Saturday Morning at the Market

We are lucky to live near a number of farmers markets, although I am never convinced that all the vegetables what are set out in open crates have actually just been plucked from the ground.  No matter, there is a freshness and liveliness to the several blocks of tents and booths which make up for a lot.  Beside we adore the family who do indeed make and sell every variety of pasta. so real, so Italian, although the younger generation had to pass through Argentina on their way to our shores.  There is a lady making quacamole that is do die for, a great couple turning out exquisite pastries after his career as a business executive, now no longer operational.  You get the picture.  Fifty years ago my first wife and I used to go on Saturday mornings to Boston's North End for the same thing, only most of the stuff was left over sale bargains from jobbers working the supermarkets.  Cheap, though, perfect for graduate students.  We were learning to cook, so shopping together was part of our adventure.  My husband and I both cook, he looks forward to turning out his favorite recipes, I, after ten years in the kitchen of cooking for my children, and twenty years cooking Richard's dinner,  would truthfully be happy to never go near a stove again.  And, indeed, I don't often do so.  The problem is that Richard goes through the market buying items that strike his fancy "oh, eggplant, we haven't had that in a long time" without any developed expectation of the day ahead when this item will be featured in the dinner.  Thus too much produce lingers in our refrigerator and rots, especially vegetables. It is a scandal, but no matter how devoted we are to one another we don't seem to be in sync when it comes to planning menus ahead of time and sticking to them.  Richard is a superb cook of fish; he started working in his father's cousin's fish restaurant in his early teens and he knows the product, and at the market we get really fresh fish.  So that and the pasta are stellar; I need to muscle in and assure a good vegetable side at every dinner, but Richard who is commendable for the way he has taken over as my strength and skills fade is also when in command in command and does not brook my entrance into the kitchen which I must admit will scarcely hold two people, and then I lose interest and go sit with my drink in the living room, and a vegetable side does not get cooked.  And so the vegetables sit in the refrigerator growing older and older.  But occasionally he makes a run on a box store and buys, say, three long English cucumbers bound up tightly in cellophane.  No way they will not rot.  I must stop before all my positive projections end in the evocation of grim realities.  We have friends who receive from some company boxes of ingredients for pre planned meals each week.  Maybe that is the way to go.