Use your freedom from choice!

My fruit bowl filled with goodies.

How is it possible that I gave birth to vegetarians?

Actually, Charlotte’s mother will tell you that she’s not a vegetarian, she’s organic, and there just aren't that many free-range, grass-fed, organic cows, pigs and chickens out there, and even if there were, she couldn't afford them.

And that's why she eats legumes.

But the budding cartographer tried to go vegetarian at about age 10, at which time I told her I wasn’t making two meals, and asked if she wasn’t going to get tired of peanut butter and jelly?
She is backsliding now, a result of keeping company with a culinary school alumnus. But for years, she avoided meat.

It seems that every generation in my family is getting better about eating their vegetables.
As one friend put it, Charlotte will probably turn out to be a militant vegan.

My mother refuses to eat any green food except green beans. I give her credit; she made us vegetables, even though the idea made her gag. But they were never fresh.
We ate broccoli because Green Giant made a boil-in-bag with cheese sauce.

To illustrate, my mom came home from the market one day when I was a teenager, and asked me to go to the store and buy two zucchini. “Mom! You just came from the store!” was my typically smart-ass teenage reply.

“I know,” she said, “But I have this zucchini bread recipe I want to try, and I don’t know what they look like and I was too embarrassed to ask.”
At that point, I’m not sure I could identify them either, but I was willing to ask someone.

I eat lots of fresh vegetables now, but I’m terrible at picking them out. I get stuff that ripens too fast, or never comes close to ripe. So it causes me great grief. I want to have a produce manager on retainer just to take the decision out of my hands.

So I was thrilled to find Abundant Harvest Organics, a co-op that takes the guesswork out of produce. My daughter, the mommyblogger, found out about it first, now I've been doing it for about a month. My friend's father calls it freedom from choice.

The box full of goodness from Abundant Harvest Organics

I went on the website and signed up to get a collapsible box filled with ripe vegetables and fruit from a variety of Southern California farms. It's environmentally more sound, too. When that egg recall went down, all I could think was "why the hell are we buying eggs from Iowa with all the egg farms in our own state?"

Lemon Leaf kitchen manager Helen picks up a box of vegetables and fruit from Kathryn Juybari-Johnson, area coordinator.

My friend Brenna found Abundant Organics in a parenting magazine, and she says it has completely transformed the way her family eats.

"We were worried that maybe this was going to be another expense that we really didn't need, but it has cut our grocery bill by 75%."

"And absolutely everything we've gotten is stellar."

Especially the tomatoes. I'm from New Jersey, where the tomatoes are sweet and succulent, and these are a close second.

Me, I still don't eat everything that shows up in the box. I think figs are disgusting, and eggplant gritty, so I pass that stuff along. My kids think I'm nuts, because they regard figs as manna from heaven. Thank heaven for the newsletter that gives you recipes and explains how to store things. Like this week we got fresh lemon basil.

It really forces you to cook, or throw stuff out, so if you are cheap at all (and I am) you'll make the most of it. I made fresh tomato sauce to put over my spaghetti squash a few weeks ago. But the produce ignorance was passed down, apparently, because I had to send a photo of green round things to the mommyblogger to find out that they were Asian pears.

I thought pears were, well, pear-shaped.

Patrons line up to pick up their cases of produce in front of Lemon Leaf restaurant on Lancaster Blvd.