CSA Week #16

CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture.  Essentially, one purchases a ‘share’ in a local farm – much like the stock market, one then has a vested interest in seeing the farm succeed.  Dividends/pay outs come in the form of produce – vegetables and sometimes fruit.  Different farms do things differently; my farm happens to be also organic, and I pick up my box each week – Tuesdays for me – from a local location.  Join me on this journey – my inaugural season with a CSA – as I explore the various vegetables I receive and what I can do with them to turn them into delicious happiness…
For more information on CSAs, click here.  To find a CSA local to you, you can click here or for one in NYC, visit JustFood.org.  I found mine by typing “Forest Hills CSA” into Google – my neighborhood name + the word CSA, and I’m sure that would work for you as well.  Good luck and enjoy the fruits of your labors… har, har. 

If you take a look over here… you’ll see week #16 brought some fun things.  I was very excited…

A mini-watermelon that was juicy and sweet beyond belief.  I mean, just look at that gorgeous yellow watermelon.  I’d never eaten yellow watermelon before this, but wow… it was just amazing.  About the size of a shotput (I don’t know why that’s the image in my mind!), heavy, sweet… delicious.  Obviously I ate it plainly; I’ve never been one to eat fresh fruit anything but plain (it has to do with the way I grew up eating fruit – fresh & plain).  One day, when I have a ton of the same fruit, I’ll experiment with it after I get tired of eating it plain, but I don’t know that’ll ever happen… I love fruit!  (Next year, I’m definitely getting a fruit share!) 

Another bowl of magic soup was made (with the kale, zucchini, garlic), but this one with a new addition – well, it’s never the same twice, to be honest, but this time, I added something even more different.  (And yes, eventually, I will write an entire post dedicated to this soup, but for now, I’m still compiling recipes and tweaking, and taking lots of pictures of each different rendition.) 

Here’s a closer up photo.  Can you tell what I added?  A cup of quinoa.  Which absorbed all of the liquid such that I had to add more stock (because I thought it would just, y’know, stop cooking when it was done, but apparently it doesn’t!).  But then, it broke down and added this lovely thickness to the soup, giving it another character… which I really liked.  So, I will be doing this again and more often with my magic soup, and yes, again, it helped stave off sneezing fits and chills, because the weather, my non-NY-area readers, has been up and down and up and down and up and down and down.  It’s driving my immune system absolutely bonkers, so I predict more and more soup in the weeks to come! 

Next up is some lovely wonderful delicious items, BUT THE PICTURES ARE A LITTLE GRAPHIC FOR THOSE FAINT OF STOMACH WHO MAY NOT EAT SUCH THINGS… so please be warned and avert your eyes if you’re not into, ummm… rare meat and stuff like that. 

Seriously, this isn’t one of the graphic photos.  Yet.  I’d recently purchased a bunch of beef marrow bones, giant ones, and finally managed to do what I wanted: roast them so I could

(look at all that roasted bone goodness) buy some crusty baguette and

scoop out the beef marrow, spread it on those crusty baguettes and

sprinkle with sea salt (actually I used kosher) and then

eat it.  Thanks to Scott, the Shameless Carnivore, for the cooking & serving suggestion! 

Deliciously beefy fatness against crusty, crunchy bread… Ok, a few admissions.  I’ve never eaten marrow like this before; after I had eaten a decent amount of it (what you see above), I realized that I might have just eaten undercooked beef marrow.  HOWEVER, I didn’t get sick, so I am OK with this admission.  I wound up putting the bone back in the oven to finish off the cooking process, and it turned entirely brown, so, okay, I think I did eat “rare” beef marrow, but it still tasted really amazingly good, so I don’t regret it at all.  Although next time, I will surely cook it a bit more. 

Last but not least, I again braised cucumbers with a bit of sliced up Vidalia onion.  And it was delicious, refreshingly crisp and “clean” tasting (ie, not oily, even though I made them with butter, of course) against the beefy fatty goodness of the marrow. 

Oh, my deliciousness. 

Happy eating indeed!