The mystery of fresh produce

 

 (stock photo)

Washington DC is a culinary wasteland. Yes there are some pockets of excellent restaurant food, usually food from Ethiopia, Korea, Vietnam, or somewhere else far from these shores. There may also be good, fresh produce at Whole Foods or the local farmer's market. However, with 5 mouths in this household the days of $15 bunches of asparagus are behind us.

Terry returned from a weekend in PA with four or five full bags of produce. Some of it was local, farmer's market.  The cauliflower he brought home was the best cauliflower I have ever eaten. 24 hours later I am still thinking about it. 

On the other hand, he brought home two plastic quart containers of Driscoll's strawberries, looking exactly like the strawberries I can find in any of the 6 large and medium sized grocery store chains within a 5 mile radius of my home.

I don't know where Driscoll's is, but it probably had to go through DC on its way to Pennsylvania. However, somehow, the freshness, taste and general quality was significantly better than anything I can find in DC. Given the aforementioned overstock of grocery stores in my neck of the woods, this is not a "supermarket desert". It is a quality food desert.

Can anyone suss out why on earth this is the case? 

Da Vinci Discovery Center

Continuing the theme of keeping Alex busy and happy by taking her to science museums, we headed this week to the Lehigh Valley's own Da Vinci Discovery Center. We'd gone last year with Grammy and Zoltan and only managed to get a taste of what was there.

First note: I was very impressed that on their web site they suggest that individuals come in the afternoon as school groups usually depart by 1:30pm. We were having a slow morning anyway, so arrival at 1:00pm was perfect.

It's an impressive museum for its size and location. We managed to fill more than 3 hours and didn't check out every exhibit, although that was due to Alex's interest and attention span, not the amount of time we had. It was fun that they had Grossology, which I had seen many years ago at (I think) the Franklin Institute. As always, what captivates a child is never what we think it will be but as we had no deadlines and I only had her interests to indulge, it was an incredibly relaxing experience.

My favorite part was watching her play with the station with all the gears, and gradually incorporate every single gear in one huge rotation. She got a kick out of the paper airplane folding exhibit, where the computer guides us through one of about a dozen different designs. She was too excited to settle down and let me read to her from the book corner in the Preschooler room but had a ball stacking the foam blocks into towers and a hidey-hole for herself (except when a child ran into the room, jumped on her work-in-progress and ran out. Then another kid did the exact same thing during the rebuild).

I guess one of our adventures this summer will be checking out what kind of science/hands-on-children's museums we can find in the DC area.