Mon Petit Chou

The cabbage moths and the compost.

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Images 1-4: We are all temporarily not dirt (source).

Inside of me are two cabbage moths- one who wants to eat only the freshest produce available at all times and another who is determined to use up everything in the fridge even if it’s halfway to compost. These moths fly in dusty spirals around my aspirational cabbage purchases, making wagers on whether or not sauerkraut will actually happen while the pale globe is still firm and squeaky. They alight brightly on my shoulders as the liquifying cilantro that I’m chopping smears a verdant stripe across my palm. Although the slime and the cabbage moths may beg to differ, I am well familiar with the taste of peak nutrience. I know what it is to eat mizuna out in the field, its fresh cut stems dripping sharp juices down my chin and back into the soil. I’ve nibbled wheatgrass shoots from a knife blade, testing them on either side of my tongue, their sugary first stretches towards the sun succumbing tenderly to my eyeteeth. And, too, I’ve made dinners from expired mispicks and bruised vegetables, recanned industrial quantities of past date tomatoes for home use, boiled decadent jam from softly ballooning plums smuggled home in a sagging backpack, reveled in the everyday opportunities of day old anything. I love the economy of cooking just as much as I love its vast array of proffered experiences and pleasures.

Next to the dish rack a thrift store cookie jar fills up daily with coffee grounds and potato peels. Stacked under the counter our egg carton stash is dwindling faster than we consume a dozen, supplemented by brown paper carried home from work, stored whole now that it’s warm enough to shred it outside. On the pantry windowsill sprouting onions reach sunward, perched on glass jars alongside the houseplant cuttings that I’ve been neglectfully propagating. I’ve treated sprouting onions this way every winter, giving them sunlight and water until they are rooting and bursting like flowerless paperwhites, with no functional use besides feeding a green hope. When they whither completely they’ll go in the compost- the end of their brief stint indoors but really just another in a long line of beginnings. I eagerly await their collapse, as I relish each chance to open the compost and peer inside. It’s already exciting in there, hot and steamy and full of deep smells and surprising colors. The compost absolves me of my vegetal neglect, welcoming wilted cabbage leaves and weird kraut with warmth and activity and blessed little judgement.

Tonight I peeled a truly wasted head of savoy cabbage down to a tight, pale fist and braised that still crisp miracle with tempeh and shiitakes in coconut milk. I poured the remnants of old spices out in heaps, coaxed flavor with salt and flame. As we ate we remembered a sweet friend’s superior homemade tempeh, its delicate white structures bruisable like the rind on brie, packed into every corner of the ziplocks where it grew. We scooped dented avocados into our bowls, deftly scraping out the browned bits with fork tines, dousing everything in lime juice, all practices honed in the days when we lived off of co-op free bins, where sunken avocados were the sometimes literal glue holding everything and everyone together. I repeat to myself the lesson I learned again and again from the staff bins of cold, dry tofu and burst tomatoes:

To have food is a blessing, period.

To eat it together is to revel in riches uncountable.