Nicole Is Cooking

It is that time of the year in the US… if you do not currently participate in a Community Supported Agriculture program (CSA), now is the time to start looking. I received my email this week from my farm with the deadline to re-register and information on when they would sell the remaining shares to new members. If you are looking for a CSA, the link above is also a fabulous resource for searching for them.

If you live in DC and are curious about CSAs but reluctant to make the financial commitment, well, I have just the thing for you. I recently found out about Star Hallow Farm on my neighborhood list serve and just took my first delivery from them today. They are part CSA, part personalized farmers’ market. If you decide to work with them, you do send them money in advance ($300 is their initial buy-in). However, unlike the traditional CSA model, this becomes a debit account. You then order products once a week (from 7am Wednesday through 7am Thursday… yes the site says 8-8 at the time I published this but they informed today this will be changing) based on what they have available. You can order a mixed “box” like you would get at a CSA or individual products. And what if you don’t want anything that week because you are out of town? Don’t order and your account isn’t charged. They then deliver your products to DC (Adams Morgan or Tenleytown) for pickup on Saturday.

I ordered their small mixed box and received 4 apples, a head of hydroponic lettuce, spinach (yay!), an English cucumber, some nice looking carrots (4 or so), 2 beets, 2 medium sweet potatoes and a few gold potatoes for $18. They let you know what is and is not organic- the lettuce is not and neither is the greenhouse grown cucumber. And the apples are not because there are not any organic orchards on the east coast (I believe they explain this somewhere on their site but the requirement might be that the trees have never been treated with chemical pesticide and due to the age of most east coast orchards none of them qualify since people have not been concerned about this for as long as they have been around). They also work with farms around their area. In addition to the box, I also ordered two of their cheeses produced from raw milk and was very happy to discover they were made with specifically vegetable enzymes (I was expecting the ambiguous “enzymes” label at best). Everything is wonderful so far so I will definitely stick with them in my CSA’s off season and maybe supplement my CSA’s share with them through out the season too especially if they have anything my farm does not grow.

Tonight I made a simple meal using some of the items I received as well as continuing to deal with the realization that I have too many leftovers sitting in my freezer (I am not good at eating leftovers). I don’t have step by step pictures because I did not do anything elaborate. From my Star Hallow haul, I decided to do a little salad of fresh lettuce, carrot and cucumber with a little onion I had around. I also took half of one of the sweet potatoes, cut it into wedges, tossed it with some olive oil, salt, black pepper and a dash of cayenne then baked them at 400 degrees (Farenheit) until they began to brown.

From the leftovers, I retrieved some black bean soup (this was made in the less than 72 hours I had between returning from international travel and having to get to my sister’s for the holidays so no documentation of me making this!) that I had reduced the other night into burrito filling and had added some Frieda’s Soyrizo to. I unfortunately found out I was out of salsa verde so I just used some store bought salsa and onions to make a burrito in a whole wheat tortilla.

It was a simple but satisfying meal.