Eating Our Vegetables

I love Costco. I mean, I love Costco like I love bacon. And I really love bacon. Not as much as I love my wife but right up there, you know? Well, maybe not. No, I suspect that placing Mary on the same plane with bacon would not go over well. I think I'll just move on.

I may have mentioned a few times how much we like the meat at Costco, so much so that we no longer buy beef, for instance, at the local Safeway. Costco beef is normally a higher grade and cheaper on that basis. We've also bought vegetables at Costco in the past but they were really sops to our conscience. I mean, I'm loading up the cart with blocks of cheese that could be the annual output of a small family dairy in Wisconsin, or barrels of extra virgin olive oil and I would feel the need for some plant matter to offset all the oils and fats. Mary says dietary science doesn't actually work like that, but then she's often been a bit of a spoilsport, throwing down with the research and documentation and peer reviewed journal articles.

This summer's dalliance with the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) meant we ate a lot more veggies than normally. And we kind of got in the habit, so once the fall ended and the deliveries stopped we were jonesing bad for a veggie fix. And we noticed that Costco has some really good looking vegetables. A bag with a quartet of artichokes for goes for like 4-5 dollars which is the same price the local grocery charges for a single one. Green beans, really gorgeous thin haricots vert for well, a pittance really. On a per bean basis anyhow.

The drawback of course is that you have to buy like three pounds of green beans or a flat of blueberries big enough to make pancakes for the entire Tenth Mountain Division. Even we, lovers of all things green, find it difficult to eat green beans with every dinner for a week and a half. But with enough different recipes we manage. And that's why I love Costco. Just not as much as my wife.