Beware the Bears

San Francisco Community Supported Agriculture

What with bunching parsley, scrubbing carrots, harvesting lettuce, emptying trucks, moving compost, hiring and driving, the sun set and there wasn’t enough time to go over each bunch of red onions and remove every undesirable bit, so I’m leaving it up to our members to give them the once over. These little onionettes don’t have particularly robust green tops, and they may need a little peeling, but the flavor and quality is exceptional. If the green part of the onion is suffering do the following: eat all the strawberries you received in this week’s CSA box in one go, get a pair of scissors, grasp the onion bunch by the tops and holding over a compost bin make one cut at the base to remove the roots, then, over the strawberry basket make another cut where the bulb meets the stem allowing the onion to fall just so into the strawberry basket. Drop the green stems into the compost and refrigerate the basket.

When your spouse, children, your dear sweet roommate arrive home and start rooting around in the fridge and through the CSA box looking for berries like so many hungry black bears, inform them with just a bit of annoyance that this week your so-called farmer friends jilted you with a basket of red onions instead of the usual sweet, succulent, bursting red ripe strawberries. Yes, I know, the nerve. State unequivocally that you will be sending an email shortly voicing your dissatisfaction.

Then, quietly so as not to draw attention to yourself, go into the garden, the garage, a back bedroom closet and eat all the blueberries from the clamshell you’ve hidden under your shirt like a common criminal. Deposit the empty clamshell somewhere so as not to arouse suspicion. Maybe the neighbor’s recycling. Or Daly City.

Using the neighbor’s garden hose, a shirt hem, a paper towel, clean your gob of the red and blue fruit stains that have besmirched more than your guilty face, for they have stained your immortal soul, I’m afraid, at this point, and return to the kitchen and declare that you’ll be turning lemons into lemonade and use the aforementioned red onions to good effect in a beautiful pan of roasted vegetables, a heart healthy quinoa salad or a sizzling tofu stir fry. Yum.

Don’t forget to shove this incriminating message deep into the compost bin, at least below Tuesday’s coffee grounds. So long as you didn’t eat all the nectarines as well, you may just get away with it. Eat the nectarines and the bears may get you.