Composing this entry has made me realize that I don’t ever remove things from the exterior of my fridge and neither does my cohabiting bf. Do I win for most cluttered exterior? What does this say about me? Kayoko, can we call in a fridge reader for this column? Surely ones fridge speaks volumes more about a person than a palm can, no?

I have trouble removing things from the inside as well, like the teeny bit of spoilt Ronnybrook milk that if you look closely at the pic below is clearly beginning to separate (full disclosure: this pic was taken on 5/20. Milk was removed and disposed of by bf on 6/1).

But this week was looking pretty spare, and generally speaking, I can say that the months from November to May are sparse ones without our regularly incoming CSA produce. So this is the bare-bones me, but my perennial staples are all here: flat Italian parsley (the most versatile herb on earth!), good butter, Cholula or Tapatio, eggs, something pickled, and bacon/bacon fat/some other pork product.

That said, I’m really lucky to be less than a block away from the year-round farmer’s market at Ft. Greene Park and even luckier to have a farmer in the “family.” My bf Mitchell’s sister KayCee is a founding farmer of livestock at the nascent Awesome Farm in Tivoli, NY; she and her partner raise sheep, lambs, chickens, and turkeys with the assistance of a llama named Omar and a donkey named McGinty. They share land and labor with the farmers at Hearty Roots Community Farm, a vegetable farm with the best CSA produce in Brooklyn.

So eggs are nearly always from Awesome Farm or the Tello’s farmstand.

In the butter department, we have Ronnybrook and Plugra, the former I eat on toast and the latter I use in pies and sauces. (The caviar, which came in a gift basket from our very sweet landlord two years ago, has not been touched).

On the pickles front, there’s some Rick’s Pick’s on the door there from the Greenmarket that I’m not really that into. I do dabble in pickling and canning though (de rigueur, according to the New York Times!) This would maybe be a good time for a confession: last year I made an enormous jar of kimchi that had barely been touched for many, many months – perhaps a year. I really don’t know what happened there. Eventually, we (read: the bf) did get rid of it. I’m totally embarrassed now.

Above left to right: pickled beets with a basic white wine vinegar/sugar brine, pickled ramps with lots of sugar, rice wine vinegar, and a sprinkle or two of shichimi togarashi (from David Chang’s amazing recipe; he makes a dirty martini at Ssam bar with the pickling solution), and pickled garlic scapes using the ramps recipe.

These are some really dirty ramps we foraged upstate near the Hearty Roots/Awesome Farm land a few weeks ago.

Back to the aforementioned pork product, the pièce de résistance: La Quercia guanciale, (sadly, in my haste, I did not photograph the contents). We got this from Fairway. La Quercia for the uninitiated is a husband-and-wife operation based out of Des Moines.

The guy lived in Parma for a while and is schooled in traditional Italian curing and aging methods, and La Quercia sources their meat locally from humanely-raised, acorn-fed pigs – in Iowa of all places. They’re most famous for their prosciutto, which I haven’t tried yet. Yet! Read more about them here.

See also: rendered pork lard from Wilklow Orchards. I use this in piecrusts (three parts lard to seven parts butter). We also keep a jar of bacon grease on hand (see door) for cooking greens usually, and eggs, when there’s no bacon.

This is what’s left of the ricotta I made from the Salvatore Brooklyn recipe, which I got from Tasting Table. This is easily the easiest thing I’ve ever made with the highest reward, and I encourage anyone who’s even remotely curious to try it. Use good milk, that’s all you need (plus lemon). I used grass-fed Fairway brand milk. Some of it was consumed on toast with olive oil, a little salt, and a little thyme. Most of it was used in this pasta recipe that turned out pretty great.

There are some Sahadi’s olives somewhere in the back there, but my favorite thing at Brooklyn’s beloved mainstay is the Mymoune fig jam from Lebanon. It’s only $3.35 as you can see, and how often can you say the ingredients for anything are as simple and in triplicate as: figs, sugar, and lemon juice. I really don’t know how that’s possible (I guess lemon is a natural preservative?), but it’s awesome (and delicious with cheese on toast!).

Moving upstairs…

Try to ignore the giant carton of Camels and admire my new favorite ice cream from Adirondack Creamery, based upstate in Kingston, NY! It costs me a $1 more than Ben and Jerry’s, Ciao Bella, or Haagen Dazs but it’s absolutely worth it — so creamy and delicious.

Also: some really, really, seriously old and weird durian popsicles from a supermarket in Elmhurst. I ate one on the subway home and haven’t touched ‘em since. That was easily a year ago. How time flies.

Lots of frozen meat, including miscellaneous lamb parts from Awesome Farm.

And loads of mysterious plastic bags and yogurt containers. The former I cannot attest to, but the latter contain frozen blueberries that I picked upstate last summer, frozen sour cherries from the farmer’s market, and Awesome Farm chicken stock — the idea here being that it’s impossible to eat seasonally in the winter months, so you gotta preserve! If you’re interested in that kind of thing.

*youcannotbeserious is a slightly blog-averse (but trying to fight it!) writer and editor living in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn.