When we moved to San Francisco, on encouragement from one of my skiing friends, Earl and I signed up for Farm Fresh to You, a bi-weekly service that delivers a heaping box of fresh organic fruits and veggies to your door, for the reasonable price of $30. It is super exciting to get the box and see what we’ve gotten, and also it’s helping FORCE us to 1.) cook for ourselves more often instead of going out and 2.) eat more healthy stuff.

We love the service (and really recommend them if you are in the Bay area), however, oftentimes we receive some random freaky vegetables which we have no clue how to cook. Okay- guilty admission- we don’t really know how to cook ANY of them, heh heh, but some of them are even MORE oddball than others. For example, radicchio. What the heck is radicchio? It looks like a red lettuce, erm, but what do you do with it?

So the first week we got the FFTY box, I let all the strange vegetables that I didn’t know how to cook rot in the back of our fridge. Not good, and it has the added insult of forcing you to clean out all these moldy vegetables from the back of the fridge two weeks later, and reminding you that you suck and let all these wonderful veggies you paid good money for go bad in the back of your fridge and now you probably have toxic poisoning from rotting vegetable mold which has subsequently infected all the other contents of your fridge.

With the most recent box we received, I vowed to cook ! them! all!  Even that enormous 4lb kochiabaaosfhasdf squash.  So what I did last week was sit down and go through Every. Single. Cookbook. We. Owned. and marked out a recipe for every vegetable in the box. Then, when we went grocery shopping I made sure we grabbed all the other stuff we needed for the recipes, like saffron, which was is $15 for a stupid little packet.  I thought cooking for yourself was supposed to be *cheaper* than going out?! agh.  Talk about a pain. Cooking, and planning what to cook, is hard work.  No wonder our lazy butts used to eat out all the time.

Tonight we made, from my New York City Cookbook, Linguine with Leeks, Radicchio and Pine Nuts, which you can find a similar- but not exactly the same (thank god)- recipe here.

Now, I don’t know if I cooked this incorrectly, because I don’t really know what I am doing yet in the kitchen, or we burned the radicchio, or we had a bad batch of radicchio, or Earl and I simply hate the taste of radicchio, but man oh man whatever the heck happened… this thing turned out DISGUSTING!!! Neither on of us finished it, it was that bad.  And even after we picked out all the bits of radicchio, the rest of the meal still tasted poisoned. Blegh blegh blegh, gak gak gak, hurl, dryheave, blegh.  It was horrendously bitter and just plain nasty.  Even thinking about it now, three hours later, I kind of dry heave in my mouth a little bit.

EPIC DINNER FAIL.

Man, that was the nastiest thing I have ever cooked.
Here is the carnage:
-boiling pasta, toasting pine nuts, and sauteing leeks, garlic, onion and radicchio

everything looks normal

so far, so good??

end result- everything *looks* normal

Ahh, dont eat it!!! SAVE YOURSELVES, run for the hills aggh, blegh gross how could you serve us this, are you trying to kill us???

Ahh, don't eat it!!! SAVE YOURSELVES, run for the hills aggh, blegh gross how could you serve us this, are you trying to kill us???

When we finished putting the entire dinner down the disposal, we seriously contemplated ordering a pizza but instead binged on Christmas cookies which my cousin-in-law Denise so kindly baked us for Christmas. All Hail baker extraordinaire Denise, who singlehandedly saved the evening!

Tonight we also trimmed Linus’ nails

getting his nails did

getting his nails did

and later snuggled up and snoozed with ze ani-mules. Don’t they look cute?? Former arch-enemies now curl up together in the corner. Aww.

nap time

nap time