When I throw a couple cups of beans in the slow cooker insert, along with a chunk of meat straight from the freezer (or not, if I’m in a vegetarian mood), salt, a bay leaf, and water; cover and set it to Low (8 – 10 hours), that’s Phase One. 

Slow cooker cooking delivers food so tasty, it’s hard to believe it’s so easy. 

Phase Two:  Sauté diced onions, garlic, savories and spices. Add the sauté to the beans/stock.  Do this sooner or, later.  Doesn’t matter. 

Phase Three: Go about your business for six, eight, ten hours. Return to mouth-watering aromas. Eat.

What’s not to love? No effort: quick prep, no babysitting, quick clean up. Perfect, whether you’re busy or lazy. 

No recipe. Of course, you can use one. But use it as a guide and reference, rather than a mathematical formula. Less planning equals more playing with your food. 

No worries. Whatever you do, it’s always right. How can that be? You’ll see.

Bucolic. Zen flow. At peace with the world. That’s how this city girl felt last Friday twilight strolling to pick raspberries at Essex Farm, the thriving CSA farm we belong to. From the pavilion where members pick up the week’s veggies, dairy, eggs and such, it’s under a mile to the raspberry field. A pleasant walk over cover-crop grasses, clumpy clods of dirt and small sinks of squelchy mud.  

I pass row after row of blue-green and purple-red cabbage, ferny-topped carrots and red-green-leafed beets, stands of dark green broccoli, forests of feathery asparagus and rustling corn. The two straight raspberry rows stretch south forever before t-boning on Rural Route 22. A few action-figure-sized members hunch over the bushes down there, cars parked by the side of the road. By walking through the fields, I have the north end to myself.

I sweat and squat, plucking ripe berries exposed between leaves and hiding under them, a treasure hunt that stains my fingers deep red. I pop them into my mouth and drop them into a quart cardboard box, into my mouth, into the box, a lovely rhythm.

In the humid air, the sounds of Indian summer swell and fall, fortissimo and pianissimo. Cattle low unseen from a field far away behind a scrim of trees, crickets saw, bees airplane-buzz, and mosquitoes screech and howl as they dive-bomb me from all directions. They are so aggressive, and my swats so frantic, I slap the glasses off my nose.

But nothing can stop me— I am consumed by pick-your-own lust.

“There’s no yogurt?” I stick out my lower lip in comical exaggeration of disappointment.

Mark, the farmer-owner of the CSA we belong to, looks me in the eye and says, “D, this is why you are a high maintenance member.”

Me?! High maintenance? He must be joking. I telescope onto his blue eyes, which are locked on mine unwaveringly. No. He’s not joking.