The farm to table shuck and jive vs. Make Do…

A couple of weeks ago, I paid $4.00 for a bunch of scallions. I could attempt to justify myself. I could say, “But I needed them for a recipe.”

Which is exactly true, I needed them to make a seafood (OK sea leg) salad I had planned to make for lunch that day. The usually cost effective vegetable vendor at the Farmer’s Market had some skank, too big, wilted, dried out looking green onions that they were only charging $2.00 for, but they were never going to make it anything I cooked.

Not that I am too fancy or too good for skank ingredients, I just did not want to throw away half of what I bought.

So, I bought the cute little, I’m sure they were organic scallions for $4.00 thereby setting my grandparents, both children of the Depression era and staunch defenders of a militant, rural frugality I have come to call Make Do, freely spinning in their respective, yet distant graves.

Make Do would never have justified $4.00 scallions. Make Do would have prescribed a substitution of minced onions, salted to mellow their sting OR using the frozen scallions that are sitting in the freezer even as I type this OR rehydrating some dried onion OR adding a few dashes of onion powder OR worst case forgoing the onion tang entirely and just mixing up the salad with celery and maybe some additional spices to compensate.

Two points here: One: Don’t become so blind to a recipe that you buy an overpriced ingredient just for the sake of adhering to some vision or someone’s recipe on a card or in a book. Be creative and ask yourself, “What do I have on hand that I can use?”

For instance, I used dark rum in a recent country pate in place of cognac. Next time, I would use a little less of it than the cognac because it has a much bigger flavor profile than cognac, but ultimately it worked.

In another case, I recall my grandmother once making macaroni salad using long grain white rice instead of elbow macaroni for a party. I was less a fan of that Make Do effort than the dark rum substitution, but I was young, still subject to recipe dogma, a macaroni salad purist and likely a little embarrassed. Everyone else at the party, devotees of Make Do to the end, thought it was excellent and a creative solution to the lack of elbows in my grandmother’s pantry.

Two: I despise the Farmer’s Market, farm to table organic bullshit shuck and jive that allows some farmers to think they can charge $4.00 for a cute little bunch of scallions.

In these times when people are not eating enough veg and likely do not have a ton of disposable income to boot, farmers should be making an effort to bring vegetables to market at a fair price. $4.00 is just too much for a cute little bunch of scallions, hell $2.00 is also, but you’re getting closer.

Just to be clear, I am not one to begrudge a farmer making a buck. My grandparents farmed the unforgiving, dense clay, rocky slopes of Duanesburg, NY for 50 years. This included four very large home garden plots. So, I am very attune to the time, effort and cost involved in bringing vegetables to the table and I am similarly cool with optimizing the return on that effort, but there needs to be balance people.

And trust me, if the balance is not found, Make Do will crush your cutesy farm to table organic bullshit shuck and jive like Stalin crushed, well, just about everyone.