fresh!

Here in Germany I buy most of my fruits and vegetables from the Obst Frau (fruit lady). As a vegetarian nothing excites me more on a Saturday morning than hopping in the car for a 7 minute drive to the closest farm where one of a handful of ladies will be standing in front of some tables with today's freshest offerings very close to the farm where they were grown.

Granted the selection is not huge, especially in the dead of winter. However, the quality and taste is unsurpassed and the price is quite low if you were to compare to how much you would pay to get farm fresh, usually organic vegetables and fruit in the US. I'm talking so fresh that with they have tomatoes on a vine, the vine is still bright green and moist, like they were picked today in your own backyard.

Winter tends to be a little slower, and they supplement sometimes with a crate or two of things from other farms that they probably pick up wholesale somewhere. Current local offerings are potatoes, onions, multiple varieties of cabbage, turnips, leeks, and apples as well as eggs, homemade egg noodles, and honey. Additional out of the area items include citrus fruits like oranges from spain, and advacados from heaven.

I'm not sure where the lettuce comes from, and I'm not such a fan in the winter as it tends to be bitter. Further, as a vegetarian I can eat a salad with 80% lettuce and still not eat an entire head so it's a little wasted because it goes bad so quickly. Therefore I usually buy the pre-washed, chopped and bagged lettuce from the supermarket, it's my only vegetable purchase from the supermarket.

So imagine my surpise when the Obst Frau had this:

You're thinking, 'big squat,' it's lettuce in a bag, from Belgium. (Thank goodness not from Holland, but that's a different post.) But no! Look closely at the bottom of the second photo, it's still rooted in the dirt. Do you realize the freshness factor here? I can have fresh lettuce for days, instead of one day of fresh and five days of wilting.

The only place I have ever seen lettuce sold as such was Lithuania a few months ago. And now here in Germany, at a farm in the tiny town of B. in the middle of nowhere.

I never felt the urge to write an entire post about lettuce, but today, lettuce gets its day.

(Final thought: I would say, 'today lettuce gets its day in the sun,' but there is still no sun in this part of Germany. Today brought a whopping 5 minutes of sun, but at least the rain finally stopped.)