Adventures in Cooking Our CSA Share: Season 2

So, should I call it "Return of the CSA?" or "The CSA Strikes Back?"

Mama just suggested "Spawn of CSA."

You get the picture: I just sent in our application for Year 2 of our CSA experiment. We loved (I loved) our farm, from which we received full-share boxes of produce for about 25 weeks, or June through mid-November. We had kale, chard, dandelion greens, collard greens, turnip greens, Asian mixed greens, garlic scapes, kohlrabi, hakurei turnips, radishes, lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, cabbages, leeks, carrots, sweet potatoes, bok choi, scallions, green beans, zucchini, yellow squash, winter squash, corn, garlic, onions, cucumbers, eggplant, peppers (from purple through the red-orange rainbow to green), Brussel sprouts, escarole, broccoli rabe, beets, cauliflower, lots of herbs, spinach, and eggs, (plus access to lots of fruit and even our Thanksgiving turkey!) so many of which were new to us, and not in a small way daunting. But we learned a lot (and more) and are back for more, this time with more experience cooking different vegetables, more recipes (thanks for all the veggie cookbooks for Christmas, Mama!), more ways to put up the excess produce.

The timing is perfect because I've just finished reading Michael Pollan's superb and memorable Food Rules, a compendium of cultural suggestions for eating food, mostly plants, not too much, and am starting Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which very introduction calls for a food culture in the U.S. to guide our eating habits. Pollan's rules, culled from research and reader responses, include many snappy axioms, like "eat food grown on a plant, not made in a plant" or "treat treats like treats" (or the corollary, "S" rule--snacks, sweets, and seconds only on days that start with S). Sure, it sounds like the phrases from a Weight Watchers meeting (such as my least favorite "nothing tastes as good as being thin feels." Ugh. And b.s.), but that's not all bad if it helps. And Kingsolver's book will be a positive motivation to eat locally and seasonally, maybe even expand our own garden efforts, without, hopefully, all the depressing scariness of other Pollan books like Food Inc. (which I have not read entirely).

I think I'm ready for spring: ready to ditch my coat, ready to open the windows, ready to put some seeds in the ground, ready to have a variety of seasonal produce (we're trying to eat seasonally which means it's been a long time since we've had much more than beans, root veggies, certain greens, and apples).

And I'm definitely ready for my first CSA box!