We love food. Well, Laurie loves food, but I (Lauren) LOVE food. I really do. I love food shopping, reading magazines like Food & Wine and Saveur, venturing to new restaurants, discovering recipes, cooking and especially eating. Like most Americans, we are far too often guilty of valuing convenience over quality and grabbing take-out Thai food or ordering pizza, so back during the long, snowy winter, Laurie and I decided to join a Community Supported Agriculture program and split a small share of vegetables from Earth Spring Farm in Pennsylvania.
What the heck is a CSA you might ask? Essentially, it is a simple way to purchase fresh, local produce while supporting a small farm. Both Laurie and I grew up in the country and could find decent vegetables in our families’ gardens or at roadside produce stands, but here in D.C., there’s neither the space nor opportunity to grow our own produce. By purchasing a small share of vegetables from the farm, we will receive a weekly box of seasonally available vegetables from early June through late November and pick up the box from a neighbor’s porch every Thursday. In our “pre-harvest” e-mails we’ve received from Earth Spring, we’ve been told to expect everything from kale, collards and carrots to winter squash, cauliflower and kohlrabi.
I consider myself to be a good cook (with the exception of my risotto, which is always a little crunchy), but this will be a new experience for me given that we won’t have a choice with regard to the vegetables we receive weekly. Friends that have been members of CSAs before have given the experience mixed reviews, and some have gone so far as to swear off kale for the rest of their lives. Still, I’m optimistic. This whole experience will probably be fun – it might be challenging, but it will most definitely be interesting.
Tonight is the first pick-up day for our CSA, so get excited for the great vegetable unveiling!
Lauren
What the heck is a CSA you might ask? Essentially, it is a simple way to purchase fresh, local produce while supporting a small farm. Both Laurie and I grew up in the country and could find decent vegetables in our families’ gardens or at roadside produce stands, but here in D.C., there’s neither the space nor opportunity to grow our own produce. By purchasing a small share of vegetables from the farm, we will receive a weekly box of seasonally available vegetables from early June through late November and pick up the box from a neighbor’s porch every Thursday. In our “pre-harvest” e-mails we’ve received from Earth Spring, we’ve been told to expect everything from kale, collards and carrots to winter squash, cauliflower and kohlrabi.
I consider myself to be a good cook (with the exception of my risotto, which is always a little crunchy), but this will be a new experience for me given that we won’t have a choice with regard to the vegetables we receive weekly. Friends that have been members of CSAs before have given the experience mixed reviews, and some have gone so far as to swear off kale for the rest of their lives. Still, I’m optimistic. This whole experience will probably be fun – it might be challenging, but it will most definitely be interesting.
Tonight is the first pick-up day for our CSA, so get excited for the great vegetable unveiling!
Lauren
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