CSA Update

So back when we began our crazy CSA endeavor this year, I had these visions of my family spending the summer eating wonderful healthy meals made out of our fresh organic produce.  These would be the kind of amazing meals that you see featured by those bloggers who photograph every step of the cooking process in lovely, mouth-watering, high-resolution detail.

I don't know what I was smoking.

If this particular endeavor had occurred before kids, I would've labeled it a failure.  A complete and total disaster.  However, kids have taught me not to be so hard on myself since I'm pretty sure I haven't accomplished a single thing I set out to do in the last four years.  So instead of this being a failure, we will call it a learning experience.  Here are some of the things I learned.

I hate greens.  Really, I do.  Collards taste all right cooked up in bacon grease with little chunks of bacon mixed in, but I really don't want to mess with them every day.  Or even every year.  We got a ton of them at the beginning of the season, and they were a big ol' pain in the heiny.  The preparation process would start with me hosing the mud off them outside, then I would have to rinse them inside.  And dry them in towels.  And repeat about 18 times because I could never get all the sand out of the greens.  (Our soil is sand and not dirt.)  Then I would have to cut each stupid leaf to remove the stem.  Finally, about five hours later after all of the interruptions from the kids, dogs, and life in general, I would be ready to cook them.  The cooking part wasn't so bad, and the smell of bacon is always heavenly.  But they just didn't seem worth the effort.

There is such a thing as too much zucchini and watermelon.  Seriously.

The problem with organic produce is the bugs get it.  And it needs water.  There were a lot of weeks with a lot of bugs and no water that resulted in us getting really small boxes of produce.  Given the amount of work associated with greens (and with salad mix, which wasn't a whole lot better) I wasn't all that sad.  I hate to throw food away, and it happened a couple of weeks when I just couldn't make time to use it all (and one week when I started turning green myself just looking at the turnip greens).  But it did give me a much better appreciation of the challenges of being a family farmer and how difficult it must be to stake so much of your livelihood on the forces of nature.

We also learned that Leon likes turnips.  A lot.  He will eat them raw or cooked, alone or combined with other foods, solid or mashed.  And without this experience we never would've tried turnips.  If we just came out a little braver, it was worth it.  Maybe.