Vegetable Connoisuer

The musings of a farmer's market casual employee...

There is a guesthouse called the Noble Grape and I have often wondered at the title, pictured a grape resplendent in battle dress, slaying grape enemies and bestowing grace when its conscience demanded so.  As I stand here, in the echo and re-echo of beep beep scanners, and the orders of military matriarchs organising their familial rabble, "You fetch a box, you pack out, you pack in, out the way, stand aside, no, the heavier stuff goes first, shit! I forgot the cheese, you get a block o'cheddar..." I begin to question the possibility of a savage potato.  Can a potato truly be savage, perhaps if you consider an older one that has been kept in the dark (literal dark, as in not keeping the identity of its real parents from it, or the state of its credit card debt) so that it has become a little green, soft and possesses several unseeing eyes.  No, this strikes me more as a once reliable potato that due to neglect has become a little madcap.  Well, a daikon is definitely not a contender, more a monk of the oblong vegetable variety, a cloistered parsnip, if you will.  Perhaps a parsnip then, no cliche`.  As P has rightly pointed out in a previous entry, a parsnip is naught but an albino carrot and I will not have it suffer the reputation incited by fiction of novel and screen genres, where those who are a little short on pigment are the seething pimples of blunt and foul evil.  So the parsnip is not savage, just misunderstood.  "They are mushrooms, love,"  I am interrupted.  Yes, I smile sweetly to indicate my gratitude and comprehension of well intended but redundant information.  It says mushrooms on the bag.  I am still required to to peer into the bag to identify the type of fungus.  Ah, the androgynous button mushroom.  Bland in texture, colour, shape and taste, though pop them in a hot pan with some butter and a good dash of nutmeg and they gain a lovely distinction.  They are also fabulous in beef stroganoff - 'Oh those Russians'. Ah, the parsnip - of course! Purple war paint around its gills and a stark tuft of foliage, stiffened no doubt by the vegetable blood of countless vegetable sacrifices offered in appeasement of the vegetable gods.  All in vain, for it shall be plucked from the earth, washed, trimmed and transported, paraded and sold, cooked and et! And if not, then woe betide the savage turnip that crosses that noble grape.
"That comes to $175.00, thank you.  And which account is that on?"