Gastography

Whoo hoo! It’s CSA time again! Time to shrug off winter’s recipe rut and reign spring’s exuberance with bi-monthly boxes of vegetables (and hopefully meat).

This year’s CSA is from Brooklyn Beet CSA. Brooklyn Beet provides veggie shares from Angel Family Farm, a sustainable farm located in Orange County, NY that was created with the support of GrowNYC’s New Farmer Development Project; fruit shares from Hepworth Family Farm, a 250-acre NOFA-certified seventh-generation family farm in Milton, NY; baked goods from Wild Mountain Bread based in Brooklyn; and a wide variety of grass-fed beef, pasture raised pork, and other products (like other meats, cheeses, bread, flour, grains, lax-fermented vegetables, pastas and other pantry goods) from Lewis Waite Farm, which sources from over 35 local family farms.

I purchased a half share, and will be getting a box containing 6-8 vegetables (about 2 bags worth) every other week from June – October (11 shares), and plan on ordering a carnivore share box from Lewis Waite (4-6 lbs. of meat) for pickup each veggie week. I also purchased a “Challenger Share” for the season (6 deliveries total) containing odd bits like animal fats, organ meats, neck bones, shanks, and rendered lard to stretch my culinary skills. The price of my CSA averages out to $25.50 per share for veggies, plus an additional $45 per pickup week for meat/offal. This total will be accounted for in my weekly Adventures In Budget Paleo Cooking posts.

You would think by now that I’d be used to flying blind when it comes to CSA season, since they rarely seem to post previews of upcoming shares, but I’m not. At least not going into this first week. Pickup this year is on Tuesday, so it looks like another summer of alltheveggies for half a week & utilizing the stragglers before they go bad on Mondays and Tuesdays. Such is the life of a CSA devotee. Boom and bust every week (or every other week, in my case).

  

Brooklyn Beets 2015 CSA Box 10

1 bunch spinach
1 head lettuce
1 pumpkin
1 fancy pumpkin
1 kabocha squash
4 ears corn
3 lbs. potatoes

  
Lewis Waite Meat Share Box 9

3 lbs. beef short ribs
2 chicken breasts
1 lb. hot pork sausage

  
Lewis Waite Challenger Share 5

Pork leaf lard

How I Used My Share

I took the single chicken leg, the chicken breasts, 3 of the potatoes, a leftover onion, and the spinach and made a hearty chicken stew.

The lettuce wilted.

I peeled the fancy pumpkin and turned it into a pumpkin chocolate chili.

I made a hot ground pork sausage skillet out of some of the potatoes, the sausage, and some leftover onions.

I turned the corn into a puree, which I served under the short ribs – which I slow-cooked.

Leftovers: Lamb kidneys, 1/2 a pound ground beef, a couple green tomatoes a hand full of parsley, a pumpkin, 2 potatoes and a kabocha squash, lard

My Favorite Dish From This Box

This week, my favorite was the corn puree. This was an ingenious way to use up an ingredient (and I can’t believe I’m saying this) I was sick of.