Lentils

Weather: More of the same, cold mornings, promised snow that materializes into thin layers in the dark, and afternoons warm enough to melt it but not warm enough for working outside without getting chilled.

Last useful snow: 12/13. Week’s low: 14 degrees F. Week’s high: 51 degrees F in the shade.

What’s still green: Stems on roses; leaves on cliff roses, juniper, arborvitae, and other evergreens, yuccas, red hot pokers, Dutch iris, grape hyacinths, blue flax, winecup mallow, beards tongues, snapdragons, pink evening primrose, vinca, sweet peas, Queen Anne’s lace, chrysanthemum, June, needle and cheat grasses

What’s gray, gray-green, or blue green: Four-winged saltbush, fernbush, buddleia, pinks, winterfat, snow-in-summer leaves

What’s red: Stems on sandbar willow and bing cherries, new wood on peaches and apples; leaves on alfilerillo

What’s yellow: Stems on weeping willows

Tasks: Some local people have been out amputating their trees, leaving no branches, only trunks and large limbs. I cut some Maximilian sunflower stems.

Animal sightings: Flock of juncos were in the Russian olive; I saw fruit in the peak of one before they flew away.

Weekly update: Two years ago lentils disappeared from the shelves of the local grocery stores. When I say disappeared, there were no bags anywhere in Espanola or Santa Fé and the generic bins had been emptied. It was more like a recall than a distribution problem.

I checked the internet. There were no recalls, and as near as I can tell no crop shortages. It was hard to tell about the latter, since crops reports are all pitched in the future, not the present.

I mentioned it to clerk in one of the stores who agreed it was odd because "It’s not Easter when you cook ‘em."

I found some on-line, but that’s an expensive way to get a legume. They’re sold by the pound, and pounds cost money to ship.

When I got them they were dirty. By that I mean, they were filled with husk debris. It was so bad, I had to put them in a colander to sift out the skins, and then had to manually pick through them.

Now, before this I had had occasional problems with stone chips, either something black or white quartz. I was never sure about the source because I cooked the lentils with rice, and I had the problem when I bought different types of lintels.

Now I knew. The stones were in the lentils, even the expensive, boutique organic ones.

Eventually, the local store that catered to Spanish-speaking customers imported some packages from Mexican suppliers. They still had to be picked through before they could be used. Then, when the legumes returned in the spring, the packages were the worst of all. They must first have cleared the bottoms of their storage units.

Only now, after two years is the quality back to what it had been. The dried seeds aren’t perfect. Some are chipped by the machines that handle them. I assume they’re picked by machines, then dried mechanically. Next, they’re put on conveyers where more machines husk, sort and package them.

The colors and sizes are not uniform. If you ever shelled string beans or peas or looked closed at the corn on the cob, you know not every seed grows to the same size. But some had dark spots that I suspect were caused by tiny insects.

And then there are the ones that are puckered. That could have come from lack of water, oddities that didn’t show up until they were dried, or who knows what else attacks plants growing in fields.

If one looks too closely, one might never eat one again. But, one also realizes those imperfections exist in all processed food, but are masked by the preservatives, sauces, and other additives that are used. Making them into soup disguises everything but the stones.

A friend reminded me not to be finicky. He said his father always told him to eat the peaches the birds had pecked, because they always found the sweetest and ripest.

Notes on photographs: Lentils (Lens culinaris) purchased in Española, 18 December 2018.