Veggies are Here!

The CSA season is for me like a 26 week long culinary Christmas. Each week, I peek inside the CSA box to find out what wonderful produce awaits, my mind immediately scheming ways to chop, steam, grill, and otherwise combine them into deliciousness. I've been known to wake up in the middle of the night with a new recipe in mind, which is, admittedly, a little more neurotic than I'd like to acknowledge. Anyway, this is our second year with Grant Family Farms and promises to be an exciting one. Here is the loot from week one:


lettuce, spinach, kale, baby beets, cilantro, dill, and eggs


washing leafy greens - Doug's most dreaded chore


veggies ready for the fridge (will often last well over a week this way)

With a CSA we trade in some time (washing everything seems to take forever) and some predictability (really, would I be buying several bunches of kale every week from a conventional grocery store?), but in return we get incredibly fresh vegetables that have traveled less than 25 miles from the field to our tummies.

Here is my other culinary hobby for the summer - another year of container gardening, hopefully this year more successful than the last. I caved in and bought one beautiful, already flowering tomato plant from the greenhouse but pretty much everything else has been nurtured from seeds on our window sill over the last few months. After last year's efforts were wiped out in one major hail storm, I anxiously waited and waited to put these guys outside. I don't fancy myself a real gardener by any stretch of the imagination, but keep trying in hopes that each year I learn a little more about successfully growing food in preparation for a day when we might actually have a yard and a real garden.


lemon cucumbers, thai peppers, basil, rosemary, parsley, two heirloom tomato varietals, and one hybrid tomato insurance plant:)