WHAT WAS IN YOUR CART?
Now that we are all limited in our food shopping trips due to the fear of contracting COVID-19, we have a new way of buying; we stock up. When I was talking with my friend Marita, with whom I speak very often, she asked what was in my shopping cart that day. I gave her a fast rundown, to which she laughed, “You had a white people’s cart.”
Chuckling, I playfully asked, “What was in your black people’s cart?” With that, we shared a hearty laugh. It felt good to laugh; everyone is looking for things to find funny during the worldwide pandemic.
While my daughter was at our house for a socially distanced lunch on the patio, I told her about the blog post I was writing. I admitted that all I remember about what was different in our carts were the beans in mine and collard greens in Marita’s. Then, I blurted out it kind of reminds me of The Price Is Right. We giggled at the thought of the contestants on the popular long-running television game show guessing the prices of the contents of the shopping carts.
When I was younger, car rides included playing all kinds of games with my brothers and our parents to make the minutes fly by. A few of our favorite boredom busters were: 1) "Who can keep quiet the longest?" 2) "Who spots license plates from the most variety of states? and 3) "What shapes do you see in the clouds?" I remember playing those games with our children, and others, such as I Spy. When they were toddlers, we liked playing that at the checkout counters in grocery stores.
Ahh, children in the grocery stores, wandering the aisles, touching the fruits, pointing at the sugary cereals, pushing carts, and being pushed, all suddenly became a thing of the past. When Marita called me after she returned home from grocery shopping and told me that the stores were “dead,” I scoffed, “no kids. Who can ever remember a time when there weren’t kids in the stores?”
Over the years of our friendship, Marita and I have exchanged several recipes. One of these days, I’m going to whip up the tried and true one she boasts about for collard greens. While she has sampled my cooking and raves about it, I have never had hers. That's because I keep a kosher home, while she, not being Jewish, does not. She tells me how much her family loves her “greens,” as she calls the collard greens.
With a ban on entertaining, I suppose I could go through the trouble of making the hearty vegetable dish for my husband and me. We would surely savor the taste, never knowing if the result is as good as she says without the taste of her greens to compare. C’est la vie, black, white, Jewish, Christian, lockdown, leisure, beans or greens; have some fun, even if it’s just talking with your friends about what’s in your shopping cart.
Collard Greens