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CSA share blogging #1
25 June 2020 09:45 amIn an effort to post something that isn't Chinese translations, I'm thinking of starting that blogging-your-CSA-share thing that's going around. Which makes it a meme, but at least it's different.
We used to belong to this CSA, but went on hiatus before becoming parents because we were already having trouble keeping up. It's only now with lockdown/quarantine keeping all of us eating and cooking at home more, that we finally felt up for resuming.
The schedule for this CSA is different from most of the country: the main farm (there are two involved) has three plots at different altitudes -- the one outside Phoenix produces in the winter and the one halfway up the mountains produces in the summer, which means it runs year-round. That said, we're in the stretch that's the hardest for them to fill out a full share, in the hottest part of summer before monsoonal thunderstorms have gotten the better summer crops producing. So it was a small but interesting bag that I picked up yesterday:
half-dozen small gold onions
two cucumbers of indeterminate type (one may be pickling?)
one medium zucchini
basket of tomatillos
bundle of rosemary sprigs
three oranges
jar of mesquite honey
For the record, mesquite is my favorite flavor of honey -- it's not as full-on sweet as clover, with a dusky edge -- and I'm really glad that it's available at our local Trader Joe's as their standard variety. But this, creamy and straight from the farm, should be yummy. The oranges went into Eaglet's stash -- they were down to only three, including no mandarins, and we're not due to go shopping till probably Monday. The tomatillos are going to our neighbor, who actually likes them. (Are they good for anything but salsa?) The onions are going into the stockpile, and I'll probably use one as the aromatic in whatever I stir-fry tonight, along with some green onions left over from last week. (A few more things are left over, including a pattypan squash I don't know what to do with, and two small round yellow squashes had gone bad oops.)
Not sure yet what to do with the zuke, which is a good 10in/25cm long, and Eaglet's eyes went wide when I told them it's only medium. I have been entertaining them with stories of the time my father first planted zucchini and thought he was playing it safe by planting "only" four hills, and how he ended up forcing his grad students to take some. If we had ground meat in the house, I'd halve-and-hollow it and bake 'em with a meat-and-marinara filling, but I used that up in a pot of chili this weekend. It's too thick to fry until golden -- wedges don't work well for that. *shrug* Will think on't.
Who else is doing a farm share?
---L.
We used to belong to this CSA, but went on hiatus before becoming parents because we were already having trouble keeping up. It's only now with lockdown/quarantine keeping all of us eating and cooking at home more, that we finally felt up for resuming.
The schedule for this CSA is different from most of the country: the main farm (there are two involved) has three plots at different altitudes -- the one outside Phoenix produces in the winter and the one halfway up the mountains produces in the summer, which means it runs year-round. That said, we're in the stretch that's the hardest for them to fill out a full share, in the hottest part of summer before monsoonal thunderstorms have gotten the better summer crops producing. So it was a small but interesting bag that I picked up yesterday:
half-dozen small gold onions
two cucumbers of indeterminate type (one may be pickling?)
one medium zucchini
basket of tomatillos
bundle of rosemary sprigs
three oranges
jar of mesquite honey
For the record, mesquite is my favorite flavor of honey -- it's not as full-on sweet as clover, with a dusky edge -- and I'm really glad that it's available at our local Trader Joe's as their standard variety. But this, creamy and straight from the farm, should be yummy. The oranges went into Eaglet's stash -- they were down to only three, including no mandarins, and we're not due to go shopping till probably Monday. The tomatillos are going to our neighbor, who actually likes them. (Are they good for anything but salsa?) The onions are going into the stockpile, and I'll probably use one as the aromatic in whatever I stir-fry tonight, along with some green onions left over from last week. (A few more things are left over, including a pattypan squash I don't know what to do with, and two small round yellow squashes had gone bad oops.)
Not sure yet what to do with the zuke, which is a good 10in/25cm long, and Eaglet's eyes went wide when I told them it's only medium. I have been entertaining them with stories of the time my father first planted zucchini and thought he was playing it safe by planting "only" four hills, and how he ended up forcing his grad students to take some. If we had ground meat in the house, I'd halve-and-hollow it and bake 'em with a meat-and-marinara filling, but I used that up in a pot of chili this weekend. It's too thick to fry until golden -- wedges don't work well for that. *shrug* Will think on't.
Who else is doing a farm share?
---L.