One Straw Eating: CSA Recap & Top 10

The CSA has come to an end, and I thought I’d do a recap. There were some aspects that were tough about it, but I’d absolutely do it again. I’d highly encourage everyone to find one in your area. You’ll eat better while probably not spending more than you would buying veggies at your grocery store, and you’ll be supporting local (probably organic) agriculture.

Our CSA was of course One Straw Farm in White Hall, MD – about 40 miles away from our home. But they have weekly pickups all over the area, so we only had to go a couple of miles every week to get our veggies. We got 24 weeks of veggies at a total cost of $570, which we split with another couple. So with a per-person upfront cost of $142.50, that works out to $5.94 per week for 8 different organic vegetables. I’ve never kept track of what I spend on veggies at the grocery store, but that seems like a pretty good deal. If we do the early bird discount next year, it will be even less.

Obviously, you get a ton of vegetables. Even with splitting each week’s share, it was sometimes more than rob and I could handle. Not that we couldn’t have eaten everything, but for busy people who are often not home (and as working musicians, often eating out at gigs), it was hard to plan to use and cook everything. Some things did get wasted – more than I would have liked – but overall, considering our schedule, I think decent use was made of what we got. There were times when I did feel a little held-hostage by the produce lurking at home. After an exhausting day at work--sometimes not getting home until 11pm or later after a gig--it’s tempting to grab fast food or whip up a box of Kraft mac & cheese. And often, we did. Most of what’s featured on this blog was made on my days off or evenings when I got home at a decent hour – I certainly don’t eat like this all the time! I sometimes tried to plan for leftovers or would freeze things, but not as much as I could have. I think I also lost steam towards the end of this (or maybe was just busier than usual). In a way I'm glad to have a little break so I can go back to just having what I "need" on hand.

And we did get some things we weren’t crazy about. Still not a huge fan of radishes or cabbage. We seemed to get green peppers almost every week—which I like, but not that much. A lot of lettuce went to waste. If lettuce was all we were getting, I probably would have made more salads. But with all the other veggies each week, I just wasn’t that interested in salads.

But let’s look at the good stuff!

The sheer variety of vegetables was just awesome. There were some I’d never eaten before (garlic scapes, celeriac, kohlrabi, purple broccoli). There were many that I’d never bought or prepared before (kale, arugula, collard greens, mustard greens, dandelion greens, pattypan squash, purple basil, radishes). Definitely ate way more greens than I ever have.

The surprise of coming home every Thursday and discovering what we got was fun (I never actually got to do any of the pickups myself because I got home from work too late). It would be nice if we got some kind of heads up from the farm about what we’d get that week – would help a little bit with the planning – but I enjoyed the challenge of it.

In general, the quality of the produce was great. These veggies often aren’t as pretty as what you get at the grocery store, but that’s because they’re not genetically modified or harvested unripe. But they sure taste better. As I posted before, the farm said they had a lot of weather challenges this season and that did affect the quality and/or what they were able to offer sometimes. But that’s part of eating local – you share the good and bad with the farm. There were occasions when things went to waste because they weren’t in great shape by the time we got them or they quickly perished, but for the most part everything was really fresh.

In summary – I’m not a die-hard locavore/food snob, and I understand how difficult it is to eat well when you have a busy life. But the CSA definitely helped with that, and I’d recommend it to anyone—as long as you can deal with the quantity of what you get.

Thought I’d also run down my top 10 favorite dishes that came out of this:

10. Beet-Grapefruit Salad

Fun tastes & textures in this one.