Health and Food

 The last month has been busy and rainy, two things that don’t go well with a regular exercise schedule.  I’ve noticed that without my regular exercise and fresh air/sunshine time, I become a grumpy gus.  Added to that is lots of work stress and the relentless monthly schedule of my professional licensing exams and…I tend to mope around.  Today I finally get to go running after only getting out once or twice in the last month.  Funny, you wouldn’t think you’d look forward so much to hard physical work, but the weather is sunny and I get to run in beautiful Balboa Park.

Now about health and food.  I’m going to pick up my third CSA basket today and am beginning to understand the whole thing.  Here are the benefits: 

• I don’t have to go to the farmer’s market and shop at separate places—it’s all ready for me to pick up in a box.
• I get the excitement of a variety of things I wouldn’t necessarily buy on my own.  For example, my wife made swiss chard in a cream sauce with rotini.  Excellent!
• I am guaranteed everything is organic, where at the farmer’s market some stands with produce/fruit I want is not organic.
• I get fruit that I wouldn’t normally buy, and because I know another box is coming, I am eating more fruit to clear the way.  I’m especially loving the blood oranges, tangelos, and apples.

Here’s the drawback:  cost.  At about $30/week, our current CSA box contents just don’t add up.  I think we could do better buying all the ingredients separately at our local farmer’s market.  That takes more work, but it might actually save us money.  So I’m going to look at another CSA next month to see if I can get a better deal. 

Next week I pick up our beef CSA package.  I’m hoping we can split that cost with some friends, and to make space for all this frozen meat, I’ve been happily chucking out freezer burnt mystery packages from our freezer that look like specimen collections of this guy.

Oetzi

Finally a little note about bread.  This weekend I made an important discovery about finally getting ears on my bread.  My oven doesn’t heat evenly, and I need to rotate every five minutes for the first twenty to make sure the ears get a chance to bloom.  I hope to resolve this by using a foil roasting pan to cover my bread, helping to radiate heat evenly, provide uniform steam, and save me the hassle and danger of pouring hot water onto lava rocks.  I’ll save that for the sauna.

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Writer, architect, father, husband.