2670 Veggies

Monday, November 23, 2009

Blessed are the cracked, for they shall let in the light.

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I want vegetables! Why is it so hard to get vegetables? I've been eating out a lot lately, and living mostly on doggy bags between outings, and I am veggie deprived. Restaurant meals seem to come with meat and starch, and that's about all. The last dinner was one pound (!!!) of steak (four days of meat), a mountain of fries, and five, that's 5!, lonely string beans on the plate. Yeah, there are salads, but they tend to be mostly lettuce, which doesn't count.

I buy vegetables at the grocery store, but most things I want don't come in small quantities. I'm so tired of throwing out 3/4 of the head of cabbage, most of the bunch of carrots, 80% of the stalk of celery, half the bag of baby spinach, when they shrivel and die. Lately even the things that I used to be able to buy in small quantities, like loose string beans or broccoli spears, aren't sold loose anymore. They are in enormous bags. I suppose it has something to do with disease - they don't want people handling things that don't get peeled.

Frozen vegetables also come in "too much", never "just right". Yeah, I can open a bag and take out what I want, but a) it's not raw, and I want RAW, and b) if I don't finish off the bag quickly once opened, they get icky. I often end up throwing out half the bags.

Grocery store salad bars were wonderful, a boon to single people. I used to get a container, and fill it with a little bit of this, and a little of that, and I'd have two or three days of a variety of veggies to nibble on. Throw in a chunk of cheese, and I was eating well.

Grocery store salad bars seem to be a thing of the past. I don't know whether they were considered to have too much waste, or whether it's the sanitary thing again. Now the stores that used to have salad bars have prepackaged containers of salad instead - mostly lettuce, with a few bits of this and that lying on top. No good at all.

I've been buying the stir-fry mixes and then eating it raw or steamed, and they were good and worked for a while, but lately they seem to be difficult to find, and have become mostly broccoli, which is ok once in a while, but not every day, and so again I end up throwing out half.

I want veggies, without waste. Something like 40% of households are singles living alone. Why has no one noticed us? Why does no one cater to us? Why is it so hard to put a few whatevers in a bag, next to the umpteen pound bags? Give us a choice?

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Later update: I went to the grocery store, stared balefully at the huge bunches, boxes, and bags of fresh vegetables, and then hit the frozen foods section. Lean Cuisine dinners, my plan B, include veggies.

This evening for dinner I am having LC butternut squash-stuffed ravioli, with lots of carrots, green beans, peas, walnuts, and summer squash in the sauce. I'll just shake off most of the sauce.
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