The Veggie Box Dictates the Dinner

Mostly, the vegetables from our farm share end up in easy to prepare side dishes. One of my favorites is sliced zucchini, onion, and halved cherry tomatoes sauted in a little olive oil with seasonings. Another favorite is a simple salad of greens, fresh basil, and cucumber slices. I used to put onion in there, but I find that only detracts from the basil. And hardly anything is easier than corn on the cob.

Sometimes the veggies are more critical to the main dish, as in stuffed green peppers, or tuna salad with swiss chard, or salad nicoise with new potatoes and green beans.

Very rarely, the veggies are front and center. Like in a late-lunch of roasted carrots and fennel; breaded, fried cauliflower; and plenty of naan. I actually prefer this way of eating, and would like to serve more meals like this in our future.

Meals from the Farm Box

It's hard to cook when friends are in town, but I managed to use up all the veggies except the swiss chard. Tonight I'll cook it, so I can make room in the fridge for today's farm box.

Saturday Cookout
Instead of the standard mustard, ketchup, relish, I topped my burger with 5 purple basil leaves, a little mayo, and a 1/2-inch thick slice of grilled sweet onion. Superb.

No Fancy Salad This Week
Just sliced cucumber and fresh basil with lettuce mix.

Broccoli Side
The steamed broccoli, dressed with balsamic vinegar, made it into our lunches. But mostly I just snacked on it.

Fruit Right Out of the Box
We practically inhaled the cherries within minutes of opening the box.

Zucchini with Chickpea Flour
We had big plans to grill the zucchini, but I ended up making a big batch of the above gluten-free side dish. It's tasty and easy, but I need to try it one more time. I don't think I cooked the flour long enough.

Taste of Chicago (Localvore Edition)

So if you live in Chicago on the weekend of the Gay Pride Parade, Taste of Chicago, and the Cross Town Classic what do you decide to do?

If you're me, you drive 55 miles south of the city and tour the CSA farm you're supporting. Farmer Vicki hosted her annual potluck and gave a tour of her farm. About 75 shareholders from all over the Chicago area came to see the fields of onions, zucchini, etc, tour the greenhouses, meet the new kittens, and sample some delicious veggie dishes.

Very inspiring. I came home and weeded my garden.

Lots 'o Lettuce

The family we're splitting our farm share with doesn't cook with cabbage and is still making their way through the lettuce from last week. So they let us take all the cabbage and lettuce from this week's veggie box.

We now have a tremendous amount of lettuce in our fridge, and a monster head of cabbage.

Fortunately my book club is meeting this weekend, so I'll bring a big salad. I'll make Chinese noodles with the cabbage.

Also this weekend, a group of shareholders are touring the farm with Farmer Vicki. Hubby and I will be there with our daughters.

Teenage Grazing

Hubby and I are always accusing each other of eating all the food. Of course, it's really our daughters eating everything. My precious chocolate milk - gone. Pudding mixes, muffin mixes - all gone. Bowls of cherries, gallons of milk, lunch meat, frozen waffles, et cetera.

They ate 11 cheese sticks in two days??

However, I can pretty much guarantee that they will never, ever touch the veggies from the farm share. And so, because we've been busy, this week's produce is still sitting in the fridge:

bunch kale
bunch spinach
head leaf lettuce
fresh cilantro
asparagus
daikon radish
strawberries (FRUIT! Gobbled up as soon as we opened the box)

CSA - Week 2

In her weekly email, Farmer Vicki says she had to cram some of her early crops into smaller spaces because of the wet soil. She apologizes for another light delivery. This week's box contained:

rhubarb
head of leaf lettuce
head of bok choi
strawberries
turnips
fresh oregano

I happened to be talking to my excellent friend (and excellent cook) yesterday and asked her if she had any yummy recipes for bok choi. Of course she did, so I made it for dinner.

I love when people are excited to share a recipe. This one fills all my requirements: easy, delicious, few ingredients, easy to make substitutions.

Yummy! And I've discovered my girls love udon noodles.

Too Booked to Cook

Eating dinner out with family and friends tonight and tomorrow, so no homemade dinners this weekend.

I have decided to wash all the greens and have them ready in a bowl. Today's and tomorrow's lunch will just be garbage salad. (I need to clean out the fridge anyway.)

Also, last night hubby and I ended up at Cafe 28 for drinks/appetizer/
dessert. They placed some fantastic salty/spicy butter on the table with the bread, and I was reminded how much I love herbed butters. I think this is one way I will use Farmer Vicki's herbs this summer. The other way is in dressings, as I have been wanting to break myself of the habit of bottled salad dressings for many years.

Wine & Radish

After work, I sliced the radishes and set them out on a plate, but I have nothing to serve with them. (Wish I had olives and feta and pita bread, oh well.) I guess I"ll just squeeze lime over the radish, and have a glass of wine while I watch the news.

I have chicken in the oven now, and I'll serve it with the purple asparagus for dinner.

FYI, teenage daughters declared Kale Krisps "interesting". And spent much time cleaning the green stuff out of their braces!

Pretty Purple Asparagus

In her weekly email, Farmer Vicki says that because of the late spring, the box would be light this week (and that she will make up for it in next week's box). When I opened the box, I thought it did seem light, especially since we are sharing the box with another family. But after dividing everything in two, I think it's safe to say the Broderick family will probably be just fine with the following produce for the next six days:

3 radishes
bunch kale
bunch spinach
mesclun lettuce mix
bunch thyme
stawberries
bunch purple asparagus
(I gave all the rhubarb to my friend, because I harvest my own rhubarb from our garden.)

We ate the sweet strawberries with breakfast this morning. I will make Kale Krisps tonight, as recommended by Farmer Vicki.

A Farm in St. Anne, Illinois

We bought a share in a community supported agriculture (CSA) farm for the summer—Genesis Growers.

“Our pledge: We will do our utmost to provide you with a wide variety of fresh, chemical free produce weekly, but please remember crop failure can occur, and while this rarely affects our boxes, there is a certain risk involved in farming.”

The summer season begins today and goes for 21 weeks until sometime in October. We decided on the summer season, since grilled veggies are yummy and that’s when we’re most likely to grill. We went with the medium share, rather than the large share, and we decided to split the cost of the share with another family of four. Cost per family is $14.29/week. Since we paid for the season back in February when we signed up, it now feels like we will be getting free organic veggies through October.

I’ll pick up the box after work today.

Spring for the Organic Farmer

It’s time to sign up for a CSA if you’re interested in that kind of thing. Our experience purchasing a half-share in an organic farm was quite the adventure last year, and probably not the ideal experience for first-timers like us. Then again, maybe it was. We learned a lot.

Here’s Farmer Renee’s latest, thoughtful letter about organic farming. Always fascinating!

On this Easter morning, I wish her my best.

A Farm in Trouble

Instead of our box of organic vegetables, on Friday we received this letter from Farmer Renee. It’s filled with bad news, and to me, it’s very sad on a number of levels. Please take the time to read it, as it provides insight into the small farmer’s precarious situation.

Also, this article from the business section of a Madison, Wisconsin, newspaper The Capital Times discusses the surprisingly large role small southwestern Wisconsin farms play in the huge organic foods economy.

A Shareholders Social

Our neighborhood escaped those heavy rains at the end of August, but the farm we subscribed to this summer got hit. Crawford County in southwestern Wisconsin, where our farm is located, was declared a disaster zone after days of unrelenting rains. Farmer Renee suspended delivery for one week so she could assess crop loss. In the meantime, a social was scheduled at our pick up site.

So we dropped by on Saturday to meet a few of the other shareholders—one of whom organized the whole site and has been communicating with us about deliveries—compared CSA experiences, sampled fair trade coffee, and tasted a watermelon from this week’s box of produce. Halfway through the 2007 growing season, I’m happy to have met some like-minded food people, and they psyched me up for more chopping/grilling of vegetables! (But no more tomatoes—they were all lost in the storms.)

At the Farmer's Market

I took our girls to a farmer’s market yesterday morning, for the first time this summer. We haven’t been to any yet because our CSA is supplying us with more than enough fresh produce. But I wanted to hit a few markets this season to see what they offer (specifically in terms of meat and dairy).

We purchased a small box of raspberries and four nectarines for a total of $7 (pricey, yes, but the best I’ve tasted in many, many months). The CSA is a much better deal, at $20/week (though this is for organic vegetables). Economics aside, I have forgotten how fun it is to roam around the market, buy non-food items, and learn about other local organizations.

I discovered Urban Meadows, a Chicago-based nonprofit florist that provides jobs and job training for people with mental illness. And
The Enterprising Kitchen is a Chicago-based nonprofit natural products business providing employment and life skills to low-income women working toward self-sufficiency and independence.

Veggie Drop-Off #1

Here’s our first delivery of vegetables from the organic farm we subscribed to this year. Aren’t they beautiful? Farmer Renee dropped them off today at a church behind our local Starbucks.

What I'm able to identify is the red-leafed lettuce, the bunch of turnips (in the center of the photo), and the cucumbers. I can’t competently i.d. the other two lettuce varieties. The bag of what we first thought were green beans turned out to be long, curvy green onions (not like any I’d ever seen before). We chopped off a piece to taste. Wow—so fresh.

The challenge, of course, is how to prepare all this lovely produce during the next seven days (before the next delivery). And to get our daughters to partake!

More CSA

To follow up on last month’s post, our family has officially joined the CSA movement (at least for the 2007 growing season). Today we purchased a partial share in Sweet Earth Organic Farm. We will be picking up our box of fresh fruits, herbs, and vegetables once a week from June to November.

This is a challenge we look forward to.

Chicago and the Small Farm

Certain books are very special to me because they’ve changed the way I want to live. The most recent one I've read is The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan. This is a book about where our food comes from today, where it used to come from, and why it matters. It’s a thought provoking, beautifully written book, and I think it’s remarkable that he pulled the whole idea off.

Here’s a review from the author’s website. I’ve chosen this link because after the review, you can read the introduction and first chapter from the book.

After I read what Pollan had to say, I became determined to back community supported agriculture (CSA)—even though I live in a huge city and have been waiting for years for our local Whole Foods to open. Belonging to a CSA farm is kind of like subscribing to your food. You find a local farm, purchase a share of its crop, and take home weekly deliveries grown on that farm. It’s not as convenient, obviously, as stopping by the grocery store, and that’s why our family hasn’t done it yet. You can’t predict what you will get in each delivery, and who knows if you’ll be able to eat it all before the next one arrives. And if the crop fails, guess what?

But I found the online version of the 2007 Chicago CSA Map, which just reminded me that I better start researching this topic if I want to sign up for this year's growing season. Pollan recommends visiting the farm beforehand.

So I guess our family has a little road trip to make—and I bet it will be much more exciting than going to Whole Foods.