Eats Shoots and Leaves — Bed to Table

I’ve been trying to focus as much as possible this week on self-care. This season, this year, and this life are way too short to give myself over to anxiety. It’s been a beautiful thing having my appetite back this week and especially having so many exciting things to indulge it with.

Over the last few months, I’ve gradually been tidying up our entire apartment using the Konmari method. Organizing our kitchen has been a key step to inspiring me to cook again, and it’s perfect timing now that we have our summer CSA treasures to play with. On Memorial Day we took a stroll through the Broadway street fair in the neighborhood and got a few new spices and teas to add to our newly tidied pantry. Then I spent Wednesday night giving the refrigerator a much-needed overhaul. It’s so easy to amass clutter when you’re bummed out and eating take-out every other night because you have no motivation to cook and be good to yourself. It was almost therapeutic just to empty out the fridge, clean, discard, reorganize, improve. I found myself doing silly but amusing things like leaving notes on the mustard jar reminding us not to buy more because I discovered two more bottles of the exact same mustard we forgot we had.

When I finished this project around 10 o’clock, I finally got to making dinner. (Fortunately, Jon has the patience of a saint.) I sautéed up some onions, garlic, and red pepper flakes in olive oil, then added bunches and bunches of all our farm greens, kale, turnip greens, radish greens, and spicy braising mustards. Once they all wilted down, I tossed them with lemon juice, salt, pepper, and a handful of kalamata olives. This recipe is a great standby for when you have lots of greens to use up. I’ll probably come back to it a lot this summer when we’re overflowing with kale and chard.

Then I tossed some navy beans with sunflower shoots, radish sprouts, olive oil, lemon, salt, and pepper. The sunflower shoots taste like sunflower seeds. The radish sprouts taste like radishes. The snozzberries taste like snozzberries!

On the side, we had goat cheese on toast sprinkled with chive blossoms. Beauty.