This morning’s trip to the farmers’ market to collect the veggie box donated by Harmony Valley for my MACSAC class tomorrow turned out to be a bit of an adventure. First I debated whether to go by bike or car – I knew I had the box to pick up, and, even though I knew I could easily fit the box contents into my panniers, for the purposes of the class, we kind of wanted to be able to show the box as a box. Plus it looked like it might rain. In the end, I nerved up, put air in my bike tires and took off, but I kept having this feeling I would get a flat, in part because the last time Mark pumped up the tires on my bike, I told him they took 65 lbs. and he came back and said, “no, dear, they really take 85”. In fact, the back tire takes 65 – 85, but the front is only 65 – 75 – I let a little out on the front, afraid I’d overfilled.
Once I got to the market, I decided to pick up the box first, so that I could see how much room I’d have for my own shopping. I pulled up behind Harmony Valley’s stand, got shown where the boxes were, and immediately determined that I’d need to take everything out of the box. Which meant I got to inventory everything right away – and, no offense meant to Harmony Valley, but this box illustrates why most people are stumped by the contents of their CSA boxes. It’s filled with one of this and two of that – awkward, to say the least, for recipe planning. Full illustrated inventory below, and here’s a link to the Harmony Valley newsletter for this week, describing the box contents, and my recipe plans for said box contents.
As I was transferring all the veggies to bags and my panniers, my bike tipped over and grazed the leg of another Harmony Valley customer. I made nice about that, moved my overloaded, lopsided bike to lean against Harmony Valley’s parked truck, and flattened and put back their box. That gave me a chance to look for some of the items from the box on display in their stand, labelled – especially the fuzzy greens that were right on top – that turned out to be sesame leaf. When I got back to my bike, the rear tire was flat. I wheeled it to a parking spot and pushed on to do the rest of my shopping – sungolds from Matt, iced coffee (and tipped a street musician on the way) from Gotham Bagels, eggs & spicey pork sticks from Pecatonica, jerky from D&G, cheesey bread from Stellas. I called John to see if he could pick me up, but I also was thinking that Yellow Jersey might be able to fix my bike while I waited.
Which turned out to be true – got another iced coffee while Yellow Jersey fixed the flat. It was actually a puncture, which made me happy, oddly – I thought I might’ve overloaded the bike so much that the tube got pushed off the rim – but because it was a fixed puncture, that meant that I could re-overload my bike and head off home. Pretty good, except in changing the tire, the bike mechanic left the chain kind stuck off the smallest sprocket, so I had to take all my big bags off the bike yet one more time, upend it, get the chain back in the right place and shift the bike into a reasonable gear, and load all my bags on again, in front of a cop car, with cop, watching over State St. And no grass to rub the chain oil off my hands on.
Real adventure.
