Tales from the CSA: Week 1

I've been working at my current job for about a year at this point.  It's an awesome place to work, not least of which because it's the most staff-friendly place I've ever been.  Case in point:  we have a wellness initiative, through which you can earn extra days off.  As a result, the senior leadership supported me coordinating a group (20+ people) to participate in a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) on work time.  And the CSA we chose, Shallowbrook Farm, delivers to our office.  Which they also support.  It's great.

Anyway, this all helped me finally convince Chef Spouse to try a CSA.  He was worried about getting food he didn't choose and might not know what to do with.  But I bribed him with a copy of Alice Waters's Vegetables cookbook, and I figured out how to start an urban compost pile as insurance.

So I thought I might document what we get each week, and what we end up doing with it.

Week 1 box:

1 head Boston Bibb Lettuce
1 sm bunch scallions
1 qt. strawberries
1 lg head broccoli
1 yellow squash
5 med potatoes

Chef Spouse was disappointed - he knew what everything was on sight and knew exactly what to do with it.

The first thing we did was run a taste test.  There was not as much difference between the farm strawberries and the store strawberries as I would've thought. The difference was more in texture - the farm strawberries were much softer and juicier. There was a HUGE difference in taste between farm yellow squash and store yellow squash.  We didn't have anything else on hand to do a one-to-one test, but the broccoli was extra yummy, too.

We were out of town Memorial Day weekend, and we still managed to use everything - potatoes, broccoli, squash, lettuce and scallions were used in the course of normal cooking.  And we turned the berries into sorbet (recipe forthcoming).