One of my favorite parts of summer is receiving a weekly box of veggies through a CSA share (
CSA = Community Supported Agriculture), where you pay for a share of a farm's veggies at the beginning of the summer growing season and receive a weekly or bi-monthly box of produce through early or mid-fall. There are SO MANY advantages to CSAs—namely, supporting farmers directly, buying local food (which equals fresher and more environmentally-friendly food with lower transportation costs), paying the farmer up-front so that they can more accurately plan their crops (which I see as a benefit over farmers markets, though they are wonderful as well), and the adventure that comes with not always knowing exactly what will show up in your box each week. The first time we received
celeriac, I had no idea what it was; it looked like a
mandrake straight out of Harry Potter! It's been a fun and challenging experience for us each year.
Our current CSA is through
King's Hill Farm in Mineral Point, Wisconsin. In the past, we've also used
Angelic Organics in Caledonia, Illinois. We always purchase a half share, which in the past meant a full box delivered twice per month, but King's Hill Farm changed their half share to a smaller sized box that we receive weekly. The boxes work out to be $15 each and contain 5-6 items. While we do have to supplement these items with grocery store or farmers market visits for protein, bread, and other staples to complete our meals, I have found that the CSA items definitely span the whole week and often act as the core of our dinners.
Ages ago, I wrote a post on my old blog answering some
basic questions about CSAs
and how they work, and today I'd like to update that post with some of
my favorite tips that have come out of five years of CSA membership. Many of these tips can also be applied to farmers market shopping, if that's more your jam.
OBTAIN A VEGETABLE-CENTRIC COOKBOOK
In our first year with Angelic Organics, they gave us a wonderful cookbook written by the farm's founder called
Farmer John's Cookbook. I honestly reference this every single week—not necessarily for recipes but largely because the cookbook is divided by ingredient and contains proper storage instruction for each item. I particularly like this cookbook because it is specifically catered to our local area and the kinds of crops we get in CSA boxes, and helps when I get those "WTF is this?" vegetables. If you live in a region other than the Midwest, I encourage you to see if there might be a farm that has printed their own cookbook. Many CSAs email you a weekly newsletter with your box's contents and a few recipes, but I don't find them detailed enough to be useful. If you can't find a vegetable cookbook specific to your local region, something like
Vegetable Literacy can be a great reference too.
STORE YOUR VEGETABLES PROPERLY
Proper storage makes a huge difference in how long vegetables stay fresh and crisp. For the first few years, I'd just throw bunches of kale or rainbow chard into the fridge, and within a day or two, it would look droopy, limp and sad. Not ideal. This year, as I mentioned above, I've been reading up on storage tips from the Farmer
John's Cookbook (I'm sure this information exists online somewhere as well). Things like: damp vs. dry, bagged vs. unbagged, paper vs. plastic, and what drawer of the fridge. I've been so impressed with how much of a difference this has made. Granted, I'm going through damp paper towels and gallon sized ziplock bags like nobody's business, but my greens in particular are staying as fresh as the day we get them from the farm.
TAKE ADVANTAGE OF MEAL PLANNING (AND UTILIZE PINTEREST)
It's slightly harder to meal plan when you don't know what you're going to get in your CSA box until a few days before you receive it, but I still think planning is an important part of the process and doesn't take any more time than it does during non-CSA season. I pick up our CSA box on Friday afternoons, and my meal plans run from Tuesday (when I grocery shop) to the following Monday. So, during the weekend after we pick up a new box, we're typically finishing up the meal plan/produce from the previous box (and sometimes going out to eat, of course). I still follow
the meal-planning process I wrote about here, but I base all meals around what comes in our CSA box. Most frequently I turn to Pinterest to pick recipes because I can just search by ingredient. Some favorites from the beginning of the CSA season have been:
Carrot and Sunflower Seed Salad (we used pepitas instead),
Curry Roasted Red Pepper and Eggplant Soup,
Bread and Butter Pickles (because SO MANY CUCUMBERS),
Kale Hemp and Flaxseed Oil Pesto (served over zucchini noodles with grilled chicken),
Grilled Ginger Sesame Chicken Chopped Salad (added red pepper),
Beet Burgers (soooo good; link from my old blog), and
Scallion Pancakes. I typically keep eggs, cans of beans, and frozen chicken sausages/chicken breasts/ground beef on-hand to add protein to the veg/salad heavy meals, or we just end up eating two different salads side-by-side as a veggie centric meal. I'm very lucky Mark likes veggies and doesn't HAVE to have meat in every meal. He's just glad I do the planning and most of the cooking around here :)
WRITE OUT YOUR CURRENT CSA INVENTORY ON THE FRIDGE
I've long written our meal planning "menu" on a dry erase board on the fridge so we can pick what we feel like eating on any given weeknight, but I also list each CSA item as well. Often, the recipes we make don't use up all of what we have for a particular vegetable (or we'll receive something like 14 cucumbers), so I keep items on the list until they are completely gone. It keeps me from forgetting what we have, and helps when I meal plan for the following week so I can know what needs to be used up first. Much less is going to waste for us this way.
BE ADVENTUROUS
CSAs favor the bold eater. You will probably not love every vegetable you receive. It took me forever to find beet recipes that I liked, but persistence paid off. Sometimes you get a billion cucumbers (or tomatoes, or whatever) and quickly have to figure out how to pickle or can or preserve as to not let the bounty go to waste. Other times you'll get kohlrabi or celeriac or scapes and need to research what they even ARE. As a person who loves food, it's been a really fun experience to expand my horizons and get me to try new things in the kitchen (you can see some of my
past CSA meals here; I need to get back in the habit of taking photos of what I cook so I can share more here!).
All-in-all, I'm a huge CSA fan. Every year I question whether I want to spend the money (since it is a big chunk up-front) but every year I remember how much fun we have with it and how healthy and good we feel eating all those veggies.
If you have any CSA-specific questions, please let me know!
