Kristin Janz

Tag: vegetables

  • More CSA complaints

    Um.  Can you guys try not to put the corn on the cob on top of the baby spinach next time?  I swear, Wilson Farm has the worst grocery baggers on the planet (I’ve lost track of how many peaches, plums and nectarines they’ve ruined), and apparently the same people are putting the CSA shares into the baskets.

    We finally got a decent amount of tomatoes.  For a few weeks, we’d been getting 2 a week.  This week we got 16.  Donald is a little disappointed that we still got the same massive amount of zucchini and summer squash, though.  And lettuce is back, after a lovely 2-week lettuce hiatus.  I’m sort of disappointed that heirloom tomatoes are in full swing, and we only got the most basic, boring tomatoes they grow at Wilson Farm.  But I can sort of understand.  The heirloom ones tend to be more susceptible to splitting and cracking, especially around the stem, and once that happens they go bad pretty quickly.  If we got 16 large heirloom tomatoes, we’d have to eat nothing but for a couple of days so that they didn’t rot before we got to them.  And then we’d have no tomatoes left for the rest of the week.  Also, even basic, boring tomatoes are pretty tasty in August, when they’re locally grown (not the tasteless ones that they pick green in California and blow ethylene gas over to sort of ripen them before they put them out on the shelf in your Massachusetts grocery store).

    For dinner tonight, I made Mediterranean couscous salad (with tomatoes and zucchini, as well as other vegetables), tomato and mozzarella salad with basil, and boiled corn on the cob (with lime-cilantro butter).  Fresh local raspberries from our CSA share for dessert (even though Donald was eyeing the new cherries I’d bought; I told him we had to eat the raspberries first, though, because they’re more perishable).  Everything was yummy, though Donald opted out of the couscous salad because of the measly 1 cup of diced zucchini I’d added, and had leftover pork tenderloin with figs from last night instead.

  • Low fat, schmow fat!

    Just for a change from boiled corn on the cob, I decided to use this week’s corn from my CSA share to make creamed corn for lunch.

    A bowl of creamed corn, with fresh corn off the cob and heavy cream. And butter. Because heavy cream just doesn’t have enough fat.

    It was yummy, though I’m feeling maybe I ought to have a double portion of salad tonight, with no dressing, to make up for it. (In case you’re wondering, I didn’t only eat corn and heavy cream for lunch; I also had leftover Greek vegetable stew and salad (with dressing). And a peach.)

    Maybe next time I’ll try the variation with blue cheese and bacon.

    On the writing front, not such a good day. I was working on the novel, and only got about 1800 words written. Considering that Donald can write 800 words just in the evening after coming home from a long day at his regular job … well, not so good! This is why I need to be a stay-at-home writer in order to accomplish anything, because I’m so slow. Though today was especially bad. I just wasn’t into it, and in the morning I kept dozing off at my desk. And I didn’t have any caffeine in the house. I took a 20-minute nap, which was probably a better idea anyway, and actually helped a lot. (My theory is that using caffeine to stay awake is like curing a hangover with the hair of the dog; it only prolongs the inevitable.) I did force myself to sit at my desk for 6 hours staring at the file of my novel, though. So discipline was okay, just not inspiration.

  • Careful what you wish for!

    I’m sure it’s a coincidence, but last week I complained about all the vegetables we were getting each week in our CSA share, and this week we didn’t get as many.  Here’s what we got this week:

    1 head red leaf lettuce
    2 cucumbers
    1 bunch salad onions (3)
    1 bunch scallions
    1 bunch beets with greens attached
    baby beet greens
    green beans
    6 ears corn
    2 yellow summer squash
    2 zucchini

    Last week we got an extra lettuce (romaine), and more summer squash, and both Romano beans and wax beans instead of regular green beans. We didn’t get beet greens or beets, but we got an eggplant, and some basil.

    I suppose this week’s take is a more reasonable amount of food, but now that I’ve been trained to expect ridiculously massive quantities of produce every week, it doesn’t feel like a good deal if we’re getting less.

    I’m also a little annoyed that the “full share” people are always getting the special vegetables when the “half share” people like us aren’t. Maybe this is to be expected, but we’ve only gotten kale and Swiss chard once, and the full share people are getting one or the other (or both!) every week. And this week the full share people got tomatoes. Tomatoes! Possibly the most desirable vegetable, and we didn’t get any. Hopefully it’s just that the tomatoes are only starting to come in, and they didn’t have enough for everyone. But I’m certainly not joining this CSA again if I don’t get some tomatoes at some point.

  • Why I probably won’t join a vegetable CSA next year

    Although the title might suggest the opposite, I love the CSA I’m in.  CSA stands for community-supported agriculture; you pay the farm a set amount before the start of the harvest season, and each week you get vegetables.  You don’t get to pick which vegetables you receive.  I like all vegetables, so this is not a problem for me.  (My husband Donald, however, has been introduced to all sorts of new vegetables he hadn’t even known he disliked.)  And the vegetables are very good.  I won’t even buy fresh green beans except at Russo’s and occasionally Whole Foods, and even there I have to pick through the bin bean by bean to find ones that haven’t started to rot.  The green beans from my CSA share, on the other hand, are the freshest beans I’ve seen anywhere since my childhood, when we used to grow them ourselves.  Same for the beets, and Swiss chard, and zucchini, and lettuce, and corn, and pretty much everything else.  I like to support local businesses when I can (read:  when it’s not too inconvenient for me), and I don’t like how centralized all our agricultural production is becoming (it makes sense for some crops, like grain, and less for perishable vegetables), and I especially don’t like the crappy quality of the vegetables that I see at most supermarkets.  I feel that the value of what I’ve gotten each week is competitive with supermarket prices, and as an added bonus, the farm whose CSA I joined (Wilson Farm) has a store and they offer a 10% discount to CSA members on their pick-up day, on anything else in the store.

    So what’s the problem?

    Mainly, that Donald and I are having a hard time eating so many vegetables.  Here’s what I received last week.  This is a “half-share”, the smallest size offered, suggested as an appropriate amount for 2-3 people.

    1 head red leaf lettuce
    1 head romaine lettuce
    2 large cucumbers
    1 large bunch of scallions
    1 bunch of salad onions (3 onions)
    2 zucchini
    3 yellow summer squash
    1 enormous bunch of basil
    6 ears of corn
    1 pound wax beans
    1 pound Romano beans
    1 eggplant

    Is that it? I think that’s it. Is it just me, or is this a lot for 2 non-vegetarian adults who don’t eat every meal at home to get through in a single week? Some weeks we get 3 heads of lettuce. We’re eating salad at every meal except breakfast (in addition to another vegetable side dish and sometimes a vegetable main dish), and we still end up with lettuce left over when it’s time for the next CSA pick-up.

    I think part of the problem is me (I do almost all of the cooking in our household, because I like cooking and Donald doesn’t). I like to cook from cookbooks. I like to find an interesting recipe, then go out and buy the ingredients, and cook it. I’m not a spontaneous cook. I can’t say, well, I have beans and eggplant and zucchini, I’ll make a vegetable stew with them. Well, I guess I can say that. But I’d rather find a recipe for a bean/eggplant/zucchini stew, because experience has taught me that a reliable recipe is probably better than whatever I’m going to make up off the top of my head (I’m a pretty boring recipe-inventor, and also always add too much oil if I don’t have a recipe to keep me in check). Wilson Farm has recipe print-outs that you can pick up, and they included a free cookbook with the first CSA share pick-up, but a lot of the recipes they make available call for extra ingredients (including additional vegetables!) that weren’t actually in my share and that I probably don’t have at home, so they’re not that useful (at least not to me).

    (Fortunately, Wilson Farm posts the week’s share contents on their website the day before you pick it up. It’s subject to change at the last minute, but it’s usually roughly accurate, and immensely helpful in menu planning, so that I don’t have to pick up my share on Tuesday and then go to another grocery store on Wednesday once I’ve seen what I’m getting, found some recipes, and figured out which additional ingredients I need.)

    I have been making pesto with the massive amounts of basil we’re getting, and putting it in the freezer. But a CSA share isn’t really great for “putting up” food. For one thing, there’s all that lettuce. For another, although you get too much food each week, you don’t actually get enough for it to be practical to freeze, can or pickle it. I’m just not going to freeze two pounds of beans, or pickle 3 beets.

    Oddly, if we were getting fewer vegetables for the price we paid, I wouldn’t feel like we were getting a very good deal. I wonder if it would make sense for farms to start offering quarter-shares. The most common complaint I hear from friends in CSAs is that they can’t manage to eat so many vegetables, so I think there would be a demand for it (assuming it was half the price of a half-share, and it wasn’t all lettuce). Or, if Donald and I could find another couple to split our weekly take with, or maybe even 1 other person … we are actually getting through everything in our share each week, except for the lettuce, but just barely.

    So, I might just not be the best person for a vegetable CSA (the meat CSA is easier, because everything is frozen when you pick it up, and then you have plenty of time to figure out over the next several days what you’re going to do with it all). It’s been a really good experience, and has encouraged (nay, forced!) me to cook more seasonally. I still look to cookbooks for inspiration, but at least now I’m saying, “Okay, I need a recipe with beets or zucchini; butternut squash soup can wait until fall.” I’m sure I can continue to do this sort of thing even if I don’t also have beans, eggplant, cucumbers and basil to deal with.

    A friend of mine said that she had tried a CSA in the past, but been similarly defeated. She started thinking how great it would be if she could just go each week and buy only the amount of vegetables that she actually needed … and then realized that she had just invented the grocery store.

    But what am I saying: “It’s been a really good experience”? Ha! It’s Week 8 of 20. We’re not even halfway there.