CSA Week 2

How did it get to be Sunday (and hell, by the time this publishes, it may well be Monday) already? Sometimes I think I've got a pretty good schedule and then once again it's my weekend to work and three days disappear in a blink. 

Anyhow, we picked up our veggies as schedule on Thursday, then promptly drove to my sister's house to watch the cutest little niece for the night. Julia is a nurse who works the night shift, and my brother in law had a very early come to it, or don't bother coming in Monday type meeting in North Jersey on Friday, so we took on the arduous task of snuggling Miss Molly. Makes me want another little one (hmm, we can see if Peter is really reading this thing)

Lucky for us, Nick loves to cook and had dinner waiting for us when we got to their house, so we just smooshed our veggies into their refrigerator for the night. 

Here's our haul from week #2

This week's pick up was a prime example of the differences between Peter and myself. The oddball table (things that they don't have enough to give everyone some, so you get to choose which you want) had the choice of cucumbers, beets, and garlic scapes. We each thought the choice was obvious, but had differing thoughts as to which was that obvious choice. As you can see from the picture above, I won. 

Seriously, I love beets, but garlic scapes are available for one week out of the CSA season. We'll be getting plenty of beets, even if the ones in our garden never take off.  

A scape

So what are these rare things? The scape is the flower head that the garlic bulb send up. However, if you let garlic go to flower, the bulb concentrates on becoming a flower instead of becoming a bulb. Maybe that's a good thing for the garlic, but not so much for the farmer hoping to harvest some garlic this summer. To get that bulb back to work making us garlic, the farmer cuts the scape just when it starts to curl and then the lucky CSA members get to eat them. They have a mild garlic flavor, and I'm planning on making pesto out of them this year.

Moving on, we also got:

Shelling peas

 

Carrots

Bok choy

plus some repeats of last week - broccoli, butter crunch lettuce, swiss chard and scallions.

I do actually have two more meals worth of posts to write, but it's almost tomorrow and I'm sleepy. Big food post coming.

We'd probably eat better if we spent more time at home

Yeah, so this week was not so great for the home cooked meal thing, although the only stuff I still have from last week's CSA is some arugula (we used some on our sandwiches) and the bunch of scallions, which haven't gone bad, so no guilt that they haven't been eaten yet.
Tuesday I worked the early shift, which means I get home by 4 and have time to create a delicious meal like this one

Greek salad, chicken with white wine & lemon thyme sauce, roasted kohlrabi and braised kale in rice

 I seared boneless skinless chicken breasts in olive oil and butter, then removed the chicken and deglazed the pan with white wine, added a few sprigs of lemon thyme (probably my favorite herb) and some milk and put the chicken back in to simmer until it was cooked through.
For the rice, I sauted a couple of cloves of garlic in olive oil, then added chicken broth and the kale covered, and let it cook for ~10 minutes then added a cup of basmati rice and simmered until the rice was done. This was my favorite dish of the night, so much better than plain rice and a more exciting way of cooking greens than my usual saute with garlic until wilted. Plus, I think the longer cooking time helped the flavor because kale can be really bitter.
I love roasting vegetables, but HATE turning on the oven when it's a million and a half degrees (spring? what spring?). Enter the love of my life, if I had a thing for kitchen appliances - the toaster oven. Seriously, I got it for Peter for Christmas and I think we've used it every single day since then. It's big enough for my 11 cup Pyrex baking dish and I used that to roast both of the kohlrabi from last week. I use the same basic method for roasting almost any vegetable. Cut, toss with olive oil, salt and pepper and into the oven @ 400 until done, stirring half way through. Simple and absolutely delicious.
Speaking of my 11 cup Pyrex baking dish - if I had a thing for baking dishes this would be the love of my life. I have 3 or 4 of them, and they are seriously the greatest thing ever. It won't last much longer, because the baby's portion is quickly approaching real person size, but for right now it is the perfect size to make a dinner in for the three of us. I can split a regular recipe, like for lasagna, into two of these babies, pop the lid on one and throw it in the freezer, and bam! Two dinners for the amount of work of one. Love it, and the fact that they fit perfectly into the toaster oven.


CSA pickup is again today. This is a no cheese week, but we're expecting garlic scapes, broccoli, lettuce, bok choy, scallions, kohlrabi, and hopefully carrots and peas.

If it's Tuesday before I can recap, there's a good chance I need a weekend to recover from my weekend

Not a great weekend for the blog, but man did we have a great time!

Friday night, we went to the Brandywine Strawberry Festival, which has little to do with strawberries, other than it takes place during strawberry season and they sell strawberry shortcake. Really, it's just a carnival, but a certain little girl got to meet and hug Elmo, so we can count it as a success.

Saturday, we had the first pizza night of the season with my parents, sister, brother in law and niece. It was a great (and yummy) night, but since I'm a lazy ass, I forgot to take pictures of our masterpieces. Usually when we make pizza in groups, we each design a pie and then share slices. I know we had a red pie with sausage, peppers and onions, another with CSA broccoli, spinach and black olives,  a basil pesto with spinach and black olives, and a pesto with sausage, broccoli and spinach. It's taken a couple of years, but Peter has become a pizza making pro out there. Plus he's pretty cute while doing it.

Sunday was a super long day. We started out heading to my aunt and uncle's house in Baltimore. My cousin Adam recently finished Army training and this was a chance for everyone to see him before he has to report to his new base in Colorado. It was a gorgeous day, and really great to see our family that we do not get to see often enough. From there we drove up to Collingswood to spend the night with Peter's parents in anticipation of him helping his parents get some work done around their house on Monday. Of course Little Miss fell asleep in the car on the ride up from Baltimore and then had no interest in going to sleep at her normal time.  It wouldn't have been a big deal, except she and I had big plans to avoid having to do manual labor on Monday.

Our Arizona cousins were in town and we got to meet up to go to the aquarium! We had such a good time, and with practically no indication that Lil G got quite a bit less sleep than normal. It was wonderful to see Michaela and Zach too, although kids sure do grow a lot when you only see them every year or so.

Unfortunately, it was back to the grind today, although I did make a rather nice meal to use up almost everything left over from last week's CSA share. The only thing we have left in the crisper is a bag of arugula, and it still looks great, so it will not be going to waste. A full recap will have to wait, 14 hour shifts are not fun on a full night's rest, they're really not fun when you start out tired.

CSA Week 1

CSA season is here!  I'm a little surprised just how much I've been looking forward to this day. It's a little hard to explain why it's so enjoyable, but it is. I love that we have only a vague idea of what we're going to be getting. I love that both the owners and their son are at every pick-up and are not only willing, but eager to talk to everyone about what's happening on the farm. I love that they took anyone who wanted one on a half hour long tour of the farm, and explained how Farmer Ike is working to preserve heirloom varieties. I absolutely love that everyone who works on the farm clearly has a passion and love for their job.

On to the pick-up

  

 We get an email a couple of days before the pickup telling us what the farmers expect to have ready for pickup day, but as it's up to Mother Nature, there are always some surprises. Today we came home with -

Purple Peacock Kale

Kohlrabi

Broccoli

We already had the cutie patootie, but I added her for scale

Arugula

Swiss Chard

Buttercruch lettuce

Scallions

In addition to running their fruit and veggie CSA, North Star also sponsers a couple of other local companies for CSA pickup at the farm. Since today was the first day, they were all there to talk about what they offer. I'm a sucker for free samples (I have an unhealthy guilty conscience) and a daughter who loves cheese, so we left as new members of the Hillacres Pride Cheese CSA.
The cheese CSA is a pick up every 2 weeks, instead of every week, but they had this week's share available, even if you hadn't signed up ahead of time, so we got to bring home these yummies

Savory Herb chedder and fresh Feta.

One of the most fun things about the CSA is that for the most part, we don't get a say in what veggies we bring home. They do have a swap box, so if there's something you really don't want, you can exchange it for something else, but we have enjoyed trying new things.
Our dinner tonight consisted of Adorned Marlboro Man sandwiches, courtesy of The Pioneer Woman, (minus half of the butter she calls for) with CSA arugula, potato salad that my mom brought by, and baked swiss chard, loosely based on this recipe, although I added garlic when roasting the stems, used only a sprinkle of Parmesan and used ricotta cheese (whatever was leftover in the fridge, probably around 1/2 cup) instead of the cream. Truth be told, I think it had too much cheese, but I can pretty much guarantee that I was the ONLY person in this household that thought that.

Yum

And finally, just because she's too stinkin cute for words

CSA

What is a CSA, and why did we join up?

CSA stand for community supported agriculture, and the basic idea is that people buy shares in a farm's proceeds before they're actually available. It works for the farmer because they get an influx of cash in the dead of winter when the farm is producing nothing, conveniently just in time for them to buy the seeds and supplies they need for the upcoming harvest, and it works for the consumer because by the time you're picking up your weekly share, you've forgotten about the check you wrote in February, and it feels like you're getting veggies for free. Although, that may just be me.
 Anyhow, there are quite a few options in our area, but we decided on North Star Orchard. One of their farms is less than 15 minutes from our house, they grow using organic methods, and they're devoted to more unusual varieties.
The veggie CSA runs for 22 weeks, which means we're very nearly covered for vegetables until October (they don't grow corn, and we're from Jersey, we can't go the entire summer without corn!) The first few weeks tend to be a little lighter than once we really get into summer, but we've been told that we should be getting arugula, spinach, broccoli, Tatsoi, lettuce, scallions, and a broccoli/kale cross breed called purple peacock.

Asparagus & squash - or proof that Peter really meant his wedding vows

So we've grown zucchini and yellow squash every year that we've had a garden. It's kind of the hobby farmer's bread and butter you know? Practically a weed, you're almost guaranteed to get some food out of your plants. And did we ever. Unfortunately, we also got really honking big plants that overtook our beds and crowded out other veggies. So I got the idea in my head that we should clear out the massive brush pile that we inherited with the house, and create a bed where we could let the crazy plants go crazy and grow as big as they want.

Upon further reflection, the pile was not massive when we bought the house. But we've lived here 4 years, and there are a lot of trees that like to drop sticks during rain storms. It was massive by the time we decided to clear it.

Since we're talking about a rather large area, I also decided that we should bite the bullet and put in the asparagus patch that I've wanted for a couple of years.


Now, there's no better kick in the pants to perform physical labor that to have no choice, so back in February, we pre-ordered 25 one year old purple passion crowns from Johnny's seeds. They were scheduled to start shipping to our area in the middle of April, so that gave us almost two months to discuss how we were going to prepare the plot and get rid of the sticks. We discussed buying and/or renting a wood chipper, burning, moving, but suddenly I noticed a box on the porch when I left for work and we still had a big ol' pile of sticks. So we improvised and marked out the asparagus patch the next day, leaving the rest to be dealt with later. Then we started digging. And digging. And digging. By hand.

See, asparagus is planted in nice deep trenches. And the nice long one year old roots need plenty of space to spread out. And I like to complain about my back. Anyhow, my sister came down to visit, and thankfully took Gabriella to visit at our parent's house, so the planting process, went much faster than it would have if she had been here to "help".

See the pile of removed dirt is bigger than me! Ok, maybe I was in the trench but still - this is why Aleve was invented

And I told you it was a massive pile of sticks

Crowns

After the crowns are spread out over their little hills, you cover the roots with a couple of inches of soil, then gradually fill in the trenches when you start to see growth. Technically, a few places say the gradual fill method is unnecessary, but I found more websites saying to do it than not, so that was the approach we took.

 Also, while I fully intend to let the squash grow as wild as it wants, I did not want to risk it hurting my beautiful little asparagus, so I used some of those handy stick to build a primitive little fence to separate the two areas.

 

Anyhow, we must have done something right because exactly one week later, we had ...

 

The same pile of dirt?

No! Look closer ...

Asparagus!

And, as you can see in the first picture, an untouched pile of sticks. However, I am lucky to have incredible inlaws who apparently love physical labor with no reward but sincere thanks, and a job that requires me to work every other weekend. Now, I never thought of my work schedule as a plus, but while I was counting by fives, Peter and his parents moved that pile of crap (literally, it seems the previous homeowners preferred to bury construction debris, rather than put it out on the curb for the garbage men), and we went from

This

to

This

How did we get here

By way of introduction, let's flashback a few years to May 2007. Peter and I had spent the last four years living in a funky little house (technically two very little houses connected by a door on each floor) in downtown Baltimore city while I attended pharmacy school at the University of Maryland.
According to my mother (and one should always follow their mother's advice, right?) I simply had to live in a city at least once in my life. Well we did it, hookers on the corner, friends getting mugged, and a corpse discovered around the block and all.
Finally, graduation had come and gone, the house was sold, our stuff was packed and we (and by we, I mean I - Peter would happily live in the concrete jungle until the end of time) escaped to West Chester, Pennsylvania to search for our next home.
I knew I wanted an older home and space for a garden. Plenty of hours spent searching online later and I had found my house.

 
It would have been the only house we looked at, but we had another showing already scheduled, so we kept the appointment. But, honestly, my mind was made up the minute we pulled up the driveway. Why?

Wood-burning pizza oven, that's why!

So we got my dream house, and it has been a work in progress ever since. We've painted, and fixed, and have only scratched the surface of things we want to do here.
Our second summer, we built two raised beds, added another in the third year, and this year we put in an asparagus patch and cleared a tremendously huge pile of crap to have an area to let squash go crazy.  Thankfully, Peter has gotten bitten by the gardening bug (let's be honest, the more veggie patches we have, the less lawn he has to mow), and Gabriella loves to get her hands dirty, so the edible garden is a family affair.