i get by with a little help from my friends

Tonight, I ate a piece of baked chicken breast stuffed with ricotta, olives and tomatoes. "Mmmm," you say! (I can hear you, you know.) "Delicious! What's the recipe?" you might be inquiring. Dear reader, I wish I could tell you, but you'll have to ask Trader Joe himself if you'd really like to know the answer to that question.

It's a busy week this week.

That is why today, April 22, 2008 (which is, incidentally, Earth Day) my refrigerator looks like this:


I'm not proud.

But let me explain. As I've shared here before, it is becoming abundantly clear to me that the joys of procuring, cooking and eating wholesome, high quality and preferably local foods are largely unparalleled -- and in fact, such pleasures are like an epicenter, from which radiate seismic waves of joy into many other areas of life. When I allow myself to slow down, know my food, taste it, I begin to inhabit all the moments of my life in an awestruck kind of new way. Living this way, time is less of a jealous lover; time, instead, graciously unfurls its velvety petals for me and I can bathe in the abundance of the simplest of sensory experiences.

However, florid prose or no florid prose, it's also true that I'm a busy woman, living a life that is packed-to-the-gills full these days. By day I'm an environmental attorney, and right now my practice has never been more exciting or more demanding -- all because of a little moth. By evening, weekend, and lunch-hour, I work with an incredible women's environmental network, a labor of passion and joy for its all-volunteer staff. I also exercise as often as I can, attempt to sleep enough, and document my adventures on this site on something of a regular basis.

Then there's spending time with my beloved community, the chosen family with whom I'm lucky enough to share this incredible adventure that is life in the Bay Area. This weekend a bunch of us are making a pilgrimage to the desert together to celebrate the end of Passover (details, I assure you, shall follow).

Between all of these things, as well as regularly-scheduled Glamour-on-the-couch or Netflix-in-bed sessions, and even the occasional date, sometimes I just up and run out of time.

Okay, yes, time is an illusion and all of that. There is only the eternal now. Indeed. Well, kids, I'm no bodhisattva; I've got shit to do. And in my time of need, when 6:00 rolls around and I get that funny feeling, you know, the one you get when you realize it's probably going to be nori strips and peanuts for dinner, God bless it, there's only one thing to do: stop at Trader Joe's.

So I did, and so that's why there's such a quantity of #2 plastic and cellophane in my fridge.

(Did you notice, though, the bottle of milk in the back? Yeah, that's raw whole milk. I'm now a member of the very clandestine East Bay Raw Milk Co-op; once a week we take our pre-ordered bottles from a cooler tucked discreetly by the side of someone's house. Have you ever tasted raw milk? Someday I'll write an entry about it. It's astounding. It's like arriving at a dairy oasis after years of wandering the endless windswept dunes of rBGH. But I digress.)

Like I said, I'm not proud. But I'll tell you, the chicken was delicious. And so although he's no environmentalist, and certainly not a locavore, I feel secure knowing I can always count on old Trader Joe in times like these.