Another way to save money with a CSA

If I wasn't doing this research project to get farmer's market prices to compare to our CSA each week, I wouldn't go to the farmer's market every single week.

And thus, I might not have spent:

• $5 on a very nice loaf of bread.


• $5 on a lovely quart of purplish-red round plums.


• and $3 on some yellow and purple string beans (you see, they don't come with the farmshare unless we drive out to pick them ourselves.)

So I guess the CSA *could* have saved me another $13 this week. The things I do for my readers.

Market Analysis: Week 7

This week's box is starting to look very summery - 3 tomatoes, lots of sweet corn, an eggplant... and still plenty of squash, carrots, and cucumbers. I'm glad the weekend looks cool enough to cook some!

Last week's 12 lbs of extra cucumbers may have been a bit too many for how my week turned out - I've still got some left, but I do have 7 quart jars of sour-and-salty vinegar pickles, 4 pint jars of sweet pickle chips, and plans to try a few more jars of kosher dills. (Those are trickier, because you put them straight into the right amount of salty water with seasonings, and hope they actually ferment and do not mold. This apparently does not always happen. How the heck do commercial pickle makers pull this off?)

7 ears Sweet Corn (0.50c/ear) : 3.50
1 lb 1 oz Red Cabbage: $2.10
1 lb 1 oz carrots Carrots ($2/lb) : $2.10
Yellow Squash and zucchini (1 lb 2 oz): $2.25
2 lbs 12 oz cucumbers (pickling and slicing) : $4.10
Bunch of Scallions: $2
1 lb Eggplant: $3
1 lb Tomatoes: $3.50
1 Head Lettuce: $2.50
1 bunch Kale: $2.50
1 bunch Cilantro: $2
total: $29.55

To date, the farmshare has filled our fridge (and our bellies) with $21 more in produce than we would have gotten if we'd set out to the farmers' market to buy this exact mix of items!

Market Analysis, week 6

This week's box contained:

Yellow Squash and zucchini: 1lb 4 oz, $2.50

Cucumbers (mix of slicing and pickling) 2 lb 3 oz, $4.40

bunch of scallions: $2.50

Carrots, bunched with greens: $2.00

Fennel: $3.00

Green Pepper: $0.75

1lb Tomatoes: $3

1 Head Romaine Lettuce: $2.50

1 bunch Kale: $2.50

1 bunch Basil: $2

Total : $25.15



I also used another money-saving feature of our CSA this week. I ordered 3 lbs of swiss chard for a total of $6. Looking at the amount of chard, I'd say that was about 5 bunches worth, which go for $2.50/bunch at the farmers' market, so that's about $6 spent and $6 saved. I've just finished steaming the chard, squeezing it out, and putting it in the freezer for winter or for any other time that we want to make swiss chard and potatoes, one of our favorite dishes and a must for grilled fish if you have Croatians in your family. I also ordered 12 lbs of pickling cukes for $1/lb, which is half the rate they go for at the farmers' market. Now I just have to make a lot of pickles!

Reverse Shopping List

When the farmshare arrives each week, I take a quick inventory of what's still in the fridge from the last week, and what's just arrived, and make a sort of "reverse shopping list" of what produce needs using, and what's most urgent.

I like to cook on the fly, for the most part - I'm certainly not one to stick to a weekly meal plan made out in advance. But I am always checking up mentally with what's in the fridge, what the weather's looking like, whether we've got many dinners out coming up, what leftovers we should be eating soon, and so on. And I tend to have a queue, at least in my head, of some meals I plan to make in the next few days. This week, for example, the use-up list includes zucchini with many exclamation points. Some of it got grilled, some of it will go into zucchini bread (enough to freeze), some might go into an omelette or another batch of grilling, and some might get shredded and frozen on its own. The collards got steamed to make them less urgent, but I'm thinking of making a one-pot sautee meal I often make with collards, chicken/sausage/pork, onions, and BBQ sauce. The chinese cabbage went to a potluck, the cucumber will go into a test batch of kosher dill pickles. The tomato didn't even go on the use-up list but it did get devoured - twice with sandwiches and a 3rd meal over pasta with leftover grilled zucchini and grilled sausages. And if I don't have a plan, I recheck our reverse shopping list before deciding what to cook, with a goal of making sure we eat at least one leftover item or farmshare item that's on the list.

So that's a bit of my version of "planning" around a fridge full of food. What's yours?

Market Analysis: Week 5

Unpacking this week's box:



1 lb 13 oz Green Cabbage: ($1/lb) : $1.80
5 lb Zucchini ($2/lb) : $10
Dill: $0.50
2 lb 3 oz Pickling Cucumbers: ($2/lb) : $4.40
1 bunch Scallions: $2
1 bunch carrots: $3
1 head radicchio: $3
13 oz tomatoes: ($3/lb) $2.40
giant head Lettuce: $2.50
Collard Greens: $2.50

Total: 32.10, a good $10 above the average box cost. That's quite a bumper crop of zucchini. I did go with a $2/lb price of zucchini - lots of stalls had it for different prices. There were a few vendors who sold it cheaper but they definitely use pesticides (in a limited way, but still, not quite comparable to our CSA) and one who sold it more expensively than the price I went with.

And the plot from this week:



Leftover from last week, we have half a bunch of scallions, a few of the zucchini, and a fair bit of Chinese cabbage, which I intend to turn into more salad or some spring rolls to bring to a BBQ this weekend. With 5 lbs of new zucchini, I think I'll be taking my own advice and making and freezing some zucchini bread very soon!

Warm Food

I'd be exaggerating if I called this an inspired seasonal recipe using vegetables that go wonderfully together and are likely to come in your farmshare box this month.

Actually, what happened is that I wanted to do something with the fennel other than cut it up and serve it over salad. Fennel is seasonal right now. It came in our box this week, and I like it, but I've never actually tried to cook it before.

So I browsed through some of my cookbooks and found a recipe that sounded great, for braised fennel and celeriac. Celeriac, or celery root, is not at all seasonal right now. It's a late fall root vegetable that stores well over the winter in a root cellar.

Well, my squirrel tendencies and our winter storage share came to the rescue - I was saving that last celeriac, the last item remaining item from our winter share, in the vegetable drawer. I kept telling myself that it was small and I'd work on using it up when we seemed like we might run of room to put away the share one of these weeks.

So I was able to combine celeriac and fennel in this recipe, adapted from Claudia Roden's Book of Jewish Food. Sometimes, things that aren't in season together and seem to have very different styles make a surprisingly wonderful pairing!

Braised Celery and Fennel with Lemon

3 garlic cloves, chopped
1 tbsp light vegetable oil
1 small celeriac, about 1/2 lb, peeled and cut into ¾-inch cubes
1 medium fennel head, cut in half, then in thick slices
Juice of 1 lemon
1 tsp sugar
Salt and black pepper

In a wide pan with a cover, fry the garlic in the oil till lightly colored. Add the celeriac and fennel, and add water to barely cover. Add the lemon juice, sugar, and a little salt and pepper, and simmer with the lid on, stirring occasionally, for 1/2 hour. Then take the lid off, increase the heat and reduce the liquid to a thick sauce.

You could serve this as a cold salad mixed with parsley, but since it was wet and rainy and we felt like warm food, we served it warm, over some quinoa that I cooked in the rice cooker with 3 parts water and 1 part pineapple juice. The slight sweetness that the juice added to the quinoa was just right with the celeriac and fennel over the top.

Cold Food

Some of this food did require a bit of cooking, but after a week of avoiding any use of flame in the kitchen I was going crazy. Also, I think I may have acclamated to the heat a bit.

In the end we wound up with a meal we could stand to eat in the 88 degree dining room.

Last night's menu:
Bread (I do not recommend baking your own bread when it's hot out, but guess who did?)

Hummus (from a friend who had too much), doctored with lemon juice and chopped basil that came from our farm.

Garlic scape pesto, leftover in the fridge. I'm surprised I haven't tried this before this year! Recipe below.

Raw kale salad. I made a batch of this last night when it was also too hot to cook, but last night I couldn't come up with something else to accompany it so we had takeout chicken fingers.

Raw turnip and apple salad. I've been hoarding these because I love them so much despite having plenty of other food in the CSA box that needs cooking, and today I realized I'd better start using them even if it's not always for sauteed turnips. So today one large turnip went into this salad. Recipe below.

Beet Tzatziki. A creamy salad with cooked, grated beets, garlic, lemon, dill, and yogurt. This one involves boiling water for a while but it's so worth it. Recipe below.

Beet Tzatziki
Inspired by Sofra restaurant, adapted from Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean, by Ana Sortun, based on this adaptation.

3 baby beets
3 tiny cloves pressed garlic
juice of about 1 lemon
Salt
1/4 cup sour cream plus 1/4 cup regular yogurt (take the thick part, if you can, instead of blending the liquid back in) This substituted for Greek yogurt, which is what I've used before.
1/2 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoon schopped fresh dill
Black pepper
Mix, taste, and leave covered in the refrigerator at least 1 hour before eating.

Raw Turnip and Apple Salad
based on Farmer John's Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables
1 peeled, grated granny smith apple
1 peeled, grated Hakurei turnip
juice of 1/2 to 1 lemon
1 tbsp olive oil
1/4c raisins
2 tsp chopped fennel fronds
salt and pepper to taste

Mix, taste, and leave covered in the refrigerator at least 1 hour before eating.

Garlic Scape Pesto

10-12 garlic scapes, chopped into 1" pieces
1/4 cup ground almonds
1/3 cup Parmesan cheese
1/2 cup olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

In a food processor, combine scapes, almonds, cheese and some of the olive oil. Blend until combined. Add remaining olive oil, scraping sides occasionally. Eat, or store in a jar in the fridge (or freezer, supposedly, but I haven't tried that yet.)