meat must be served with three or four vegetables.
True, this new diet is much healthier than the Five Guys-McDonald’s regimen. I care very little about that, even though I should. They just taste so good. You just cannot believe the prices. Doesn’t matter.
God help me, I love vegetables.
Emmet Meara lives in Camden in blissful retirement after working as a reporter for the BDN in Rockland for 30 years.