Como frijole? How've you bean?

As we all know, I have been on a fresh food kick for the past month. For a girl who lives in a forest, this can mean almost anything because even road kill qualifies as “fresh food” if you get out there fast enough with your shovel ...

But we’re talking about fresh-off-the-farm VEGETABLES, darlings.

Friend Nete, always looking out for my best interests, signed me up for a bushel of shelled white acre peas at Rogers Farm north of here. Yes. I was REGISTERED for peas. Michael and I had to drive up there and claim them by appointment or risk ticking off the farmers, an agricultural “dis” that I’m sure has consequences involving waking up with a pit bull head in your bed.

Going to the farm for peas was glorious! First, I've never owned a bushel of anything. (Maybe I've owned a peck. But I can’t confirm that; I don’t know what a peck is.) And second, the experience of bellying up to claim MY peas and seeing my name in pencil on a damp list was thrilling.

Anyhow, I got so caught up in the moment, I also bought a bushel of lima beans, which required no registration. Free-range lima beans? This was heady stuff.

I went right to work to "put them up" like Nete taught me. (Yes, freezing lessons.) I even wore an apron. I gotta say. When the work was done, there was something marvelous about admiring a freezer full of vittles that will see ya through the winter. I felt so Earth Mother. So Pioneer Woman. So utterly Little House on the Prairie.

Then I remembered that I don’t actually LIKE peas and beans.

Uh oh.

I wonder if the Kenyan marathon runners’ quest for carbs is this complicated. Is this where we get the term COMPLEX CARBOHYDRATES???