I tried not to buy anything yesterday. When I first heard about Buy Nothing Day campaigns to get consumers to abstain from the frenzy of day-after-Thanksgiving shopping, it sounded like no big deal. I mean, many Jews do it every Saturday. But it’s tougher than you think to avoid picking up a coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, buying a newspaper, or paying for some form of transportation.

Most of what I buy is food, so I’m going to talk about it here.

As you probably know, preparing all of your meals for the day is time-consuming, as is making your own coffee. For me, the problem is stubbornness. I am the queen of Made From Scratch. My freezer knows not the frozen entrée nor the veggie burger. The great irony is that I often give up on making my own labor-intensive food and buy a hot meal or salad bar salad that costs twice as much as the convenience foods would. At any rate, I did take the time to make breakfast and lunch.

Sparing you the rest of the details, let’s skip to about 6:30 p.m. I headed to my CSA veggie pickup with a hunger that made me dream of delicious snacks available at the nearby Dupont Whole Foods. I made it through, though, and left with another familiar irony–starving as I carried a veritable cornucopia of food. There were plenty of nutritious and tasty vegetables in there, but all required slicing, dicing, and/or cooking.

When I got home, I quickly made some dinner, rendering the not-immediately-edible goodies quite edible indeed, if I do say so myself.

As I ate triumphantly and voraciously, I congratulated myself on a day of no purchasing. Well, that is if the movie I was treated to makes it by the judges…

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Here’s one dish I made, using the cukes that are coming out of my CSA at an impressive rate:

Seven O’Clock Cucumber Salad

3-6 servings

2 medium cucumbers, peeled if not organic, seeds scooped out, and diced
½ medium onion, minced
1 Tbs. umeboshi plum vinegar, or 1 Tbs. apple cider vinegar plus salt to taste
1 tsp. dried mint or 1 Tbs. fresh mint (if you don’t have mint that you swiped from a nearby apartment building’s backyard on hand like I did, you can try Thai or Italian basil).
2 tsp. black sesame seeds (optional)

Toss all ingredients together. Chill for a few hours and toss again, or begin devouring right then and there.