#farm share

[copperbadge]

My latest farm share box has arrived! My stove looks like a deranged still life. There’s also a new dozen eggs in the fridge. 

[ID: My stove, looking like a deranged still life; sitting on it are paper bags of pears, bread, and mushrooms, a pile of sweet potatoes and daikon, a sole rutabaga, a massive sack of banana peppers, and a bag of lettuce greens.]

So tomorrow is a cooking day! I probably won’t get everything cooked but the plan is to dehydrate the banana peppers (don’t know what the fuck else to do with something I don’t want to eat), make pesto out of the mizuna because I also have basil, make “latkes” with the rutabagas, fried “meatballs” with the daikon, and “pulled pork” with the oyster mushrooms, make sweet potato gratin and possibly bake a sweet potato for sweet potato bread, and throw the pears into a crumble with the apples from last time.  

Now that I have an ADHD diagnosis the symptoms sometimes get really visible, like when I put the apples in the crisper and forgot they were there because they were hidden behind the impenetrable barrier of the crisper drawer (this is why I never put stuff in the crisper drawer). So now when my farm share comes in, I list everything in it on my To Do list so that way I either eat or process the food somehow and it doesn’t begin to compost in the bottom of the fridge. 

I also have half a cabbage from last time. Might try the cabbage pancakes again. Oooh, or mix some of the cabbage in with the rutabaga. 

Anyway I’ll share photos and any useful recipes. We who are about to eat a lot more vegetables than usual salute you!

[coffeegleek]

First ever farm share and first share of the season. They said not to expect much the first few weeks as these are the cool season crops.

We bought a half share, a fruit share, and an egg share.

Now to go scouer my vegetarian and WWII cookbooks to figure out how to not hate radishes.

Also, I did not know until now that radish leaves irritate the skin. :/

[copperbadge]

[ID: My stove, covered in food; a jug of cider, a loaf of rye bread, a bag of shiitake mushrooms and one of pecans, three pounds of beef, fingerling potatoes, carrots, vidalia onions, pink lady apples, a pie pumpkin, and a dozen eggs. As usual, it looks like a bizarre Old Master painting.]

The latest farm share box has arrived! The bounty of the midwest truly knows no limit. 

I get veggies every two weeks and once a month I get meat as well; this time the meat came labeled with a handwritten tag which made me laugh uproariously for some reason. It’s the name of my punk band. 

[ID: A photograph of the tag that came attached to the beef, a piece of torn white paper labeled, in neat handwriting, “Mixed Beef”.]

I’m going to caramelize the onions and probably roast the mushrooms, cook up the ground beef into burgers and turn some of the other meat into more homemade italian beef, and possibly roast the pumpkin. 

[copperbadge]

Hi Sam! I hope you're doing well! Could you tell me (or point me to a previous post) about the farmshare thing you get? Is it local or could I sign up for it in a different state?

It's local, I'm afraid, but you may have one near you that's just as good! Especially during the pandemic a bunch of new ones popped up. If you google "farm share" or "farm CSA" in your area you may find a few.

Mine is through Urban Canopy. They call it a "LUCSA" which stands for Local Unified Community Supported Agriculture. Some just go by "CSA" but when I called it that someone pointed out that people who don't want to see discussions of child exploitation have it blacklisted, so I started calling it a Farm Share, which is another common name for it. I'm actually super lucky; prior to the pandemic a lot of the community agriculture in Chicago either didn't deliver to my area or didn't deliver at all, and now there are several.

The idea is that farms local to your region create a box of their product on a regular schedule and you pay a flat fee per box. Usually you can't choose what goes in it, it's just what's in season. Farm share boxes tend to be more expensive than what you'd pay at the grocery store, but I'm now in a position where I can pay more for fresh food and feel good about supporting local small farms and businesses without worrying about the cost.

I pre-paid for the season (15 boxes) and bought a meat add-on, so I pay somewhere around $60-$70 per box (plus delivery tip), brought to me twice-monthly from October through March by a delightful woman named Yarrow. In each box I get roughly a gallon of beverage (some alcoholic, some non), a loaf of bread, a dozen eggs, a pound or so of mushrooms, and, once monthly, three pounds of meat. Those are what convinced me to invest, because as someone who doesn't eat a lot of veg I wanted at least a handful of things I was guaranteed to like, and I love eggs and mushrooms and meat. In addition to the above, the box usually contains a large bag of greens (last one was kale) plus 5-8 different in-season veggies and fruits, like potatoes, onions, apples, peppers, radishes, carrots, et cetera.

So I've...basically stopped having to go to the grocery store. I still go once in a while for staples, but it's gone from once a week to about once a month, and I live mostly on what's in my CSA box and the occasional meal out.

There are some farm shares now where they send you a list of options and you pick; in Chicago, it's Tomato Mountain, which I'm going to look into when this farm share runs out, although I've been very happy with Urban Canopy so far in terms of food quality, amount, and convenience. I was thinking I probably wouldn't renew my subscription for the summer season, but after a few months of the winter season I'm reconsidering that.

So yeah, if you have the money and can eat veg and take regular deliveries, I think it's a cool way to get your food -- you're supporting local businesses and at least in my case learning how to cook new dishes or improvising with familiar ones.

[copperbadge]

OMG RUTABAGAS. 😱 There are some vegetables that should be treated as unexploded ordinance, and this is one of them; they are, like rhubarb, edible only in very specific cooking circumstances, and only when they don’t taste like themselves. They should come with a warning label and a list of “thou shants”. Maybe crowdsource your next novel vegetable?

LOL! Well, with the farm share I'm basically playing vegetable Go Fish, they just kinda bring me whatever they've got. I did the math and it's about $80 per box, but given that the box comes with eggs, beverage, bread, meat, and mushrooms guaranteed, that's like $40 right there these days, and the rest covers both the food they bring and a bit of what I consider "giving" to support local farms. I probably won't do a summer farm share just because the winter produce appeals to me more, but that's what Farmer's Markets are for :D

[copperbadge]

if you get rutabagas in your farm share again: there's a fancy vegan restaurant in philly called vedge that makes a rutabaga-based fondue that's fantastic and there are a bunch of recipe blogs that have done takes on it. not being a supertaster, I'm not sure how much the rutabaga flavor would come through for you, but there are certainly more other flavors involved than in a latke and none of the same textural issues. sorry the latkes didn't work, that sounded like a fun idea!

I do think if I get a rutabaga again I'll try something else with it -- I mean why not, I might as well -- but I think probably it's just the supertaster thing ruining it. Then again, if I could make a dish that smothers the flavor rather than featuring it as the latkes did, who knows.

At the moment I'm dehydrating the banana peppers; I think I'll put those in a nice jar once they're fully dried, and give them to someone I don't know very well as a holiday gift. :D Maybe someone at work.

[agreenroad]

Cow Share Program, Buy Meat In Bulk. How Does It Work? How Much Money Can It Save In Food Budget?

Mpumelelo Ncwadi @seeitamble Mar 5 If you had the opportunity to buy a cow share or sheep share, would you be interested? 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, or whole carcass. Cut and deliver. Great tasting meat to share with family and friends. The idea of cow, sheep, pig and chicken shares is part of a back to the land movement which includes people wanting to know the source of their food, and to make it organic…

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