This Valentine’s Day, we found ourselves in San Antonio, celebrating our nephew Tristan’s 4th birthday. We left on Friday evening, but took just enough time to whip up a quick snack for the road. We started with some brown rice blueberry muffins, a recipe that’s only gotten better in the last few months. As a new twist, we hunted down a recipe for frosting. Almost magically, we converted one egg and 1/3 of a cup of turbinado sugar into a delicious whipped topping!

This weekend we were delighted with our finds in the market. Everything from red onion, green garlic, to all the Brassicaceae family like broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, kale and turnips. Finding sugar cane was a sweet surprise.

I am going crazy adding onion and garlic to everything I cook. It has been so nice to have this infusion of flavors to enjoy. But the best part is that Adrian and Katerina are loving the meals too. Above is a photo of one of our seasonal vegetable dishes. Brussels sprouts and purple cauliflower sauteed with green garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper. Delicious.

Could you trash your refrigerator?

The New York Times ran a story on environmentally-minded individuals who are deciding to unplug their refrigerators for good. Mostly, these are people who are hoping to cut down on the electrical usage of their household and are not satisfied with the energy savings delivered by even the most efficient Energy Star appliances.

So they pull the plug and adapt to living without the convenience of refrigeration. In some ways, their strategies sound familiar: no prepared foods means more cooking at home and a decreased reliance on processed food. Some of them keep a freezer for meats and vegetables, and for freezing water containers that can keep an ice chest cool.

Though the number of people nixing the fridge is undoubtedly small, one has to admire their resolve..and ask just how they’re getting by! We have a hard enough time keeping all of our greens fresh and crisp inside the refrigerator, so maintaining our diet of whole foods would require multiple market stops each week.

Any savings we’d see from shutting off the refrigerator would likely be offset by the increase in gasoline we’d consume going to multiple farmers’ markets. A discussion on other points has developed at thecrunchychicken.com, including cooking inefficiency, food waste, increased cost and packaging.

Are any of our readers deliberately living fridge-free? We’d love to hear about it…