Confession: I Cheated on My CSA

I often write about how much I love my Community Supported Agriculture membership at Fairview Gardens Farm in Goleta, CA. It's been invaluable to my vegan cooking efforts, since I get weekly helpings of all my favorite fruits and veggies (and some random ones I don't quite know what to do with).

But I'm in Massachusetts right now, and my CSA farm is all the way across the country, so... what happens in Massachusetts stays in Massachusetts, right? Today I hit up another CSA... with my mom.

My parents are members at Powisset Farm in Dover, just a short drive from their home in Westwood. Here's what the farm looks like:

 

Look how beautiful it is. How could I resist?

There were thirteen different items out on tables for us to pick up: lettuce, kale, basil, fennel, chard, beets, cabbage, onions, carrots, kohlrabi, potatoes, squash, and mizuna. I was intrigued by the mizuna. I'd never even heard of mizuna. Turns out, I got all excited for nothing: it's just a kind of bland green to mix into salads.

But we also got to go out in the fields and gather our own flowers, herbs, snap peas, and fava beans:

Just in case you can't read it, the sign says, "These are ready when they are huge, plump, and even with a few brown spots!" I read it and chuckled. Then I got up in there and picked myself some fava beans. I never get to pick my own fava beans at Fairview. I felt like a real-life farmer - granted, one who has had everything planted and tended for her. Some people would probably say it's more convenient to have all the vegetables already collected for you, but I think there's something fun about going out and getting them yourself, if you have time.

The folks at Powisset keep a blog with recipe ideas involving the produce they offer. You can search by ingredient (but not by "vegan," unfortunately). Fairview has a blog, too; theirs is arguably more helpful, since it gives you a heads up about which items you're going to get that week. If you're the type to plan recipes ahead of time (and I assure you, I am not that type) then this is a really important feature.

So which CSA is better? Luckily for me, I don't have to choose. I can have my (eggless) cake and eat it too, visiting Powisset while I'm out here and resuming my relationship with Fairview when I get back home. But shhh! Don't tell.

Kale, Fruit, and a Little Root

Two years ago, I didn't even know what kale looked like. When my roommates and I started getting Community Supported Agriculture shares from Fairview Gardens, I discovered a slew of new vegetables like turnips, rainbow chard, and green onions - but kale is my favorite.

It just makes anything you add it to taste better. Usually I just grill it up in olive oil with whatever other greens I have lying around. But recently I've been getting creative with ingredients. A few weeks ago, I made this braised kale and apple dish. It tasted good, but I don't have much experience braising things, and I am pretty sure my kale got a bit too brown.

So this afternoon, I decided to experiment with some other fruits: oranges and strawberries. I still had one orange left from my trip to Plow to Porch, and we got a little basket of strawberries in our CSA share yesterday. Would kale and fruit be enough?

I opened the door to the refrigerator and saw a bundle of little root vegetables. I stared at them blankly (my default face when it comes to gazing into the refrigerator). They were too small to be beets and too reddish to be turnips. Aha - radishes! You might think it's depressing that I don't know a radish when I see one, but at least I know what a tomato looks like.

Yesterday, my friend Than identified the hitch-kick as "the Goldilocks of dance moves - not too big, not too small, but just right." In case you don't know what a hitch-kick is, here's an incredible demo video. Following Than's fabulous analogy, a radish is the Goldilocks of root vegetables. Any bigger and it would be a beet. Any smaller and it would be... too small to care about.

So I had my winning combination: kale, oranges, strawberries, and radishes. For dressing, I decided to use the carrot, ginger, and miso OM Sweet Mama dressing I had purchased at Plow to Porch.

Ingredients (makes one serving):

5-6 leaves curly kale
1tbsp carrot, ginger, and miso dressing (or balsamic vinaigrette if you're feeling less fancy)
3-4 strawberries
1/2 orange, diced
1 radish, sliced thinly

I wanted the kale to wilt a little bit, so I put it on low heat with just a bit of water and pushed it around. After about four minutes, I took it off the heat and drained it. Then I poured the dressing on top of it and spent a while mixing it in. Kale leaves are tricky because they don't really hold dressing the way that other greens might, so you have to either massage the dressing into them or (if you are weirded out by the idea of massaging kale) spend a while pushing them around in a puddle of dressing.

I arranged the kale all nicely on a plate with the pieces of fruit and radish on top of it. It looked adorable:

It was quite tasty! I was so proud of myself for inventing a yummy salad recipe and for taking a lovely picture of it that I attempted a hitch-kick. That knocked my pride down a notch pretty quickly. I'm just going to stick to making salads.