A Peek into the CSA Box - Week 2
This week’s CSA delivery has been quite tasty. We’re still looking at relatively small boxes, but it’s been fun integrating one or two ingredients into some meals during the week. No doubt we are going to really have to ramp up the cooking when summer really hits. This week we got three early turnips, two heads of speckled trout’s back lettuce, a bunch of white icicle radishes, some more spring onions, a bag of snow peas, and a bag of spinach.
Our CSA box delivery night is turning into big salad night. This week’s salad was a mock blackened chicken salad using pan-fried blackened tofu cutlets. We used up most of the trout’s back lettuce, added some carrots, cucumber, tomatoes, an avocado, and the green onions. The blackening mix was Alton Brown’s recipe from his first book. In fact, the green onions we used were left over from the previous week’s box, and we just recently used up the last of them.
That’s been another benefit of using the CSA. Of course the veggies taste best the day they are delivered straight from the farm, but because they are so fresh when we receive them, their shelf life has been amazingly long. The green onions are just one example. This week’s snow peas made it into a late-week meal and they were great, and we still have the spinach waiting to be used that still looks fresh. It’s nice to know our veggies didn’t have to travel from California and waste a bunch of energy, but it’s also nice to know we can neglect them in the fridge for several days without worry. We braised and honey-buttered our turnips with their greens and some carrots for a quick meal.
This weekend I supplemented our CSA selection with a trip to the State Farmer’s Market. There were three flower vendors there taking advantage of the day-before-Mother’s-Day crowd. Perplexing was the fact that one of the vendors had a huge line that was disrupting the flow of traffic, but the other two had nearly no business. I picked up a nice $10 bouquet and a few blooming plants to give to the Moms in my life along with some more hydroponic tomatoes, some garden peas to shell, and some Chapel Hill Creamery “feta” cheese to go with our salads this week.
The crowds at the market continue to be large, with the main parking areas jammed to a standstill with people trying to get in or out. So here’s a secret - skip all of those lots, drive all the way to the last behind the seafood restaurant, and park somewhere near the Nahunta Pork trailer. Easy in and out. Works every week.