Author: Julie

Recovering Southerner, foul-mouthed mom, doesn't like vegetables very much.

a blonde, an asian american, and barbara boxer walk into a bar

Public transportation turns me on, y’all. I don’t mean, like, I see a city bus and get all hot and bothered; I just mean I have a real love for the lifestyle I think a good mass transit system supports. Whenever I dream of my life as a tortured, starving artist (with expensive shoes and a Jenny Aniston hair cut, circa now, not circa Friends), it’s always midnight and I’m on a train headed home to my postage stamp-sized apartment from whatever gallery opening or swank new restaurant I couldn’t afford so I just stood at the bar sipping tap water with lime and looking hot with my pretty shoes. Shoes, glorious shoes.
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eat, vegetables, love

Does anyone remember how all this foolishness got started? I’ve been thinking about it lately while I haven’t been cooking or eating vegetables but have been eating some great meat cooked by other people at Decatur’s newest burger joint. The answer is: I have no idea. I think it was an accident. I mean, I know I had a series of revelations about what a baby I’ve been about eating vegetables all my life, but no other revelation has ever led me to wake up one day and forfeit a way of life I’ve worked so hard for. I think it’s possible my abducted by aliens theory may have legs.
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battle 28–yams–day 2

It’s still yam week, but I haven’t cooked any yams yet because I haven’t found a volunteer to go to the farmers’ market with me to root out the authentic Library of Congress science nerd version of the real thing. I had been doing well at the farmers’ market lately, navigating the imposing bins with ease, but on my most recent trip I went in search of a rutabaga and wound up in the check-out line with a tap root. I thought maybe tap root was just special farmers’ market code language for rutabaga, but I asked just in case. The cashier didn’t even blink.
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battle 28–yams–day 1, void

It’s yam time. When I saw yams were next on the list I finally thought I must have been smoking crack when I put this list together, because aren’t yams winter-y? And haven’t we established that spring has sprung? And then I thought, isn’t yam just another word for sweet potato (which I handily defeated in the fall)? Like how corn and maize are kind of the same thing. Aren’t they? I wasn’t really sure about any of this so I decided not to wholly abandon yams until I had consulted an authoritative source, like…my parents, the people who instilled in me absolutely no values about eating fresh food.  Naturally. Continue reading “battle 28–yams–day 1, void” →

waxing philosophical–jvv gets fancy

In my effort to put off eating turnips as long as possible (I have until the end of March, which is plenty of time) I decided to make muffins for dinner last night. This decision was informed not by a remarkable lack of food in the house (although there was a remarkable lack of food in the house) but by a family tradition of eating breakfast for supper when the day was too long and the night was too short to come up with anything better or more creative. And when there was a remarkable lack of food in the house. Continue reading “waxing philosophical–jvv gets fancy” →