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.
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May 15th, 2008 at 10:09 pm
I love the idea of this…but I would have looked in that box and literally not known what to do with any of it. “Should I plant this? Is this a weed?”
May 15th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
Nettles are not only a weed but a nuisance plant that hurts. Think temporary poison ivy. I guess it’s the same as eating a dandelion?
Other than the package of herbs, you just eat the rest — even the stuff that looks like sticks ;)
May 16th, 2008 at 8:52 am
Mrs Marcos,
Harmony Valley has a chef and with each week’s shipment they have information and recipes featuring the items in the box. Their web site also has an archive of recipes dating back a few years.
Also, http://www.epicurious.com is an excellent source of recipes. You simply type in an ingredient and you get hundreds of recipes.
In the past couple of years, the only thing from our CSA we’ve never even tried to use has been the burdock root. Apparently it’s used primarily in Asian dishes and we don’t cook as much Asian food.
May 16th, 2008 at 8:58 am
MSPD,
I’m pretty excited for the burdock root. It looks fairly versatile and from the few recipes I’ve read cooking something up stir-fry style is easy enough. While we don’t typically do “Asian cooking” at home, I am quite capable of frying some veggies and meat up in a frying pan or wok.
There’s a great recipe that doesn’t seem too “Asian” here:
May 16th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
Good to know.
May 16th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
We bought “Perfect Vegetables” by Cooks Illustrated when we joined our CSA. Doesn’t have some of the more exotic stuff in it, but it’ll give you fourteen good things to do with green beans when they start arriving.