Every fall is always filled with mixed emotions for me. I love fall — the slight chill in the air, the crunchy leaves, pumpkins and gingerbread and apple cider — but on the other hand, the farms are shutting down. Next week will be the last week of the CSA, and the last week of the HoCo farmers’ markets. I’ll have to actually buy my produce from a grocery store again, from cashiers who may not be able to identify the items on sight.

You take a lot for granted when shopping at a farmer’s market. When you pick up an item, you can ask: is this eaten cooked or raw? Do you have any tricks for preserving it? How do you prepare it? And not only is the farmer happy to talk with you (assuming the stall isn’t slammed with customers), but you’ll soon have a dialogue going with the other shoppers, who are also happy to share their experiences, recipes, and recommendations. The community feeling is just incredible, and not something you generally get at your local grocery store.

(Not to slam Giant, Safeway, or Harris Teeter. I patronize them too, and I do appreciate their all-hours convenience and their endless rows of clean, brightly-lit produce. But it’s not the same as the love I have for the farmer’s market, where I may not quite find what I was looking for, but I come away with stuff that I’m excited about.)

ANYWAY. The penultimate week of the CSA brought us a pound of spinach, 3 pounds of white potatoes, a pound of brussels sprouts, a spaghetti squash, five large rainbow carrots, another enormous head of cauliflower, eight apples (the all-red ones are Staymans, and the yellow-reds are Jonagolds), and the usual eggs and bread (Great Harvest challah).

I love brussels sprouts; cut in half and tossed with olive oil and spices, and roasted until the edges caramelize, they turn into crunchy-on-the-outside, tender-on-the-inside little nuggets of awesome, and I consider them the perfect food to nosh on while watching a football game. As a bonus, the Little Prince likes them too. Pick the little ones; they’re the sweetest.

For lunch today, I ate a frittata of diced kielbasa, tomato, green pepper, and onion, served over white rice with a side of sauteed celery, and a little bit of beef gravy to give it some flavor and moisture. Frittata: a great way to stretch a single kielbasa sausage into six meals.

Last night I made six “adult” meals as described above, plus two “little prince” meals consisting of leftover toad-in-the-hole and cut up green beans, as well as two “little princess” meals of pureed vegetable and cut up fruit (her bottles of pumped milk can’t be prepared too far in advance, or I’d do those too). I love The Unmanly Chef‘s series of 5 Days 5 Lunches but right now, with two adults, a three-year-old, and a ten-month-old, and limited fridge storage to boot, I’m happy to just get two or three days ahead of the game.

Honestly, parenting is like treading water; you’re busy just keeping your head in the air. I’ve been neglecting the blog, but rest assured that we are still eating the fruits of summer and loving it here at the K household. Our patio garden has been going crazy and drowning us in hot peppers and cherry tomatoes. Every week, I get the CSA pickup and then drop by the Miller Library farmer’s market to fill in the gaps (usually with peaches from Lewis Orchard, onions and bacon from TLV Tree Farm, and sweet cherry tomatoes from Love Dove).

I may or may not do a CSA catch-up post… the previous pickup photos are scattered across various devices (old phone, new phone, tablet) and my record keeping is not all that it could be. Let’s just talk about the most recent week for now:

So many beautiful colors! We’ve had corn every week and here it is again, 6 ears of it. There’s also cantaloupe, yellow squash, rainbow carrots, nectarines, green peppers, eggplant, beautiful ripe tomatoes, eggs, and bread (Great Harvest challah).

The corn got simply boiled (Little Prince’s favorite preparation) – I brought a pot of water to a boil, and then, so as not to waste the hot water (and the time it took to get hot), I used it three times: I blanched green beans, added salt and cooked a box of penne pasta, and finally sprinkled in some sugar and boiled the corn.

The yellow squash got sauteed with some shrimp to go over the penne; eggs, green peppers and (some) tomatoes went into the frittata; later we’ll turn the eggplant into baba ghannouj or baingan bharta, and I’ll make glazed rainbow carrots (as well as steam some for the baby). Cantaloupe and nectarine are perfectly good as is, and fortunately both kids love fruit. Keep the fruit coming, Breezy Willow!

Week 3 of the CSA brought us another beautiful rainbow of produce (fitting because the SCOTUS decision was announced that week):

We have kale, green leaf lettuce, yellow zucchini, mushrooms, green beans, white potatoes, sweet cherries, blueberries, eggs, and bread (Great Harvest challah).

I like yellow zucchini much better than yellow squash, because squash that doesn’t change diameter as you go is just a lot easier to deal with on the cutting board. That way you don’t have to work too hard to cut everything the same size for even cooking. It’s the little things.

The little container off to the side is a cinnamon stick pickle from Farm Boy Pickles (available at Breezy Willow Farm):

It’s a sweet pickle with a bit of cinnamon kick – basically a bread and butter pickle with a little touch of spice. I was dubious at first about the concept, but when I tried a sample, I was hooked. I’ve been eating a couple of bites after dinner in place of dessert. I love it.

Every fourth week of the CSA brings a special bonus item, and for this week 4, we got to choose between Breezy Willow’s barbecue sauce and their horseradish mustard. I went for the mustard. The rest of the pickup consisted of corn, broccoli, green beans, red potatoes, mushrooms, zucchini, cucumbers, eggs, and bread (Great Harvest challah again; I know what I like).

It’s the beginning of what will likely be a giant corn avalanche this summer. We always get a ton of corn in this CSA. My family loves corn in all forms – boiled, grilled, cut off the cob and creamed – so it’s no hardship at all. Before the Little Prince was born, I used to blanch and freeze the corn for use in winter. Now, though, he eats it up as fast as I can prepare it.

This is a chromatically pleasing pickup! Perfectly sweet blueberries; kale, green leaf lettuce, green beans, cucumber, and an extra bunch of parsley; a huge stack of yellow squash; red-skinned potatoes; orange (brown) eggs, and a loaf of soft golden challah.

Kale, lettuce, and green beans disappear fairly quickly in our house, but not so much the yellow squash. I’ve got my eye on smitten kitchen’s squash and potato torte recipe. It looks kind of fiddly* to prepare, what with all the slicing and arranging and so on, but I think I can find time this weekend. As a bonus, I can fold in some of the green onions and thyme that are going gangbusters in our container garden.

*as a salary mom with an infant and a preschooler, who can only really cook on evenings and weekends, I now evaluate recipes on the basis of “how easy is this to prepare while the kids are awake?” So anything that needs lots of fine knife work, or constant stirring on the stovetop, has to be tabled until after the kids go to bed. This torte, for instance, looks like a great contender for a prepare-the-night-before, bake-up-the-next-day type of approach.

The CSA is back! *throws confetti* I’ve managed to get by with the farmer’s markets, but there’s no substitute for picking up a week’s worth of vegetables that I, uh, had no say in selecting. (Well, technically I can select my beets from a pile of other beets. But I still can only get beets. Especially since there were nothing but beets at the trade table. Fellow CSA members, can you truly be soured on beets already?)

First week of the summer CSA brought us a ton of leafy greens to eat: green leaf lettuce, rainbow chard, spinach, and the greens from the aforementioned beets meant that it was a very leafy pickup. Also in the pickup: spring onions, mushrooms, zucchini, and the usual eggs and bread (Breadery 3-seed).

I cut up and washed the green leaf lettuce right away. Lettuces don’t hold up well in the fridge. We had it alongside white rice and a frittata of kielbasa, spinach, and cheddar cheese. The Little Prince actually ate his entire serving of “egg pie”, much to my delight.

No fancy plans for the rest of the pickup; I might end up just sauteeing the beet greens together with the chard, let the thick-stemmed greens hang out together. Zucchini is fantastic tossed with a bit of olive oil and spice, and baked on a sheet pan or quickly sauteed on the stovetop. Spring onion greens might go in another frittata with the mushrooms (there are oh so many eggs in the house right now), and I’ll save the spring onion bulbs to throw on the grill next time it’s fired up (they turn sweet and smoky and fantastic; I highly recommend it). Beets, I’ll probably try some sort of pickle. Or puree into soup with a little garlic and cream.

The weather yesterday was beautiful and I was absolutely loving being at the farm. It was nice to see the llamas again, too. Hi, llamas!

The haul: 5 Stayman apples, 8 Fuji apples, rainbow carrots, asparagus, radishes (though the overhead shot really shows more radish green than radish root), a pound of spinach, a head of (really sandy) romaine lettuce, Brussels sprouts, eggs, and bread (Breadery honey whole wheat).

We ate the asparagus immediately; it was so fresh that some of the ends didn’t even snap. I love asparagus for its ease of preparation: snap the ends, rinse the spears, tumble them into a pan with some olive oil, salt, and pepper, and roast them until they start to look a little shriveled. Done! They get all tender and delicious. Even the Little Prince loves them.

The apples are really piling up; we are drowning a bit in apples here. Since the Little Princess is just starting solid foods (she seemed to like her puree of CSA spinach last night), I think I’ll be making applesauce this weekend. And apple cobbler for us older folks, too.

I also dropped by the Miller Library farmer’s market yesterday. It was great to see all the farm stands again! Not much in the way of fresh produce yet but if you want to stock up on little baby herb and tomato plants, now is the time. I picked up two little cherry tomato plugs from Love Dove Farm; really looking forward to fresh-off-the-vine tomatoes this summer, assuming I can get to them before all the back yard wildlife.

Breezy Willow’s spring CSA runs for just one more week, and then it’s a two-week break until the summer one starts up. I’m looking forward to doing a lot of farmer’s market shopping over the hiatus.

Week 9 of the CSA: red potatoes, Vidalia onions, apples (Fuji, definitely looking a little past their prime as we near the end of cold season storage), spinach, cucumbers, romaine lettuce, mushrooms, asparagus, eggs, and bread (Breadery sourdough).

Progress report: So far we’ve already eaten the mushrooms (sauteed in butter, served alongside steak), asparagus (seasoned and broiled, served alongside stir-fried beef and eggplant), spinach (wilted, seasoned, and served as a side, with some pureed for the Little Princess), and cucumbers (refrigerator-pickled).

The romaine lettuce is going to get brushed with a vinagrette and thrown on the grill. I sliced up onions last night after the kids went to bed, and they (the onions, not the kids) are going to get sauteed up with some sliced peppers tonight (busy mom tip: prep as much as possible the night before). Potatoes will be quartered, folded into a foil packet with some oil and herbs, and left on the grill to roast in the carryover heat; ditto the beets from last week. So happy that grilling season is back again!

Our patio garden is also coming back to life with some thyme, basil and habanero peppers (from the Thursday farmer’s market at East Columbia library) as well as parsley, rosemary, poblano, and ghost peppers (from the Sunday market at Oakland Mills). Looking forward to adding some tomato plants too, and probably more peppers. Someday we’ll graduate to a proper plot of land in our backyard, but for now, the patio container garden is about all I can handle.

The guy at the TLV Tree Farm stand said that his strawberries were looking good, and would be available in a couple more weeks. I’m really looking forward to taking the Little Prince berry picking again this year.