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.

The Beet Goes On

This is surreal.  It is noon, and I am sitting down, in my house, at my computer, eating lunch.  And I am all alone.

Jeff and Ree are out running errands to get ready for the soccer tournament Jeff's team is playing in this weekend.  The boys are napping.  And having already put in my 40 hours for the week, I am home from work.  This is nice.

While things are quiet, I have two goals (well, four if you also count eating and typing).  To finally put pictures in the collage frames we got for Christmas (We have the pictures and the frames, and they are in a bag together.  Yet somehow the pictures have refused to jump in the frames.  This is annoying.  I expect more out of my prints.) and to cook.  Actually, to cook a lot.

Back in March, I had a realization.  We go through a ton of food.  In the era before children, and even when Ree was little, I would cook big, healthy meals on the weekends, and we would eat the leftovers during the week.  So one weekend in March I cooked three big meals a day, from Friday - Sunday.  By Monday night, all that was left were the dirty dishes in the sink.  The food was all gone.  So in order to avoid another trip to the grocery store, we got creative.  One day that week, the kids ate a loaf of bread.  Yes, the entire loaf.  Of big, fat multi-grain slices.  They had toast and grilled cheese sandwiches and French toast for dinner.  The next day they ate a box of cereal; a can of refried beans; and all the lunch meat, cheese, fruit in the house.  We regularly go through close to 3 gallons of milk a week.  The kids each think a cantaloupe is an individual-sized fruit.  Some people worry about college costs.  We don't.  There are so many options, that if our kids are even college bound (and let's face it, right now the boys really like eating boogers and rocks.  They aren't exactly screaming Harvard Class of 2030.) they will find a way to go.  Scholarships, loans, GI Bill, free tuition depending on where I'm working.  It'll be fine.  What we worry about is feeding them as teenagers.  Holy cow!

So I decided to act.  Some people have personal trainers.  Others have personal chefs.  To deal with our insane need for food, I decided to enlist a personal farmer.  Seriously.  Well, sorta.  We've joined a CSA for this summer.  For the uninitiated, which would be us right up until this year, "CSA" stands for Community Supported Agriculture.  When you join a CSA, you pay farmers up front for a share of their crops for the year.  In return, you get boxes of food throughout the summer.  It's nice for farmers because they can focus their efforts on farming rather than on marketing and trying to sell their food throughout the season, and it's nice for consumers because we get (depending on the CSA) chemical-free, locally grown produce at a great price.

Yesterday we got our first of 10 boxes of produce from Jones Family Farm.  I had looked at the pictures of all the yummy boxes from last season, but I hadn't really thought it through.  We live in North Carolina, and we had a cold winter, and it's only May.  Yesterday we got winter veggies.  Lots of winter veggies.  I have two huge bags of salad mix, some greens (I think they're turnip greens), beets, and A LOT of turnips.  Like a few pounds of them.  I have no idea what you do with a turnip.  Add them to stews, I think.  So I will be learning.  Quickly.  This is kinda exciting.  I'll keep everyone posted on the results. (Because I know you are fascinated!  This is a train wreck just waiting to happen!)  I get to be my own little Iron Chef.  If the boys don't wake up first.