One of the benefits to cooking — and I think especially to cooking new recipes — is a lack of homogeneity within each dish.
I have become a fan of green beans and black quinoa salad. Well, I use regular quinoa rather than black, but the basic plan is the same. By using fresh green beans and preparing the dressing myself, I am assured that each bite will be slightly different. Some beans are crunchier, others are sweeter. Some bites are more garlicky while in others the balsamic vinegar is more prominent. Not every bite includes green onion. It is a lovely little adventure to keep eating in order to see what the next bite may bring.
Plus, it is a lovely starting point. Since my first experience with the recipe, I have prepared it with zucchini instead of green beans, and I am pretty sure that there is an asparagus variation in my near future as asparagus was on sale at the grocery store (and early spring is asparagus season).
Cooking classes tell you that you want to cut up ingredients into equally-sized pieces so that everything cooks evenly. That reasoning is all well and good, and perhaps with practice I will eventually achieve uniformly cut potatoes or carrots or celery or whatever, but until that day I plan to enjoy my inconsistent, varied results.
Small Town Hermit 
With all of this talk about local, I feel the inclination to add a bit of a post script that not everything needs to be local all the time. I don't have a problem buying shallots from France or wine from Italy. There are some benefits, after all, to technological advances such as rapid overseas transportation. I'll just make sure to buy the wine from a small, local shop rather than state run liquor stores.
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So someone named Susanna is “oasinstoryof.” How did you come to be named Susanna? My mother's name is Susanna.I feel a kinship to you as you articulate some of my thoughts about food and the way we should live. Johanne
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Yes, as long as oasinstoryof did not swipe Susanna Babione's post and commentary from another site. :-)My memory of family lore is that were I to be born a girl, my father was responsible for the name, and were I to be born a boy, my mother got to choose (in which case I would be Tulius Aurelius or something similar, as my mother was reading Taylor Caldwell and/or Colleen McCullough novels at the time).In my case, the source is biblical and one of the earliest examples of the individual cross-examination of witnesses during a trial. (One might guess my father's profession based on this choice.) The thirteenth chapter of Daniel tells the story of Susanna. She was was spied upon by lecherous old men while she bathed alone in her garden, and they threatened to accuse her of adultery unless she had sex with them. She refused them, was arrested, tried and sentenced to death. Daniel interrupts the proceedings, and when he interviews the men separately, they disagree about which variety of tree under which Susanna was allegedly meeting her lover, thus proving her innocence.
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