Week 12 is the last week of the spring CSA. [moment of silence] The summer CSA will start up the first full week of June. At least there will be farmer’s markets to tide me over.

This week we have tons of greenery: romaine lettuce, green leaf lettuce, spinach, and green beans. Nice big beet greens on those beets, too. We also have the last of the Florida oranges, some white potatoes, and a bonus item (you could choose between applesauce, mustard, eggs, or cheese). I opted for the block of Bowling Green feta, which was made with milk from Howard County cows. I’ve liked Bowling Green cheese in the past. I think they also sell their cheese at the Oakland Mills farmer’s market on Sunday mornings.

I’m looking forward to dinner salads with feta and orange segments. We’ll probably do some grilling this weekend (it’s supposed to be nice) and I might prevail on K to take up some of his precious grill real estate with some sliced beets. Grilled sliced beets can be pretty tasty, especially with a quick splash of balsamic.

I also met the woman behind the blog Anyone can cook, even Tina! while she was there doing her work share. I’m looking forward to using the Cedar Hill Farm yogurt, as well as my applesauce*, in her apple cake recipe.

* Because the apples we’ve been getting are from cold storage, they just aren’t as crispy and awesome as the ones we tend to get in the fall. As a consequence, ours have been piling up in the produce drawer in our fridge. Over the weekend I finally decided to do something about it. I peeled and chopped them all, heated the pieces in a pot over medium-low heat, stirring occasionally, and let them reduce to applesauce. (Applesauce is really that simple to make — apples, heat, wait, stir. I leave it chunky, but you can whiz the applesauce in a blender if you want it grocery-store smooth.) Our pile of apples produced 5 quarts of applesauce. I may have to freeze some.

This week’s CSA pickup brought the first freshly-harvested vegetables from Maryland! The radishes and the romaine lettuce were grown and harvested on Maryland farms. Everything else (except the bread, eggs, and potatoes) is still from out of state though; besides the radishes and romaine, we have grapefruit, orange, cucumber, sugar snap peas, green beans, and North Carolina strawberries at perfect peak ripeness. Still, spring has finally come to Maryland and by the time the summer CSA starts up, everything will be from Maryland or Pennsylvania farms.

Casey at the farm said that their strawberries were probably going to be ready in about two weeks, which is also what the folks at Larriland Farm are predicting. I can’t wait to go out and eat dusty perfect fresh-picked strawberries.

When we get radishes from the CSA, I like to saute up the radish greens that very evening. If you let the greens sit in the fridge connected to the radishes, the greens will suck the moisture out of the radishes and then they’ll both wilt, so you have to cut the greens off right away anyway. Radish greens have a lot of bitter, complex flavor. I just melt a bit of butter in a pan on medium-high heat, toss in the greens with some salt and garlic powder (they don’t need pepper; they’re peppery enough on their own), and stir the greens around until they’ve wilted and turned bright green. Voila, radish greens: a healthy snack (though it would probably be healthier if I didn’t saute them in butter).

Pickup at the farm this week was also special because it was the first non-rainy week that there were herbs available to pick. (They don’t let you out on their herb plot when it’s muddy — something to do with bacteria that might be on your shoes.) I picked myself a teeny bouquet of flowering chives, flowering thyme, and a couple of branches of oregano.

The picture is dominated by the tall chive stalks, but you can see the little thyme blossoms beneath. Flavorful and decorative, too.

Finally, I dropped by the farmer’s market yesterday to pick up my annual lemon basil plant (I kill one of the poor things every year, but they’re so good in summer salads), and picked up a huge bundle of green garlic on impulse. The farmer told me that he’d put garlic bulbs in the ground two weeks ago, and just in that time they’d sprouted to easily two feet in length; he crushed a leaf and had me smell how beautifully garlicky it was. Now the bundle is sitting in some water on my counter. I’m looking forward to mincing it into scrambled eggs, slicing it into soups, and turning the rest into some tasty pesto…

I’m so glad that spring is finally here.

Technology is failing me tonight. First, our cable (and hence our internet access) was out for most of this evening, and then when it finally came back, I encountered technical difficulties getting pictures off my phone. I’ll add pics into this post when I can get them onto the computer.

In the meantime, you’ll just have to believe me when I say that this week’s CSA pickup contained spinach, mixed greens, eggplant, carrots, cucumber, mushrooms, apples, oranges, and the usual bread and eggs. The mushrooms are from PA, eggplant and oranges are from FL, the spinach is from New Jersey, and the carrots are (astoundingly) from cold storage up in Maine. I don’t know why they’re from Maine. We can’t possibly have run out of cold storage carrots in Maryland.

I also bought a pint of maple yogurt. The farm just started carrying fresh yogurt from grass-fed cows, out of Cedar Hill Farm in Darlington, MD. I had a bit of yogurt for breakfast today, topped with some granola. The yogurt is fantastic, sweet and just slightly tangy. It’s runnier than the yogurt you get from the stores, but the taste is just fresher. I love it. At $5/pint it’s pretty pricey, I think, but since yogurt is only an occasional indulgence for me, I don’t mind paying premium prices every now and then.

I took a picture of the yogurt container, too, with its adorable cow label, but you’ll just have to wait to see that.

Edit: technology and I are finally friends again. Here are the pictures of the CSA pickup and the yogurt.

This week’s pickup features multicolored eggs from Breezy Willow Farm’s own chickens.

Week 9 brings us sprouts, green lettuce, apples, cucumbers, potatoes, Vidalia onions, green beans, strawberries, and the usual bread and eggs. The dark lump in the egg carton is an avocado. I was in too much of a hurry to investigate vegetable sourcing, but I did ascertain that the strawberries came from North Carolina. They’re all right, but they still don’t compare to the ripe strawberries we’ll get in Maryland when June comes along.

A bonus picture of naturally multicolored eggs, for Easter:

These particular eggs are from K’s mother; she has a friend who raises chickens. I love the delicate blues and greens.

This week’s farm pickup is from all over the map! From north to south, we have:
– mushrooms from Pennsylvania
– spinach from New Jersey
– garlic, apples, and potatoes from cold storage in Maryland
– sugar snap peas from Georgia
– lemons, oranges, and eggplant from Florida

The bread is Great Harvest’s “Herb de Breezy Willow,” flavored with last season’s dried herbs. I forgot to ask where the cheese was from, but that was today’s “farm fresh item” instead of eggs. We had a selection to choose from, and I picked Muenster. I love Muenster, especially melted on burgers. Mmm, burgers… grilling season is upon us.

I was worried about making the farm pickup yesterday, because the weather guys were predicting a thunderstorm, and the farm can get real muddy real fast. But instead when I showed up, the weather was warm and breezy and just perfect. The farm pets were out too, roaming around the yard and charming the CSA members. I got to coo over the new puppy, who was fearless and adorable. Then I had to reassure the older dog that she was lovable, as well.

The farm cat needed no such reassurance, and pretty much ignored me.

This week’s pickup! Per Jessie’s comment last week, I realized it would be a good idea to look into how much of this stuff was actually locally produced…

From Maryland: apples, potatoes, carrots, onions, and garlic from cold storage; Great Harvest bread (I think it’s oat) and eggs.
From Georgia: Kale and green beans.
From Florida: grapefruits and oranges.

Last week’s snap peas were from Georgia too. Lucky Southerners. I’ve been pining for the HoCo farmer’s markets, but I’m realizing that the farmers would only have stuff from cold storage anyway. And they certainly wouldn’t ever have oranges.

I also paid extra for some blueberry crumb dessert bread (tastes like blueberry pound cake, with a fantastic crumb) and a block of Guinness cheddar (very strong and savory; K would have happily eaten the whole thing). Pickup at the farm is always tempting, because the pickup shed is also where they have their farm store set up; when you go inside, you’re surrounded by jars of honey and preserves, and bars of lovely-smelling homemade soap. And sometimes they have samples of cheese or oatmeal or whatever else just came in.

This week’s pickup: golden beets, sugar snap peas, green beans, spinach, mushrooms, green onions, blood oranges, apples, eggs, and bread (the bread is parmesan sourdough; I wanted to try their new “blackberry crumb” bread but it was all spoken for by the time I arrived).

I love getting snap peas and green beans. I look forward to sitting in front of the TV with a bowl of peas in my lap, pinching off stems one by one. I like doing that sort of thing by hand when I have time; it makes me feel like the most recent link in a long chain of food preparers, stretching back across time. Except, uh, that my ancestors probably weren’t trimming peas and beans while watching TV.

It’s been rainy and muddy at the CSA, but the vegetables continue to arrive.

This week’s haul: a pound of kale, a bunch of green onions, a bunch of asparagus, three kohlrabi (the funny looking roots sprouting greens in the bottom right corner), a spaghetti squash, a head of garlic, three pounds of red potatoes, three grapefruits, two lemons, six apples, and the usual eggs and bread (Great Harvest cinnamon chip).

I already know what I’m going to do with the spaghetti squash (this recipe is a favorite with both me and K), but I’m going to have to look up how to handle kohlrabi…

It’s pretty gloomy out there, but at least there are some beautiful colors in the produce.

This week from the CSA: spinach, green beans, onions, yams, apples, and a vast amount of carrots; sourdough bread from Great Harvest; oranges and lemons from the partner farm in Florida. There was also Breezy Willow applesauce in lieu of eggs this week, but I forgot to pick it up. (That’s the problem with assembling your own share instead of getting it all at once, as I’m told is the case with other CSAs.)

We split our share with another couple, so really we’re only responsible for eating half of that bounty. But it’s still a lot for just one week, and the produce drawers in the refrigerator are getting dangerously full, as is the citrus bowl on the counter. I still have half a head of cabbage from last week, as well as a big bag of carrots and a bunch of asparagus from Giant, and many uneaten potatoes and onions.

There are two moments of dread when dealing with a CSA, and those are:
1) how are we going to deal with all this produce? and
2) can we eat it all before we get next week’s share?

It’s not so bad, because some items (apples, root vegetables) can sit around for weeks, whereas others (mostly greens) need to be eaten pretty quickly. Still, when the long-storage items start overflowing from their containers, they need to be addressed.

I love being surrounded by raw ingredients, because I love daydreaming about what to cook. For instance, given the glut of potatoes and onions, I’m thinking I’ll caramelize a bunch of onions and layer them throughout a potato gratin. I haven’t tried it before, but I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work. Also, it’s still cold enough outside (snow this weekend? really?) that I won’t feel bad about keeping the oven on to make roasted green beans and asparagus, finished with just a squeeze of that Florida lemon, and sprinkled with Parmesan cheese. Apples can easily be turned into applesauce, which simmers away happily on the stovetop and makes the house smell like pie. Carrots: sliced and braised, with a squeeze of orange juice. Finally, this recipe for braised cabbage with carrots and onion is always a hit (with me, anyway).

I just need to get it all done this week, so that there’ll be room in the fridge next week. Maybe I can schedule one dish per night.

For week 3 of the CSA, the week of St Patrick’s Day, the farm wanted to make sure that we would have the makings of a good Irish meal. So we got a head of cabbage, two turnips, and three pounds of potatoes, along with a butternut squash, a bunch of chard, apples, grapefruits, oranges, and the usual eggs and bread (Great Harvest challah).

I predict corned beef with boiled vegetables in our future.

As for the stuff from last week, we still have the beets and some of the onions and citrus left. Most of the other root vegetables went into Ina Garten’s amazing pot roast recipe, in which we also used a giant meaty chuck roast bought from Breezy Willow Farm.