When I started college my diet was quite abysmal, consisting of fast food and junk food (Vegetable? What vegetable?).  However, three years of apartment living with my friend Krissy slowly but surely cured me of that.  After three years and a few culinary mishaps, I learned to love vegetables (some a lot more than others).  So I think she'd be a little proud of my activity this past weekend (though I do confess, I do sneak in the occasional ultimate cheese burger now and then).

This past Saturday I spent a fun, sunny afternoon in the fields with the family for the Tanaka farms cookout tour.   We were carted around by a tractor through their farm.  Beyond handy information about their crops and farming practices (Tanaka farms is pesticide free!), we also learned a lot of practical things... like how hard it is to pull up a carrot, which is wedged into the dirt with nothing but wispy, little greens sticking out.

At their encouragement, we pulled up vegetables, brushed off a little dirt (in the case of the Maui sweet onions, a lot of dirt), and ate them right then and there (below is a shot of my bok choy after I took a bite).   We even ate the flowers off of the Chinese broccoli.  Quite tasty.

And of course, no farm visit is ever complete without a meal, so we washed our little harvest, put them on the grill to cook, and ate the fruits (or rather veggies) of our labor.  My favorite new vegetable is the kohlrabi, which is basically a cabbage with the texture of a broccoli stem.  We actually ended up buying one to go (though of course I picked the biggest one I could find, only to struggle with chopping and peeling it later).

The pièce de résistance was their strawberries, which we picked after lunch.  It's kind of amazing to see the strawberries in their various stages (flower, green strawberry, and then red strawberry).

I love the fact that there are places like Tanaka farms, which educate as much as they  enrich the lives of people like myself, who know of little beyond the market.  And there truly is no better way to lure people out than with the promise of food. :)