Last week: chard, romaine lettuce, kale, eggplant, radishes, strawberries, cucumber, and apples. This week was a bonus item so we got almond granola in place of eggs.

I cooked down the chard and kale with some olive oil and garlic, and stashed it in the fridge for quick weekday meals. We had the lettuce as salad (my preferred salad topping is soy sauce and an over-easy egg, whereas K prefers a quick vinaigrette of balsamic vinegar and blood orange olive oil*). The eggplant and some of the radishes are still hanging out in the fridge, and K turned the cucumber into a garlicky Hungarian cucumber salad to go with his grandmother’s recipe for chicken paprikash. It’s incredibly good. Maybe I’ll share the recipe here, if he allows it.

There was also supposed to be a loaf of bread, but I forgot to pick up the bread because it was right next to the strawberries. In-season strawberries! I was so excited that I bought an extra quart.

They’re not Maryland strawberries, I think, because the ones at Larriland Farm aren’t ready yet. These are probably from somewhere down south where it’s been warmer. But there’s nothing like the intense flavor of an in-season, fresh-picked, almost-too-ripe strawberry. When I bought the extra quart, I was entertaining the idea of making strawberry shortcake, or maybe cooking them down into a coulis to top ice cream.

Who was I kidding? We ate them all just as they were, licking the juice from our fingers. Man, I can’t wait until strawberry harvest hits Maryland. I intend to do some serious damage to the stocks at Larriland and at the farmer’s markets.

…Just a reminder, because Jessie made a comment last week: unlike Breezy Willow’s summer CSA, their spring CSA is not local and a lot of the produce is from farms up and down the East Coast. Anything out of cold storage is from Maryland, but the citrus is from Florida, and then as warmer weather moves up the coast, we get greens from Georgia and North Carolina; we don’t start getting freshly harvested stuff from Maryland until May. It’s all from organic, natural, or IPM farms, so I’m still happy to support it, but just in case anyone was thinking they could find this stuff in Maryland farmer’s markets… you’ll have to wait just a little longer.

(I’m bursting with impatience, myself. I can’t wait for the berry harvest!)

* We got the blood orange olive oil from LOVE in Frederick. It’s worth a visit if you find yourself out there; they sell flavored oils and vinegars, and they let you taste and sniff as much as you want. We got a mushroom scented oil as well, and had to stop ourselves from buying more.