Photo courtesy of jojomelons. Licensed under Creative Commons.

Today is my birthday. But I promise this post is not just a thinly-veiled attempt to get nice birthday wishes in the comments (HINT, HINT). It's also about vegetables.

You see, one of the gifts I received was a CSA box from the South Central Farmers' Cooperative, one of my favorite farmers market stands. I am always happy to support the group of people who fifteen years ago took a hopeless plot of land in South LA and transformed it into a huge community garden -- only to lose it all in 2006 to a developer now planning on using the land for a Forever 21 warehouse. (See the 2008 Academy-Award-nominated documentary The Garden for the full story.) But I never knew they had a CSA program.

All I had to do was show up at the Atwater Village Farmers Market on Sunday and tell the friendly SCFC volunteer my name, and I was handed a big box filled with organic vegetable goodness. It really did feel like a gift, opening up the box and pulling out my bounty:

Head of purple lettuce
Bunch of huge carrots
Bunch of spring onions, white and purple
One summer squash
One round zucchini
One scalloped squash
One bitter melon
About a pound of beans, green and purple
Bunch of beets
Bunch of purple amaranth
About a pound of new red potatoes
Handful of papalo (Bolivian coriander -- I am totally unfamiliar with this)
Handful of unidentified herb

They offer a few different pricing options on their website, the most flexible being the $15 weekly box -- only $15 for all of that! -- as well as 16 pick-up locations all over the city. At the market I bought a mixed bag of summer fruit to supplement the vegetables and now I am set for the week.

I will definitely be buying South Central Farmers' CSA boxes for myself in the future. It's an appealing option for those weeks when I don't have the time or energy to wander through the market on a Sunday morning or when I want to shake things up a bit with some ingredients I wouldn't necessarily choose on my own. Or just when I want to open up a box of surprise vegetables and pretend it's my birthday all over again.

I celebrated over the weekend with friends and family at an amazing outdoor meal catered by Freight. Highly recommended!

Jerk goat and accompaniments.

People, there's no reason to ever eat crappy food on an airplane again. Front Page Jamaican Grille is less than 3 miles from LAX, so an extra 30 minutes and a short trip down Manchester is all that stands between you and a container full of curry goat or oxtails or jerk chicken with a side of rice and beans. Doesn't that sound better than a soggy $8 turkey sandwich wrapped in plastic? I thought so.

I was lucky enough to be invited to a lunch at Front Page Grille last weekend by an intrepid eater named Josie, whom I met the last time I visited Breed Street in Boyle Heights. She, Javier, Jessica and I met at the restaurant, just a counter and a few tables in a small space painted a dazzling green, tucked into a nondescript strip mall in Inglewood. It is, as Javier put it, like sitting inside a giant Jamaican flag.

Jamaican patties.

We started with a couple appetizers. Vegetable patties, which were like savory handpies stuffed with spinach, are not made on the premises but produced in some other magical Jamaican patty location where the crusts are always flaky and the fillings never soggy. Festival bread was like an unsweetened, slightly dense donut hole, proof that fried dough is the right way to start any meal.

Roasted perch. I swear it tastes a million times better than it looks.

I had been 30 minutes late (navigating tip: Manchester Avenue is not the same as Manchester Boulevard, although the two do eventually meet), so by the time I arrived the others had already put in an order for the roasted perch, which takes 30-40 minutes to prepare. It is well worth the wait, even if you do spend most of the time driving up and down an abandoned block of Manchester Avenue wondering if the restaurant is behind a car wash maybe. Our foil-wrapped fish was brought to the table by John, the chef and co-owner, who has a smile as bright as his green-painted walls. The steaming fish was buried under a pile of chopped cabbage and peppers, totally unphotogenic but completely delicious, the whole mess fragrant with jerk spices and tender enough to cut with a plastic fork. John says the roasted fish is a favorite among the ladies, but he doesn't know why. Gentlemen, get on board. You're missing out.

Okra, plain and simple.

We loaded up our "plates" (actually opened-up takeout containers -- it's kind of awesome) with fish, rice and beans, sticky green okra pods and sweet slices of plantain. The jerk goat was coal-black with a wonderful chew and the oxtails fell apart with the tap of a plastic tine. Nothing was particularly spicy until topped with a little of the homemade hot sauce, a slurry of Scotch bonnet peppers that made my lips tingle. The plainness of the vegetables, boiled and only lightly seasoned, offered an occasional break from the complex spicing of the meats.

Sorrel drink!

The drinks at Front Page Grille are as intriguing and authentic as the food. Pine ginger beer's spicy bite was tempered by its subtle pineapple sweetness. Cran moss is a bizarre mix of cranberry juice and Irish moss, a.k.a. carrageen moss, a sort of seaweed that lends a slightly gelatinous texture that was certainly unique, but not exactly thirst-quenching. For that, I turned to my favorite of the day, the sorrel drink. Brewed from hibiscus flowers, it is basically like jamaica, but imagine the most perfect jamaica ever, one that is not tooth-achingly sweet but instead slightly tart, like a well-made lemonade. I could drink buckets of this.

Carrot pudding/cake.

We finished the meal with a couple slices of carrot cake -- really more of a carrot pudding, dense with shredded carrots and barely sweet. When we told Pam, the other owner, that we liked it, she seemed baffled but pleased to hear someone enjoyed her husband's latest creation. "He never tells me what he's going to make," she said. "He just tells me what it is when he's done."

Showing us the Irish moss.

The vibe is mellow, the music is good, the service is friendly and the whole place reminds you why LA is a great place to live -- because if you don't have time to pick up some cheap and authentic Jamaican food on the way out of town, you can always get it when you return. Just make sure your ride doesn't mind taking a little detour on the way home from the airport.

Front Page Jamaican Grille
1117 W. Manchester Blvd.
Inglewood, CA 90301
(310) 216-9521

There was a time when Scoops served all their ice cream in apparently disposable plastic cups. I say "apparently" because although I saw everyone else throw them away, I could never bring myself to do it. Instead, after polishing off my scoop of goat cheese-lavender or genmai cha gelato, I would take the empty cup into the bathroom. (That's right, the bathroom. Shut up.) In the bathroom, I'd rinse the cup in the sink, dry it out with paper towels, stick it in my purse and take it home to join the rest of my growing collection.

Why? That's exactly what Rob said the first time he saw them. (He also asks that about all the pasta sauce jars and juice bottles I save. Obviously, I need the former to store the beans and grains I buy in bulk and the latter to hold the liquor I'm brewing in the kitchen cabinet. Duh.)

The answer is simple: they're really useful!

Use #1: fruit caddy. There's nothing I like more than a piece of perfectly ripe, juicy summer fruit from the farmers market. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to transport said fruit in my lunch bag without it getting bruised or nicked. Nobody likes nicked fruit. Enter a Scoops cup, which fits snugly around a single piece of fruit, protecting it from all the other containers banging around in my lunch bag. I do the same with hard-cooked eggs.

Use #2: cat food scooper. There was a time when we didn't measure out the amount of food we put in Milhouse's bowl every day. Then he turned into a plump cat ball and we realized we needed to be better parents. A Scoops cup and Sharpie helps keep us from dishing out Macaroni-Grill-sized portions. To make it, I just measured out various amounts of food into the Scoops cup and labeled them with the Sharpie. Milhouse is now svelte and cuter than ever.

Use #3: mise en place holder. When I cook I like to have all the ingredients prepped and ready to throw in the pan, especially when I'm making a stir-fry, which comes together in a quick, hot burst of cooking. My go-to Thai stir-fry recipe involves vegetables cooked with a mixture of oyster sauce, sugar and fish sauce, and I always mix this sauce up in a Scoops cup before I start the cooking.

I also eat my morning serving of yogurt out of a Scoops cup and have been known to sub a Scoops cup covered in plastic wrap when I run out of small lidded containers. Thinking about all the uses there are for Scoops cups, it almost pains me to think about the hundreds -- thousands? -- that have been tossed out over the years, and still get tossed out when people take their ice cream to go. Is there anyone else out there stockpiling these? Or am I destined to die alone under an accidental avalanche of blue plastic cups, the newspaper headlines reading AREA WOMAN'S MYSTERIOUS ICE CREAM OBSESSION LEADS TO DEATH?

Come on, fess up. Are you a Scoops cup saver?