The CSA: Weeks 16-18

September 29, 2008


And just like that, we’re done.

This week, our vegetables came with a note. “Thanks for everything, sign up for the Fall CSA.” Or something like that. It wasn’t a sad, misty-eyed moment or anything, but it felt like a grand experiment had come to an end.

It hadn’t, though. Instead, a new habit formed. Over the past 18 weeks, we’ve been lucky enough to have fresh, locally grown produce for half of what it would cost at the grocery store. We received a constant supply of whatever was in season. Carrots. Onions. Radishes. Whatever was ready for harvest, we were ready to receive.

And we learned a lot about vegetables. Naturally.

We are thankful that some of our veggies lasted longer than a few weeks. Some are still lasting right now. We have stocked up on potatoes and onions and other root vegetables. Like, for a month. Or more. They’re just sitting there, staring at us with all of those eyes.

Looking back, I discovered a love for raw carrots – garden carrots, naturally – that I had always suspected but was enforced by constant availability. I never knew there could be so many different types of potatoes and onions. I came to the realization that you can have too many tomatoes. That you can have too many of anything, really.

We changed our cooking habits. We were used to the typical vegetarian style of generic, quick cooking, which throws several different types of produce together in one stir-fry/stew type dish. Over the summer, unknowing as we were, we sought out recipes for beets and kohlrabi and pumpkin and found ourselves creating nearly single-vegetable dedicated meals.

We learned to cook more simply. With the vegetables we received, we had to enforce a more simple approach. We had little need to go to the grocery store. Instead, we pulled from our large stockpile of pantry staples, finally finding a use for things we had purchased long ago and never used. Our grocery bills went down – not just because we weren’t purchasing produce, but because we were simply using what we had. It was the beginnings of a pantry raid. And it has served to change our outlook on cooking meals.

Still, we have a lot of work ahead of us. Planning meals is hit and miss. The uncertainty of knowing exactly what we got left us to plan on Sunday, which often just left us not planning at all. To take full advantage of a bag full of potatoes, knowing full well that another bag will be coming in just seven days, has the feeling of a work deadline.

Above all, it just felt good to reap the CSA harvest. To me, it was always more than just food. It was more than an extended garden, a supplement to the mess we have growing in the backyard. Instead, I saw this as giving back, to supporting someone who is tethered to the ever-changing roller coaster cycle of farming, who depends on weather that has no need to cooperate and factors that live off of a farm’s suffering.

Even if it was just a couple hundred dollars, only about $10 a week for nearly 20 weeks, it was our way of supporting a small farm. And in return for that support, we received the fruits (vegetables?) of their harvest, the lifeblood of the independent farmer: produce, fresh from the ground, plucked from the vine, ripened naturally, stored on site and treated to only water, fertilizer and love.

It was worth it. On so many levels. And now the only thing I wonder is what next year will bring.

Tags: Food, Sioux Falls |

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The CSA: Weeks 14 and 15

September 9, 2008


What do you do with 30 tomatoes?

50 potatoes? Five full-sized cucumbers? Two large bundles of carrots and 15 onions?

When you’re a family of three, with one of those three being just 13 months, how do you eat five squashes?

My fear is, you don’t. You let them go bad. You give them away. You forget about them quickly, lest your inner waste-not conscience smacks you upside the head.

Herein lies our problem. We’re waste-notters. And we have too many vegetables.

The week before we left on vacation, we were a total whirlwind of busyness, flitting around the house and town and all over the place like the proverbial chicken with no head, organizing the last week of daycare and preparing for a full-on onslaught of travel.

So we had little time to make real meals.

Which means our CSA sat dormant. Piling up. Spreading out and taking over the kitchen. And with a garden full of tomato plants, thriving even without a consistent water supply, we left town to a kitchen that looked like a cornucopia murder scene, vegetables spilled everywhere, covering the counter and threatening to climb up the walls.

While we were gone, we missed a Saturday, in turn, missing a week of the CSA. Thankfully. Otherwise, we’d be in even worse shape.

Instead, we returned to yet another half-share, lovingly deposited by my mother, and realized we had a problem. We had over 30 tomatoes total, now. Our potatoes had expanded, with at least 50 small tubers in several piles throughout the kitchen. Squash was on special, apparently, and cucumbers the size of overgrown zucchini threatened to take over our fridge.

(And yes, the aforementioned zucchini were available as well, in addition to more carrots and more onions, a green pepper and two jalapeños.)

So here’s our plan.

Eat them. All of them.

Tomatoes? Half went into an easy gazpacho recipe, as did one of the cucumbers and the green pepper. More cukes will be used in a cucumber melon sesame salad. Onions? Let’s have a redux of the incredible English Onion Soup with Cheddar recipe from Jamie Oliver. Potatoes and zucchini? Kerrie’s been waiting to make tiella for ages, and this is her chance.

I don’t think it will all be gone in one week. In fact, I fully suspect that our stash will grow again on Saturday, maybe to the point that we don’t make up any ground. Or (gasp!) we actually fall further behind.

But hey – with the price of produce and the freshness of what we’re getting, I can’t imagine I should be complaining about getting too much of a good thing.

(Of course, if you need a potato or two, you know where to come calling.)

Tags: Food, Sioux Falls |

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The CSA: Weeks 12 and 13

August 25, 2008


Tomato soup. BLTs. Salad garnish. Toasted tomato and basil with mozzarella. Sandwich toppings. Straight tomatoes with salt.

Last week’s CSA and this weeks are nearly identical – corn, potatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, peppers, carrots. Each bag shows up with a wide display of colors, each week a promise of more freshness. Oh, and tomatoes. So many tomatoes.

Raw. Broiled. Sliced. Whole. Tomatoes are coming out of our ears. With our garden exploding in a fireworks display of green, orange and red, and with the ol’ CSA ramping up its collection of actual usable vegetables, including, of course, tomatoes, we’re nearly drowning in the Fruit that Would Be Called Veggie.

They’re the crown jewel of the growing season, in most cases – a perfect combination of ease, versatility and taste. We have several different kinds throughout our garden – Roma, full, three different types of heirloom – and we have a cornucopia of tomatoes spilling out on our counter; red, orange, yellow, green, like a terror alert scale gone wrong. Unfortunately, one that’s nearly always peaking on red.

And here’s the paradox. I’m greedy. I want them all. I don’t want to give any away.

Oh, don’t worry. I’m forcing myself to part with some of them. I know I couldn’t possibly eat them all, and our family is only so big. We could have tomatoes for every meal and still make an unidentifiable dent.

So we’ve been handing them to our family, offering them to friends, always with my hands over my eyes, my fingers crossed behind my back, unable to believe the words coming out of my mouth. “What am I doing,” I find myself saying afterwards. “These are royalty, these tomatoes, the most valuable vegetables in the stash!”

I get over it. Eventually. I only hoard because I understand that, when we’re out of town, the garden will be picked clean. Family will arrive like vultures to snatch away the forgotten fruits. We welcome this, but I can’t help but think that everyone would be a lot happier if we’d just go away on vacation for a month or so, leaving the garden wide open, free for the taking, simply lousy with tomatoes and the people who love them.

Don’t ask. We have too many tomatoes. Yet, it never seems like we have enough.

Tags: Food, Sioux Falls |

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The CSA: Week 11

August 13, 2008


CornAt one point in my life, I had gotten over corn.

It was like the dark ages, a corn-free zone. It wasn’t that I didn’t eat it – I would, if given no other option, but sometime during my senior year of high school I just kind of seeing it as a viable choice. It wasn’t a conscious decision, I don’t think – it was just an organic result of a decade’s worth of cafeteria corn. Loose kernels, floating in corn-juice, with little yellow specks clinging to the spoon as you pulled it out of the serving line. Ugh.

And on the cob, things weren’t better. I never made an effort to purchase corn on the cob, would pass it up in buffet line, would forgo it’s messiness for something safer, like potato salad or another hamburger bun.

What makes this corn absence even more surprising is that I was a vegetarian, making corn even more important during any sort of already meat-infested meal. But aside from having corn used in a recipe, I was never crazy about it. I was non-plussed. Corn was not a part of my life.

So why am I so excited about it now?

Maybe weeks of beets and cabbage and kohlrabi have left me shell-shocked, longing for something familiar. But when I grabbed our green bag of farm-fresh groceries and I saw those tufts of corn silk peeking out the top of the bag, nestled in between a sole green pepper and bunch of carrots, I got excited. Like, really excited. So excited that I felt the need to send a text message to Kerrie, that moment, proclaiming the good news.

“Corn!”

Now, three ears of corn sit in our fridge, preparing themselves for a Friday night grilled salmon feast. I spent ages not caring about corn, and though it might seem silly to say, I’m glad it’s back in my life.

Welcome back, corn. Welcome back.

(The weekly haul, of course)
Corn
Onions
Tomatoes
Potatoes
Carrots
Various peppers
Cucumbers
Zucchini
Kohlrabi
Green beans

Tags: Food, Sioux Falls |

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The CSA: Week 10

August 4, 2008


Sometimes, your schedule is thrown off so wildly that you don’t even remember what happened. This happens a lot more frequently when you’ve raised a child for a year – things are forgotten at such wildly quickening speed that you find yourself looking around for the time, as if you simply dropped it somewhere between the car and the front door.

I went to the Farmer’s Market twice this week. Within three hours. And I can barely remember it.

Oh, sure – I had my reasons. I was in the middle of a runaway wild hurricane, a twister caused by an impending First Birthday Party. And I was shuttling back and forth all day on Saturday, unaware of where I was from one moment to the next, working three errands at once, sweating profusely as the heat pressed harder on my skull.

The first time I went to the Market I was simply looking around. My father had never made it down to the booths, so I offered to take him down, knowing full well that I’d be back later to make any actual purchases. We wandered, we gawked, and we discussed the seemingly high price of organically grown vegetables and why the amount is generally worth it.

Later that morning my mother and I took our regularly scheduled trip to pick up our CSA, and it was like a new experience. Everything seemed new, as if I hadn’t been there since last week. And our share sent me further into the past. Back was the kohlrabi. Back was a too-big batch of beets. Beets. You’ve got to be kidding me. Our pepper stock had shrunk, and our cucumbers had as well. It seemed as though we had hit a rough patch in the weekly harvest, leaving us with nothing but the usual.

We’re getting tired of the usual.

Don’t get me wrong – I enjoy the weekly harvest. But at some point, you have to say “NO MORE!” to cabbage and kohlrabi and beets. Give us double carrots. Or, I don’t know, more tomatoes. Even onions – hell, it will give me an excuse to make French onion soup again.

(Which reminds me. Last week’s urge was for the onion soup. This week’s urge comes right off the top of the “now that I’m an omnivore again I can eat this” stack: the BLT. The real BLT. With real bacon. And with that urge in mind, I purchased my first package of non-grilling meat. Beef bacon. I didn’t even know there was such a thing.)

Most of our veggies from last week still sit in the fridge, aside from a handful of cucumbers and other sandwich- or pizza-friendly items. It was rough, to say the least. So we’re on catch-up this week.

Of course, that’s just the thing. I can’t remember what we ate last week. Just like I barely remember going to the Farmer’s Market. Just like I can’t remember anything else from that day. So maybe we’re okay – maybe we’ve forgotten what we ate, and we’re only a few beets from a successful week of vegetable nutrition.

For our own sake, I hope that’s true.

The haul:
Onions
Tomatoes
Beets
Potatoes
Carrots
Various peppers
Cucumbers
Cabbage
Green beans
Kohlrabi

Tags: Food, Sioux Falls |

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The CSA: Week 9

July 29, 2008


Deane from Gadgetopia send me an article the other day from the New York Times online, about a new trend in gardening – hiring an organic gardener to plant, maintain and harvest your garden for you.

At first it seemed nearly sacrilegious. Lazy. Elitist. Like hiring a maid. Or a chauffeur. I mean, if you’re going to go to the trouble of having a garden, why wouldn’t you do it yourself? Didn’t this defeat the purpose of a garden?

But I realized that, really, it’s not that different from, say, hiring a landscaper, or having someone mow your lawn. It’s all in the perspective. It’s something that those with money can enjoy – the fruits of a garden without the pain of gardening; the time weeding, the digging, the forgetfulness and subsequent failure.

(And trust me – as much as I enjoy getting out and picking weeds and digging in the dirt, it’s not something I drive myself to do every night. It’s one of those jobs that are surprisingly enjoyable once you’ve gotten yourself into the mood, but will sit dormant for weeks while you work up the nerve to get started. Time is an issue, yes. But so is desire.)

Even more, I realized that this organic gardening, while pretty cool, also creates summer jobs, lends itself to a greener city community and supports the organic movement. It is also pretty common. The only difference between the people featured in this article and, say, Kerrie and myself is that we don’t have the garden on our premises. Instead, it’s on a farm, several miles away.

We pay to have someone grow vegetables for us. Everyone who purchases a tomato in a grocery store pays to have someone grow vegetables for them, too. It seems like we’re doing them a favor, that we’re making their farm successful, that we’re the ones doing them a service. But it’s not. They’re doing us a service, we’re paying for it, and both sides benefit.

Just like these people who have organic gardeners. It’s not elitist or lazy or anything like that. It’s a pretty good idea, if you have the money.

Our haul was pretty good this week, and we went right to work using roughly two pounds of onions (unwillingly saved over the past two weeks) to make some delicious French onion soup. Delicious, as in, the best I’d ever tasted. Apparently, I can cook, if so driven.

(To be honest, it wasn’t French onion soup, but English onion soup with sage and cheddar, from Jamie Oliver’s new Food Network program Jamie at Home.)

In addition to the onions, we received.
Tomatoes
Beets
Potatoes
Carrots
Various peppers
Cucumbers
Cabbage
Green beans

Now, if only I could find someone who would cook the vegetables as well. We’d be in perfect shape.

Tags: Food, Outdoors, Sioux Falls |

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The CSA: Week 8

July 19, 2008


CSA: WEek 8

One bag for two families. That’s what we’ve been working with for the past seven weeks. One bag, one share, one group of vegetables. We split them, we consume them, and we come back for more.

We figured that’s all it would ever be. We were getting our money’s worth, so why expect more?

Oh man.

A combination of the beginning of a heavy harvest season and a practical rain-forest-like rain level over the past few weeks has turned the Farmer’s Market into something resembling a produce aisle at the largest Walmart on Earth. Except, you know, with good produce. And a variety. All of it organic.

It left us with not one, but two bags. Two. And not just beets and kohlrabi, either. Good stuff. Stuff I actually already eat. (Though, to be fair, we ate a lot last week, with numerous pasta dishes and a sweet oriental salad made from our half-head of cabbage.)

Two bags. For two families. And we should expect this from now on.

Best of all, we were supplied with surprises. Potatoes (finally!) and broccoli! Green beans! More cherry tomatoes, cucumbers and carrots! I’ve never loved vegetables so much, never experienced such a colorful display, never been so excited to make salads and stir-fry and whatever else you do when you eat healthy!

Our haul included:
Cherry tomatoes
Beets
Potatoes
Kohlrabi
Carrots
Yellow sweet peppers
Cucumbers
Broccoli
Onions
Cabbage
Green beans

All of it for about $20, or the average cost per week of our CSA.

$20 bucks. Two bags. Two families. One hell of a healthy haul.

Tags: Food, Sioux Falls |

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