Connections: Good Intentions

All those pumpkins and squashes at farm stands — and in so many artsy photographs last month — got to us. We’ve been trying to eat healthy, and as Thanksgiving approached the pantry and refrigerator were jammed with big, beautiful vegetables and squashes about which we had the best of intentions. 

One of our problems is that we both, my husband and I, go grocery-shopping, and more often than not neither of us has a clue what the other has been buying.

I had brought home what I thought was an unusually big acorn squash, and tossed it into a basket in the pantry that already held a giant rutabaga and a few hefty white onions. Chris came home with an acorn squash equally as big, proud of his prize, and since I did the putting away, he never noticed the one already there. Should I be surprised both prize-winning squashes are still in the pantry a week or two later?

Last week I also bought a lovely cheese pumpkin, having recalled how good it was when my son David cooked one. I dredged up a recipe for curried pumpkin soup, which sounded like a good idea, and healthy one; in reality, the spice overwhelmed the pumpkin and we had to tame it with milk, and somehow we ended up reluctantly eating cheese pumpkin soup for days.

Chris has really done his part in the healthy-food department over the last year, having become a devotee Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamini’s cookbook “Jerusalem,” which contains many exotic recipes for vegetables and legumes. For the Connecticut Thanksgiving table we shared with relatives, we did a “Jerusalem” recipe for roasted sweet potatoes with scallions and figs in a balsamic glaze. We came home to find our outsize root vegetables and squashes still hanging around in the pantry, and cauliflower and fennel still waiting in the refrigerator. It’s cornucopias of plenty at our house, and, yes, we are thankful for it all . . . but we were also a bit flummoxed by the bounty, I must admit.

The refrigerator also held a lonely avocado, a bunch of asparagus, and one apple too many. We also had one yellow, one red, and one green pepper, along with two light green and two dark green conical ones, a nice local lettuce, two endives, and a head of radicchio. We chopped up the dark peppers and the fennel bulb for a dish with bulgur. It sounded good, except it really wasn’t. Salads are great but I feel both guilty and dumb when I have to throw out lettuce that’s gone gooey. And what is it about cauliflower? It’s good for you, we claim to love it, but somehow we rarely enjoy it. I wasted more than an hour at the computer trying to find something interesting to do with a big head. The recipes looked either too complicated or too dull to bother with.

We had the asparagus at dinner last night, but as I took it out of the steamer, Chris asked if we had a sauce for it, perhaps a béchamel or lemony hollandaise.

“Sauce?” I replied. “We’re trying to eat healthy.”