Friday, September 6, 2013

Real Life CSA: week 14, produce

Classic end of summer CSA share this week. Primarily a tomato explosion!


We're starting to build another stockpile of veggies in the fridge, so we're going to be eating a lot of salad, carrots, beans and dishes with eggplant this week. 


Red cabbage will definitely end up as sweet and sour red cabbage, easily our favorite preparation of this veggie. Goes great with pork chops. If you need a good recipe, I have one!

We got two kinds of parsley this week. The kind on the top in the photo is curly - the kind towards the bottom is flat. 


I LOVE this variety of green tomato. We'll definitely be eating these fresh. 


One of the pieces of our share this week illustrates a good point about CSAs in general. I reached into the bag and actually almost put my finger through this pepper.


Yeah, it is gross. We have enough green peppers from our own garden that we decided to just straight compost this pepper instead of cutting off the bad side and eating the other. It's a great reminder that the food you get in a CSA share is real food. It will rot and go bad. You'll get soft spots that turn nasty overnight, and sometimes you'll get a bad pepper in your share or a brown or wormy apple. It happens. 

Ever see those news articles about McDonald's burgers that petrify and 20 years later they basically look the same? That's the comforting thing about eating clean. The foods you eat are real - they're meant to decay, to break down. Do you want to eat something that in 20 years will look exactly the same with no visible signs that it was food? There's something unnatural about that.

You might think that a soft pepper in your share is a waste. For us, composting comes in handy, or giving certain items to the chickens. Thankfully, with the food being so fresh in a CSA share, this rarely happens. 14 weeks of food so far, and it's the only thing that has come to us past its prime. Think of what you bring home from the grocery store that goes from unripe to rotten overnight and it's easier to get over a soft pepper in your CSA share.

This weekend, I'm definitely not worried about a soft pepper, because we've got these to deal with:


It's canning time, baby.

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