For the last two months or so, we’ve been getting a “box” of vegetables from Suzy’s Organic Farm every-other-week. We pick up our veggies at the elementary school Ruby will be attending come September—excuse me for a minute while I get a tissue…

Oh Jesus. Hold another second, please…

Ah, that’s better. Off to school you go, wee one!

Anyway, I feel pretty great about taking part in Community Supported Agriculture because we walk down the block to pick up our veggies. And, too, because I can say, Hey y’all! I’m participating in Community Supported Agriculture! as I pat myself on the back for being this much [] closer to the source of my food.

But I gotta be honest: Beyond that? Not so wowed. I find, as much as I fight it, I’m becoming ever-less enchanted with my every-other-Wednesday loot. This week, we got four tomatoes. Four. And they tasted just as much like wet cardboard as those from my grocery store. We didn’t get any lettuce but got enough arugla to feed everyone within a three block radius of our home. For a month. That is, if the arugula weren’t more bitter than Betty Draper chewing coffee grounds in between cigarettes.

Of course, we did get 3 eggplants, two gnarled and pocked squashes (is that a word? squashes?), a bag of emaciated Romanian green beans and about 60 peppers. 60 very useful Cherry Bomb, Serrano and Hungarian Hot Wax chili peppers. As much as I like supporting my local farmers, bitter arugula and flaming peppers are not helping my family meal planning. Not that I would know since I don’t normally cook, but nothing is normal around here these days. My period shows up whenever it feels like it, forty is the new 32 and last night, I baked a chicken. I touched giblets and a neck. I made a paste with olive oil and oregano leftover from the last CSA box and smeared it around under the skin. Take that store bought rotisserie chickens!

And since procrastination is an art form of the most highly disciplined avoider, I embraced this new-found talent and skipped writing in lieu of cooking again today. (Of course, here I sit writing, so it’s all getting done as it should.) And what did I do with all the weird and useless veggies from last night’s CSA box? I went shopping and got all the necessary ingredients to make this gazpacho right here.

It only took me an hour and the kitchen was a wall-splattered Jackson-Pollack-meets-Frida-Kahlo masterpiece. My gazpacho was red and not at all green, like the pretty picture on the No More Dirty Looks website, probably because I didn’t follow the directions and removed the cucumber skin, resulting in a final product that looked more closely related to the vomit of a frat boy on a bender than it did an Ayurvedic delicacy. But whew! I did it. I’m just lucky I didn’t lose a toe when the blade from my miniature food processor went flying to the ground, a credit to my natural athletical inclinations.

Like a mad scientist on a roll, I made some grilled trout for dinner.

Okay, that’s a total lie. Sam prepped and cooked the trout. But I bought it and took a photo of it just before I dealt with those pesky peppers. What to do about those peppers, right?

Even I know, when in doubt, add bacon. And cream cheese.

I sliced and cleaned 15 of these babies without getting any spice-juice in my eyes, smeared them full of cream cheese, wrapped them in bacon, slid them into the oven and then forgot to take any pictures of the end product because they were as eye-wateringly scrumptious as the gazpacho was not. And it turns out, a few of them weren’t spicy at all. Her entire face may have puckered at the flavor of the gazpacho, but one guess as to who asked for a bacon wrapped, cream cheese stuffed pepper for dessert?

I gotta say, failure be damned—and to Ruby’s teacher, I honestly thought it was a nice gesture bringing you a bowl of chilled upchuck—the effort to fun ratio was, for once, pretty inspiring.