Thursday

Discovery of the day: Apple harvest

There's talk of a food co-op starting up in my area. This would be a majorly cool thing. They're just starting to organize and have been raising money, organizing, looking for people to be on committees, etc.

I'm really excited about the possibility of a co-op and I want to help, but I have a big problem. I am allergic to committees. I'm not just making this up, either. I've learned the hard way, through a series of increasingly painful experiences over the past few decades, that I am loaded with good intentions but am miserable on the follow-through. Especially when the people running the show are not doing it the way I would prefer, or I discover that I have absolutely no interest in what they're doing and bail. And one of those two conditions, sometimes both, have existed in every single committee I've joined from high school on through the ages.

So to spare us both, I've joined the co-op's email list and I read their blog but that's about as far as I can let myself go. It's better that way. Trust me.

But last week I got an email for a co-op fundraiser: A local guy usually makes a run each October to the eastern part of the state to pick up a load of organic apples, straight from the orchard, and this year he's volunteered to donate 10% of his fee to the co-op. All I had to do was order a 20 lb box of Fuji apples and have $25 in cash on hand at pick-up. Hey, I can do that!

Twenty-five pounds sounds like a lot of apples, but it's really not. I typically eat one a day and sometimes my son does as well. If the apples average 12 oz (I'm guessing but I don't think that's unreasonable) that's about a month's worth of apples. And if I get motivated, I may even make apple crisp like I've been threatening to do for weeks.

So I now have a box of very lovely, fresh Fujis in my garage. I've helped the food co-op. Yup, there are only winners here, my friends.