After reading Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally and especially Animal Vegetable Miracle, Kim, Chris, Laura and I decided to join up and chose Harmony Valley Farm’s CSA for 17 weeks of fresh, regionally grown, organic produce this year.

There are plenty of regional CSAs available and, if you’re interested, you can check out a list here. Basically, you pay money to a “local” farm in advance (we do it monthly via ACH which was one of the reason we went with Harmony Valley Farm — they do prefer that you pay more money up front as it gets the money into the hands of the farm to ensure that they can grow their crops for the year) and in return you get a share of the crops that they grow that year. In our case we chose the “flex plan” which allowed us to pick 17 weeks of vegetables (they also have coffee, fruit and cheese as well) that best fit our schedule. The CSA delivers to a local drop off point and the members go and pickup the vegetables in their box and may end up with some bonuses like newsletters (includes some recipes for some of the different vegetables offered) and this time, in our case, a package of herbs to grow in your own garden.

The first few boxes are generally small as the harvest season just started. We ended up with turnips, ramps, nettles (I used to curse this plant as it burns like a motherfucker when you walk through a field of it in shorts), sunchokes, sorrel, asparagus, etc. Even though I was expecting the box to be a bit on the smallish side knowing that it was early in the season and Harmony Valley Farm suffered damage due to last summer’s flooding, I did expect to see just a few more veggies than we pulled down this time.

In celebration of our harvest I invited Laura over to pick up her half of the box and I made a nice spread of marinated chicken; fried potatoes ramps, sunchokes and chives; and some sauteed asparagus that had been marinated in grape seed oil, salt and pepper. Laura brought over some organic bananas and I ate one with just peanut butter and another later with some peanut butter and Natures Nectar Honey. After all of that, I just had to try some of the sorrel (which I had picked off some pieces of leaves to try) and threw it in with the overwintered spinach, spices, bleu cheese, oil and red wine vinegar.

I had never cooked with ramps or sunchokes and I have never eaten much of what we were presented with today. I’m looking forward to coming up with some really interesting recipes and thankfully Laura has been clipping newspaper articles about odd ingredients and I have been scouring the web for the best way to use some of the great organic ingredients we will be seeing all through the summer, fall and early winter.

I know that MSPD belongs to Harmony Valley Farm as a CSA member, there has been some discussion over at MNSpeak at least twice before, and my previous-coworker Andy belonged to a CSA when he lived in Indiana. Has anyone else utilized a CSA or have any recipes for some of the stranger vegetables we’re likely to see?

Check out the pictures from the CSA pickup today on Flickr here.

From the Pioneer Press’ Police Calls:

So? He was obviously just sweet on her…

Possible theft: A woman reported May 3 that she believed the maintenance man for her apartment in the 1900 block of Silver Bell Road might be stealing things. She said she’s missing two shirts, a necklace, a purse, some half and half, honey and about 2 cups of sugar.”

Explosive device: A man reported May 1 that he found a pipe bomb while cleaning a portable toilet at McMorrow Field, 200 South St. E. The St. Paul Bomb Squad responded and referred to the device as a “sparkler bomb,” a tube packed with gunpowder that explodes when lit. A bomb squad officer said the device would have blown off the door of the portable toilet had it detonated. It appeared the device had been lit and thrown into the portable toilet but got wet when it went into the holding tank.