Feeling The Vegetable Love

I was going to do my 30 Week Writing Challenge post today but Dave has been really busy at work lately and couldn't scan my pictures so that post is coming next week. And sorry I repeated some pictures from yesterday's post but some of them were necessary for this one too! #bloggerfail

Tuesdays are one of my favourite days of the whole entire week. That's because on Tuesday, we get to do our CSA (community shared agriculture) pickup and our house becomes inundated with fresh veggies. And eggs. And flowers. And, for the past couple of weeks, meat. And as I mentioned yesterday, then we are basically set for food.

CSA, for those of you who don't know, is when you pay a farmer to grow vegetables. They grow whatever they decide to and you get a regular share every week. My friend, Angie, started this CSA about six years ago and we joined to support her and because we wanted to eat locally. So every week from about mid-June to October, we get to go pick up our vegetables. (And flowers. And eggs. And meat.)

Every CSA works a little differently, but I really like Angie's because it has a "choice table." This is where we get to choose a number of items, based on the size of our share.

This year a friend of Angie's decided to start a flower CSA. She also sold shares and I bought one as a Christmas gift to me from my parents. Stephanie has various bouquets of flowers available each week and we get to choose which ones we like. If you follow me on Instagram, you will have gotten to see some of my amazing bouquets.

Angie also started an egg share, since she has some chickens. We get half a dozen farm fresh eggs each week and I have been so thankful for those.

And Angie's partner, Darrel, has started selling organic meat, which he raises, at the pick up. Since our CSA months mean we eat a lot of BBQ with steamed greens, fresh salads, and/or grilled veggies, Dave has started buying some meat from Darrel to BBQ.

One of the things I love about the CSA is that we get vegetables we normally wouldn't buy. Like kale. And hakurei turnips. And a variety of greens. We make kale chips, we grill beets, we steam greens. And we all love them, especially Sam. He eats such a great variety of vegetables in the summer. He devours a bunch of kale (in chip form (baked with olive oil and a little salt)) like they're going out of style, he munches and crunches his way through kohlrabi and hakurei turnips, and, of course, every week, Angie gathers up some sorrel for Sam and he gets his special delivery.

 

And then there's Nasturtium Salad which has become a new favourite in our family!

So all of this is to say, we love our CSA, in case you hadn't figured that out yet! If you have the option to join one, my advice is to DO IT. You may get some weird vegetables every once in awhile (I'm looking at you fennel) but the new discoveries you will make are more than worth it.

And now I'm off to make some kale chips.