What's Local at Cassie's Green Grocer

Locavoreitis

Just the other day I was telling you how good it was to be a locavore. A bag of fresh porcini mushrooms, lettuce that tasted like something, damnit red strawberries. What I did not mention is that locavorism is a curse too. I have a disease and I have it bad.

See when I walk into Cassie's Green Grocer and find something new, in this case, lamb's quarters; well, I barely pause to look at the price. They'd be in my bag if I was smart enough to bring some of our bags in from the car, but since my wife and I left them all in to go shopping, we just wrapped our arms around the greens to take them out (along with our arugula, cilantro, Trader's Creamery ice cream, baby turnips, peanut butter and Bennison's bread).

Lamb's quarters also go by wild spinach, which rather means it is a weed on farms around here that cooks and tastes a bit like spinach. It's thicker than spinach, with that same velvety quality as nettles that somewhat negates its use raw. They don't need a long cook though. Through the food chain of local, Robin, who I introduced to Cassie, who introduced Cassie to Floyd of the Midwest Organic Farmer's Cooperative, who hooked Cassie up with lamb's quarters from Ackerman Farm of Chenoa, Illinois; who sold them back to me because I have a house full of kale and beet greens and radish tops and 3 forms of lettuce and spinach too I believe, but I must, I absolutely must have some lamb's quarters. I am diseased.