Vegetable box surprise
So I trundled my carry-cart a block and a half to my CSA pickup location, and found there my CSA box, along with a very nice man with a spotlessly clean garage who made sure I did all the right things (check off name on list, empty box’s content into bags, break down box and put it away, pick up newsletter, pick up calendar, pick up flat of herb plants, pick up ornamental dogwood).
I had a couple people ask about this the last time I mentioned it, so: CSA stands for “community supported agriculture.” I pay a fee to a local farm before the beginning of the season, and the farm supplies me with a share of whatever’s ripe (or in today’s case, overwintered) during the growing season. I don’t get to choose what the farm sends me, though I may be able to swap undesired items with other CSAers.
My limited understanding of agricultural economics vaguely recalls that farms can run dangerously low on funds in late winter and early spring, sometimes having to take out ruinous loans just to get seeds in the ground; CSA revenue helps smooth out the year.
MACSAC has a great list of CSA farms that deliver to Madison. I chose Harmony Valley Farm partly because they do half-shares (not all farms do; a full CSA share is designed to feed four people) and partly because they have a pickup point I can easily walk to.
This week’s haul:
- a bag of chichi salad greens
- a bag of fresh spinach
- a huge bunch of chives
- two bunches of ramps (wild leeks, and no, I didn’t know what they were either)
- a bunch of sorrel
- a bunch of arugula
- a mess of rhubarb
- a mess of asparagus
- a pound or so of parsnips
- a pound or so of sunchokes
- a few black radishes
- the aforementioned flat of herbs and ornamental dogwood
For dinner tonight, I made the parsnips into croquettes (along with a ramp, as an alternative to the grated onion called for in the recipe), and the sunchokes and half the chives into soup. Was good, and so will the leftovers be. The spinach is going to become pesto tomorrow, and the rhubarb has pie in its future. The herbs have been planted in the back yard (poor things, their flat left them no room to grow), and in all honesty, I haven’t a clue what I’m going to do with the rest of it, but I suppose I’ll think of something!
(Well, the salad greens get eaten as a salad, duh. But I don’t have any chevre in the house to eat the arugula with, and arugula loves chevre.)
If you’ve got a can’t-miss sorrel recipe, please share. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten sorrel!