Grubbiness calls for watchful washing

– Everything is an Adventure: Column by Julia Wolf –

Garden season is one of my favorite times of year. Everything is so fresh and delicious. Plus, I’m not even the person with the garden. I just mooch off my parents’ and grandma’s hard work.

It was recently brought to my attention that there are a lot of beets in the garden and they could use some thinning out. I’m probably the person who likes beets the best, and my dad suggested I go thin those out and take the beet greens with me, to add into soup or salad. I was also told to look at what else is out there and help eat. OK.

Did I really need more greens? Probably not. I already had a pretty good-sized bag of kale loaded up to take along. But, I decided soup and salad are a traditional pairing for a reason. It turned into meal prepping, only the chaos version where I have to exert effort to use up everything before it goes bad. I decided I could freeze some of the soup if it looked like it was going to sit a while. Double meal prepping.

So, I headed over to the garden, with a box to toss my finds in. They were right about a lot of beets and some of them even had decentlysized roots already. As I started thinning the most cramped areas of the beet row, I came to the conclusion you couldn’t even tell I took any out, despite the rapidly filling box proving otherwise. I also took some spinach, because that looked good and some of the leaves were as big as my head. Then, I took an entire bok choy plant, for my soup making pleasure.

At that point, I decided that was more than enough produce for a week, and headed for home.

The box was too large to fit into my fridge, but my place has air conditioning, so I put the box on the table and decided I would cut everything up for soup a bit later. Over 24 hours later, I finally got around to doing that.

I started with the bok choy and had the stem part cooking in the soup pot, while I cut up the bok choy greens and set them in a bowl off to the side. Then, I broke any little beets off the greens (while singing the baby beets song, to the Baby Shark tune), and started washing and cutting the greens, saving the beet roots for later.

The first group of beet greens, I washed the whole plants worth of leaves at one time and wondered if that was good enough. About halfway through cutting up that batch, the food on my cutting board moved. I hate it when my food unexpectedly moves with no outside assistance.

There it was, a grub/bug, approximately the same size and color as the baby beets, sitting on my cutting board. Too much protein. Too much protein! I carefully picked up the leaf it was attached to and stuck it into the compost bin, before rinsing my knife in the sink. I didn’t think I hit the grub with my knife, but I did check over what I already had cut up, just in case. Seeing nothing, the greens got added to the greens bowl. From that point on, I washed every beet leaf and stem individually. It took quite a while and I never found another bug on them.

That grub kept breathing at me from the compost bin and I ended up taking that outside, before continuing with the soup process. That’s a lot of nerve.

Part of me is glad that the close call with the grub was in the first batch, because then I didn’t have to wonder how many I missed (unlike that one year with the blueberries, where I learned while cleaning the second pail of berries, that small, green critters sometimes live in the flower end of the fruit). Still, it was kind of an icky find.

I also love the thought of that huge bug chilling in a box on my kitchen table for over 24 hours. I thought I was living alone.

The soup ended up tasting pretty good, considering it was essentially just bok choy and beet greens in a cheesy base. For some reason, none of my co-workers wanted to try any of it. Weird.