grrlTravels

Disgusting? Or edible?

If you had purchased a bunch of asparagus (oh, say a week ago) and then never got around to cooking it; and if tonight you decided that the asparagus would go really well with the shrimp you were making; and if when you removed the asparagus from the vegetable drawer where it had been carefully stored for the past week and began cleaning it only to find that the tops were a little squishy and moldy, would you:

1. Squeal and immediately toss the asparagus in the nearest trash receptacle?


2. Inwardly squeal, sigh, carefully remove every single molecule of mold and all of the squishy parts, making sure you maintained good margins, and apologize to everyone at the dinner table, giving them fair warning?


3. Get annoyed, wash and chop the asparagus getting rid of the major bad spots and serve it with no apologies?

The answer for me is C. But then again, I got financial aid in college and you know what that means.

Financial aid meant that you had to work a campus job. And as a freshman on financial aid, the campus job you worked was food service. Period. (Except for my roommate sophomore year who lucked out and wormed her way into a job at the museum, thereby effectively missing out on the crappiest, lowest paying job of her life. After we lived together sophomore year she never talked to me again, but that's an entry for another day.)

My college was somewhat unique in that the dorms were relatively small and almost every dorm had its own kitchen, and meals were served "family style" ("gracious dining" as advertised at the all girl's school, or all women's college, depending on your point of view, and boy were those meals filled with grace). ANYWAY... One of my jobs my first semester was to get up early in the morning and go down to the kitchen to chop vegetables for the salad bar. The veggies were stored in a big walk-in fridge in boxes, and they were always soft and moldy. (The green peppers stand out in my mind for some reason. I now detest green peppers.) Not being a morning person, and being somewhat picky and prissy about my food, this job was extremely offensive to me.

But see how I have grown as a person since then? See the valuable life skills I gained from working a crappy on-campus job? I can now without compunction serve my lovely little family moldy vegetables. And not even warn them. (K., it's really just another form of penicillin—that's why you were feeling so perky yesterday.)