Tag Archives | 52 Weeks With My CSA

The trees are crayon box hues and the mornings are getting brisk.  As the seasons change outside, the way we eat our foods change as well. In the summertime, I like fresh foods that I toss or eat raw. The oven is never on; food preparation is rarely complex. In autumn, however, there is a call in the kitchen to warm things, season them, or turn them to stew.  What better way to make a meal from the autumn produce than by chopping it up and slow cooking it all afternoon.

Slow cooking meat makes it tender and fall apart in your mouth. Using your crock pot to cook veggies keeps you from hovering over a stove, worrying if the water is steaming properly or boiling the right way.  What is the best part of slow cooking? Is it the way it makes your whole house smell like dinner? Or, is it leaving the meal to stew, and coming home in time to simply dish it onto the dinner plates? You take your pick.

Do you need a recipe with a crock pot? Not really. Chop an onion. Braise some meat. Add potatoes and/or root veggies. Add some broth or water to the pot. Perhaps add garlic. Do you have fennel? Give it a try! Do you have a myriad of weird and wonderful spices? Experiment with them, as well! How do you add cheese or milk to a particular combo of veggies? Look it up on a recipe site like allrecipes.com. Overall, let your nose be your guide: if the foods smell good together, they’ll likely soup up nicely as well.

A few tips:
–    If you include beans and tomatoes, make sure the beans are cooked first before adding them to the crock pot; otherwise the acid in the tomatoes will make the beans tough.
–    If you are using meat, it is often a good idea to brown it or braise it first.
–    If you are adding a liquid, broth is always tastier than water.
–    No time to prep in the morning? Do your prep at night and store the mix in a bowl in the fridge.

Slow cooking takes time, but it helps to slow me down. The summer is so hectic. Autumn is so beautiful and rare, like the blush of all nature’s beauty before a cold, deep frost.  No need to eat on the run anymore. The days are getting shorter; the nights are giving more time for rest.  When we are awake, when we eat and are in community, let us take time to breathe, to see, to appreciate the moment we are in.  When the leaves turn brilliant colors, they are gone in a flash, and if you don’t stop and appreciate them, they are gone before you know it.

Enjoy the last fresh foods that come before your plate this autumn. Enjoy the unwinding of the days. Enjoy these last warm breaths before the harshness of winter.  Put all your memories and thoughts in a pot; mull over them, slowly, and let them enrich your dreams.

By ekwetzel
2010-11-12

WEEK 19

(Starting from the bottom left and going clockwise)
Fennell
2 Leeks
Beets
2 Parsnips
2 Pears
Head of Garlic
Red potatoes
Carrots
Loose turnips (upper right-hand corner)
3 Turnips with Greens still attached
Purple Kale
Kabocha squash
Onion

Plus a bowl of apples in the center.

When I see a red delicious, the iconic apple of school lunches and cafeterias, I cringe a little thinking of how bland and mealy they taste.  Sure, they are a deep, rich red. Sure, they have been buffed and waxed to shine in the fluorescent lights. But looks ain’t everything.

It seems that, as I explore the realms of real food, local food, and heirloom varieties, I discover more and more that the ugly foods taste the best.  My favorite tomatoes look like Frankenstein stitched them together. Greens can taste terrific when they appear to be wilted. Melons and other fruits often taste te best when they are at their ripest and easily bruised.

This week on the farm we chose apples from a crate of Jonagolds covered in ugly black spots. Terry explained in her email about the share food this week that there were “lots of scab this year because of the rainy spring.  That is the main reason there are few apple orchards on this side of the mountain!”

But you know what? I rinsed off my apples. Took a crisp bite. And – mmmm – they are good. Chopped some up and cooked them on the stove, and they made the prettiest applesauce I’ve had in a while.

Sure, sometimes food that looks bad is bad. You can typically use your nose to tell the difference: if the food smells rancid, toss it. If it smells sweet or appetizing, it’s probably right where you want it. Well, technically you’d want it in your mouth, but you get the picture.

Applesauce is easy to make, by the way. Just slice your apples and remove the core. I prefer to keep the skins on, but it’s more common to remove them. Thin slices will help it cook down faster.  Put in a small pot with a tiny amount of water, and turn on high temperature. Make sure to keep the lid on the pot sealed. If the moisture goes down, add a little water (you don’t want to ruin the bottom of your pot). Monitor the apples and let them cook down for about 30 minutes, adjusting the heat as needed. The apples are ready when you can mash them up with a spoon into sauce.

By ekwetzel
2010-11-05

WEEK 18 – First week of the Fall Share

We decided to not sign up for the egg share this fall, hence no eggs in the picture.

(Starting from the top and going clockwise)
Celery
3 Onions
Fennell
Head of Garlic
Head of Cabbage
Butternut Squash
4 Parsnips
Bok Choi
Lots of Purple Potatoes (I think it was 2 lbs worth)
(In the Middle)
Broccoli
8 Jonagold Apples
4 Pears

After a long day, it’s easy to order takeout, nuke a freezer meal in the microwave or “cook” up a box of hamburger helper.  The clean-up for these meals is also easier.  Takeout meals have disposable utensils, napkins, containers and condiment packages.  Very little cleanup is required for freezer meals or boxed meals as well.  While this food is easy to make, however, it is food that has been changed-processed and complicated-in order to be able to freeze well, taste good or be cheap to mass produce.  Complicated food is not intended to nourish, primarily, but to be sold. It is a commodity; and, for the most part, it is a food substitute.

We romanticize certain kinds of foods, foods that are homemade, heirloom, specialty, craftsman, or gourmet.  We intrinsically recognize that non-industrialized foods hold great value and character.  Even industrialized foods try to hearken back to simpler times, when food was grown primarily on small farms and livestock were able to roam under the sun and rain.  We want simple food, but simple food is hard to come by.

To eat real food, and to eat it as simply as possible, you have to buy raw ingredients. You have to prepare them. You have to wash tons of dishes. And tomorrow you have to do it all over again.

How would you make your own salsa?  How would you can or preserve your summer tomatoes? How would you bake your own bread or grind your own flour? Can you imagine making your own yogurt, or even your own cheese? Have you ever considered raising backyard chickens?

The more “simply” you eat and the raw-er your ingredients get, the more time you spend preparing them, and the more dishes you have to wash.  When a meal is simple and your ingredients are simple, there is often much work, preparation or training involved.  It’s a pity, really, that we have lost a lot of our innate cultural wisdom regarding food preparation.  To our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, much of this simple living came naturally as they learned the traditions from their mothers; for those raised in an industrialized world where our mothers were raised to depend on supermarkets and Betty Crocker, we have to strive to find a food niche from which to nourish our families.

I’m thankful that farmers markets are on the rise. I’m thankful that people are demanding local food options. I’m thankful that meat shops across the nation are offering butchery workshops for average citizens. I’m thankful heirloom seeds were preserved by a handful of wonderfully weird and independent farmers and gardeners. I’m thankful that the internet is available to be a great resource for those of us who want to walk away from over processed fake foods and be retrained in the wonderfully deep and mysterious world of real, simple food.

I’ve learned a lot, and I still have a lot more to explore. In the meantime, who wants to come wash my dishes?

By ekwetzel
2010-10-22

*Photos of the takeout bags and of the girl in the kitchen, courtesy of Molly Morris.

WEEK 16

(Clockwise, from the eggs)
Eggs (again, the farm has young hens, and they are laying smaller eggs this week, so we received 18 eggs instead of the normal dozen)
3 Jalapeno Peppers
2 Leeks
Red & Purple Potatoes
2 Purple Onions
4 Tomatillos
Delicata Squash
Garlic
2 Beets
Red Chard
2 Eggplant
(In the middle)
4 Tomatoes
Apples
3 Green Peppers

I drive with the windows down.  I love the fresh air, the wind in my hair, the sun on my arms.  I get a kick out of smelling the changing seasons or feeling the true level of humidity, fog or misting rain in the air.

Now that we moved, I take a 15 minute commute to my job, and I spend most of my drive on the freeway.  The worst part of the commute is the “armpit of Tacoma,” on I-5 between the Tacoma dome and Highway 16.  Even when the traffic is moving freely, the air on this stretch of freeway gets caught in a little valley, and the smog is unbearable.  I roll the windows up and try to have faith in the little air filter in my car.

What aggravates me the most about my commute, however, is there are many large trucks on the freeway, and they expel copious amounts of dark exhaust in to the atmosphere. It makes me gag! I get particularly upset when I see a truck whose exhaust is black and thick. How is it legal for companies to use trucks that pollute the air like this?

When Mr. Wetzel and I used to order groceries though Spud’s delivery service, I always enjoyed being able to see exactly how far each item on my grocery list travelled in order to get to the Spud warehouse. It really helped to put into perspective how great of an impact buying locally can have on the environment. Here are some interesting stats from Spud’s website:

“Each year, over $16 billion is spent across North America just to transport food. Most of this money is spent on 4 million trucks traveling 10 billion miles annually. The average grocery item travels 1500 miles to get from its place of production to where it is sold. All this transportation uses tons of fossil fuel and releases large quantities of carbon dioxide and other pollutants into our air.”

To help you get a clearer picture of what all this food transportation means, take a look at this infografic from Good magazine’s website (Click on the image above for a larger version, or go to Good’s website to see the original post here ). It is a terrific illustration of the impact it could make on the environment if more of us were to buy locally instead of aimlessly picking up whatever has been transported en mass to the local grocery chain.

Trucks stink. Farms don’t. Local food passes my smell test. Hopefully the more we demand local produce and products, the more our economy will shift to steward local economies and environments with greater responsibility and care.

By ekwetzel
2010-10-01

WEEK 13
(Clockwise, from the eggs)
Eggs (again, the farm has young hens, and they are laying smaller eggs this week, so we received 18 eggs instead of the normal dozen)
6 Corn on the Cob
2 Bok Choi
6 Apples
Cucumber
Red Onion
Head of Garlic
Green Cauliflower
Radishes
Green Beans
Head of Lettuce
Summer Squash & Zucchini
(In the middle)
Eggplant
Pumpkin Peppers
Tomatillos
4 Tomatoes