CSA Week 3

Our third box from Culinary Delights Farms - from left, snap peas, spinach, red lettuce, green lettuce, ???, green onions, baby potatoes and radishes. 

This time I washed everything and wrapped it in Ziploc bags and put it in the refrigerator. I was washing the baby potatoes and suddenly I thought of how a box like this would look to the father and son in Cormac McCarthy's book "The Road". I ate one, trying to picture what the feelings would be like to find something like that in the midst of such a dead world and have its life become part of you. I know - more overthinking. Here's what you should do to store these vegetables:

To Store	Do this	Wash first	Use by
snap peas	Remove strings and store in plastic bag or blanch and freeze	No (too late)	7-14 days
spinach	in plastic bag in crisper	No (too late)	3-4 days
red lettuce	Bag in refrigerator (don't store with apples, pears or bananas	Yes	a few (?) days
green lettuce	Bag in refrigerator (don't store with apples, pears or bananas	Yes	a few (?) days
green onions	Bag in fridge	Doesn't seem to matter	5 days
baby potatoes	Indeterminate - dry and dark , 45-50 degrees but do NOT store in plastic (too late)	Yes	2 weeks
radishes	Remove tops and store in plastic bags in refrigerator	Indeterminate	2 weeks

Did I mention how much I hate tables in Blogger?

Sources:

• http://www.foodreference.com/html/artradish.html
• http://www.merexfoodcorp.com/cons_nutrional.html

CSA Part II - July 2nd

Our second box arrived from CSA and this time because my better half was home, more of the contents were utilized. She made a great salad with bacon and most of the greens, with the strawberries and whipped cream for dessert. Excellent. Shows what a difference actual culinary talent makes.

I tried wilting the beet greens with garlic and onions....ugh. Not a hit. Even tried it with a hamburger bun. Should have used bacon with it, maybe, but that's like putting chocolate on lettuce - skip the denial and eat the chocolate.

Still trying to figure out what to do with the asparagus - ATK cookbook has a recipe for broiled asparagus, maybe I will try that.

Community Support Agriculture, Part I - June 23rd box

We signed up for a Community Supported Agriculture farm share (well, half a share) from a farm near our house. This is the first box we received, June 23rd 2008. We picked it up at a house in our town where all the boxes are dropped off.

The farmer sent an email saying the wet spring had slowed the crops down and so this wouldn't be the best set of produce, but it was still a nice package.


The box as we recieved it - picked up from a location not too far from our house.




...and the contents of the box. I didn't store these properly due to ignorance (need to wash them and store them between moist paper towels in the refrigerator) and most of it spoiled except for the spinach. I wilted that in a pan with some garlic (with a recipe from the America's Test Kitchen family cookbook) and it was pretty good.