It was my turn to buy the food for the youth group; each week we cook dinner together as a part of our meeting. This afternoon, the supermarket had fiddleheads on sale, so I bought some along with everything else.<\/p>\n
Emma, the other advisor, said, “You always bring such interesting food when you buy.” Jarrod looked at the fiddleheads skeptically; they do look pretty weird, coiled up heads of ferns cut before they can grow into those tall fronds. Alyzza just chopped garlic.<\/p>\n
“Interesting food?” I said.<\/p>\n
“Yeah,” said Emma, “Like you brought in the parsnips a couple of months ago. I don’t think I’d ever eaten parsnips.”<\/p>\n
I thought about it. I guess it’s true: most people in these United States don’t eat parsnips or fiddleheads. Why do I? “I guess it’s because Carol and I keep trying to eat locally grown food,” I said. “Parsnips are just about the only vegetable that you can dig all winter. And I really don’t like fiddleheads all that much, but they’re really the first green vegetable you can get in the spring that’s local.”<\/p>\n
We sauteed the fiddleheads in olive oil with lots of garlic. “About a third of the population has mild allergic reaction to fiddleheads,” I announced as we dug in to the food.<\/p>\n
“Great,” said Emma, who’s an R.N. “When I go into anaphylactic shock, you can drive me to the hospital.”<\/p>\n
“Well, maybe it’s not a full-blown allergic reaction,” I said. “Sometimes I get kind of an itchy feeling inside my mouth. Besides, you’re a nurse — oh wait, guess you can’t do first aid on yourself if you’re in anaphylactic shock, can you?”<\/p>\n
We all tried the fiddleheads. They weren’t very good. They never are.<\/p>\n
“They taste kind of like asparagus,” said Alyzza.<\/p>\n
“Kind of,” I said. They just taste like leaves to me.<\/p>\n
Emma actually had seconds. We talked about it later: fiddleheads must have tasted pretty good when you hadn’t had any fresh green vegetables all winter long. I suppose now we are spoiled by having fresh produce shipped in from California at a great expenditure of jet fuel. Even so, I think the only reason I’d eat fiddleheads is because they remind me of spring; but not because they taste good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was my turn to buy the food for the youth group; each week we cook dinner together as a part of our meeting. This afternoon, the supermarket had fiddleheads on sale, so I bought some along with everything else. Emma, the other advisor, said, “You always bring such interesting food when you buy.” Jarrod […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[257],"class_list":["post-487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-bedford-mass","tag-local-food"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=487"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}