CSA Week #1

We have hit that magical time of year when we start taking weekly deliveries of our farm share from Windflower Farm. This is our second year as CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) members and it was a highlight of the summer last year. The opportunity to actually engage in all the local/seasonal eating hooha is incredibly satisfying, tasty, and a bit of an adventure. Windflower Farm (that's where the veggies come from--fruits and eggs from neighboring farms) is located between Saratoga Springs and the Vermont border. Each Thursday, we venture to the M'Finda Kalunga Community Garden on the Lower East Side and pick up our loot which is delivered by truck from upstate to the Stanton Street CSA as well as a large group of other CSAs all over the city. I then go into a minor tailspin to figure out how to best use our haul while things are at their best. The occasional curve ball (like this week's kohlrabi) is part of the challenge of this local/seasonal business and, for me, a great deal of the fun.

It is clear that shooting pics of all this green indoors is not ideal as I now realize this photo gives you little sense of the individual items--I'll explore how to best capture the diversity and beauty of the food we're getting for some other entries this summer.

This week's share included: romaine, bokchoy (which I'll pair with Asian inspired meatballs), white chard (threw in a lentil soup), snow peas (which lasted about 5 more minutes after this photo), scallions, potted thyme and oregano (which I've not yet killed), Russian kale (steamed for lunch), amazing strawberries (breakfast for 3 days) and this week's stars: kohlrabi (a purple one and a green one) and GARLIC SCAPES!!!

Kohlrabi is a radish-like vegetable that looks like it may have been cultivated on another planet. I peeled and sliced ours for salads but it can also be steamed. Scapes were a mystery me until last year. They are the flowering part of garlic which is often cut and discarded (though they've come into vogue in recent years and you can often find them at the Farmer's Market at the end of the spring). I likely use ours in a white bean dip to schmear on toasted baguette over the weekend.

CSA life is a great inspiration to mix up summer menus and helps us city folk remember that food does, in fact, come out of the ground. We have 21 more weeks of this abundance to come and I look forward to every bite!

Purple kohlrabi and garlic scapes