Winter CSA, Month 1

I have been remiss in posting pictures of our winter share. This is a shot of the first winter share, which we picked up in early November:


Pretty incredible, isn't it? And yes, those are my pink-stockinged feet in the corner. I had to stand on a chair in order to get far enough away to get everything in frame. And this isn't actually everything: we also had a huge bag of onions, shallots, and garlic bulbs (to last throughout the winter), a bunch of dried rattlesnake beans, still in the pods, and as much basil as we could pick.

The basil was turned into pesto and frozen in cubes; likewise, I roasted most of the squash and steamed all of the kale to freeze for future use. I have a few pictures of meals made from this harvest, which I will post eventually. A lot of my pictures from this time did not turn out very well. The days were getting shorter and the light more elusive, and by mid-November, it was usually dark out before I even started cooking dinner.

What about month 2, which we picked up in early December? Well, I never photographed it. As I mentioned, I kept getting sick, and I was very busy, and frankly, what we got in month 2 was just not as pretty. Think parsnips. Lots and lots of parsnips. Plus carrots, potatoes, and more cabbage than I will ever know what to do with. We still have some cabbage in the fridge, and we're going to pick up month 3 tomorrow!

Check back Monday for a picture of tomorrow's haul, and have a wonderful weekend.

Confetti Salad

For my first meal from this week's amazing bounty, I decided to try The New Moosewood Cookbook's raw vegetable salad. Basically, the idea is that any vegetable can be eaten raw if you chop it small enough, so grab whatever you have -- the more different kinds and colors, the better -- and mince or grate them all. I picked squash, zucchini, scallions, and purple pepper from our CSA box, as well as carrots and celery that we had on hand. (A cucumber is pictured, but I didn't end up using it.) The celery was the only thing I minced manually; I used the kitchen shears on the scallions and threw everything else in to my trusty salad shooter. Consequently, this salad took about five minutes to prepare.

See how pretty it looks with all the different colors? Like confetti. Once everything is chopped or grated, just stir it up and add the salad dressing of your choice.

I decided to take another page from Moosewood and use their green salad dressing. It's a slightly odd mix of fresh herbs, spinach (or kale, in my case, since we didn't have spinach), lemon juice, and buttermilk. It was fresh and tangy and worked well with the raw veggies. The overall effect was very light and tasty; there's something about this salad that reminds me of fresh salsa, even though it's not spicy. It would make an incredible burrito filling -- I'm thinking with mashed pink pintos and a little queso blanco in a whole wheat tortilla. Yum!

Out of the Box, Week 7

Aren't these colors glorious? We're clearly at the height of summer. It's really nice to be back home and get another huge box of veggies.

It was recently brought to my attention that some readers might be wondering just how it is we get a nice box of veggies every week. We participate in a CSA (community-supported agriculture) program. It's sort of like a subscription service for produce. We paid in advance for a full year's worth of vegetables. From June to October, we pick up a box once a week; November through May, we'll pick up a somewhat larger assortment once a month.

It's a nice deal for all involved: the farmer gets money in advance to help pay for seeds and planting, and we end up getting fresh, local, organic vegetables and herbs at a lower price than we would pay in stores or at the farmers market. Our share works out to about $10 per week over the course of the year.

Clearly, we're getting more than $10 worth of vegetables here: we've got a large head of romaine, some kale, a bunch of basil, a huge bunch of scallions, summer squash, zucchini, tomatoes, cucumbers, a green bell pepper, a purple pepper, and two kohlrabi.

We signed up for the CSA at Luna Bleu Farm in South Royalton, Vermont. To find a CSA in your area, go here.