Foxtail Farm

I deliberately didn't write "the last CSA of 2011" (CSA stands for community supported agriculture, where individuals can subscribe to a farm and in return receive shares of produce). Many farms offer winter shares of root vegetables, storage crops, meat, or prepared foods.

I had a potato convergence last week. There were potatoes in my community-supported agriculture (CSA) box; we have a share at Foxtail Farm. A friend gave me some potatoes from her grandmother's farm. We visited our CSA farm and got to dig potatoes. All of a sudden, I had a LOT of potatoes. Fortunately, I also had a potluck to attend, and a potato salad would be perfect to bring.

My last CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) box of the year from Foxtail Farm was both a festival of fall and a chock full of vitamins: garlic, bok choi, broccoli, turnips, potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, winter squash, peppers, Brussels sprouts, and onions.

I was talking with someone at a party last week about how to manage the weekly load of vegetables from the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) box. His approach is to identify the vegetables he likes the least, and eat them first.

"Otherwise," he intoned, “there's no hope for them."

On Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution, a common complaint about eating healthfully was that people didn't want to eat “rabbit food” all the time. But, as Oliver demonstrated on the series, there's more to eating well than munching on lettuce and carrots. So with the ingredients from this week's CSA (community supported agriculture) box, I will showcase salads made without lettuce.

Two summers ago, my good friend Becky made me a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) alternate — when families who picked up CSA shares at her house were out of town, I was the beneficiary. Several weeks that summer, I had a bin full of fresh, local veggies, and the pleasant challenge of figuring out what to do with them. It was a gateway experience.

So last summer I bought my own half share in a CSA for Foxtail Farm. The downsides soon became apparent. Interestingly, they weren't ones I could have predicted, like, I never had a zillion zucchini to use up in a hurry.

For years, I would see a vegetable like okra or mustard greens in a grocery store and imagine what it would be like to make a delicious meal with such exotic ingredients. I was constantly promising myself that next week I would find recipes to fulfill my culinary fantasies. But as the weeks passed, it became obvious that I needed something else to get my creativity going. Fortunately, my fiancé knows me incredibly well, and he gave me a CSA subscription as a gift.