17 June 2010

Arugula, Basil, Beet greens, Bok choi, Garlic Scapes, Kohlrabi, Lettuce, Parsley

Here is a bit of the farm, literally.

When you signed up for our CSA you signed up for a share of our farm. You probably had in mind receiving a portion of the harvest, a weekly delivery during the season of a range of vegetables and herbs, some completely familiar, some in unexpected hues and shapes, some less common, and some deeply mysterious. And you will get that.

Take this week’s bag, for instance. There’s nothing particularly odd about the lettuce—except, of course, that it was picked yesterday just for you from a farm you are encouraged to visit by people you can talk to about how they grew it. That’s pretty odd these days when much of what people eat has traveled far from the deliberately anonymous field, often making several stops along the way in industrial facilities so that by the time it arrives at the consumer’s mouth it has taken the form of a Hot Pocket or a Lunchable.

There’s nothing particularly odd about beet greens and bok choi either. What is odd is that more people don’t eat them and eat them more frequently. I suppose I should not be surprised given the minor role any vegetables other than the (fried) potato and tomato (sauce) play in the average American diet. In fact, I am not surprised. That was just a rhetorical device. But I can lament how unappreciated these greens are nonetheless. They are tasty, full of nutrients and easy to cook. You could do nothing more than steam them and sprinkle them with salt and perhaps a little vinegar to make a good dish.

Of course, you can do more with these greens than that if you want. You can top your steamed bok choi with a mixture of soy sauce, Chinese vinegar, sesame oil, chili-bean paste, sugar and ground pepper. You can add your beet greens to a salad along with some goat cheese, toasted walnuts and a good balsamic vinaigrette. Or you could sauté them in olive oil with some garlic (note to new members: you will quickly come to recognize that I think nearly everything should be sautéed in olive oil with garlic, a fixation for which I feel no need to apologize). Fortunately, we have included some garlic in your bag. You just may not recognize it as such since it is in the form of scapes: the curlicue flower stems of hard neck garlic. Fun to play with, it also has an excellent mild garlic flavor. Cut it into pieces and cook it slowly until tender before adding the greens. You could also puree it with the basil and parsley (and arugula), olive oil, some parmesan, a healthy dose of salt and pepper and, if you like, a bit of crushed red pepper and lemon juice, and you will have an excellent sauce for pasta, meat, fish or vegetables. You could peel and slice your kohlrabi (the purple orb that looks like something from outer space) and dip it in the sauce.

I could keep on listing things you could do with your share and offering more of my cryptic recipes. But I am not sure it would be a good use of paper. In any event, you can find useful recipes for many of the vegetables you will receive on the website (theallegedfarm.com). And you may well have better ways to prepare the produce than I do. If so, I hope you will send me your recipes so that I can add them to the ones already on the website and share them with your fellow CSA members.

Plus I have that odd first sentence hanging out there unexplained. It would be nice to get around to saying what I mean before I reach the second page.

Oops.

When I say you are literally getting a share of the farm many of you may think I am referring to the small amounts of organic matter that turn up clinging to your produce—the bit of dirt in the scallions’ roots, the odd piece of straw mulch clinging to the beet greens. Well, that is a bit of the farm, I suppose, a small reminder that your vegetables come out of our dirt. But I was thinking of the vegetables themselves as a part of the farm.

All the vegetable seeds we plant in the course of the year (excluding seed potatoes, of which we planted 1200 pounds this spring) would fill about two of the brown paper bags in which we send out the shares. But with those seeds we will grow enough vegetables to fill 3800 of those bags, keep our market stall stocked for the season, feed ourselves (and people who do farm work eat a lot) and give away a few tons of extra produce to Community Action. Where does all that mass come from? It comes out of our dirt—out of the sunlight and rain that falls on it, the water than flows beneath it, the minerals and nutrients and organic compounds in it. The dirt is at the heart of what we do. It makes farming possible. It is the farm. And the vegetables are just the dirt—the farm—transformed. So when we pack your share we are not just assembling a part of the harvest for you—a head of lettuce, a bunch of greens, a sprig of basil—we are sending you a little bit of the farm itself (happily an edible bit).

CSA farmers like to talk about creating direct connections between consumers and the source of their food. We create these connections most obviously by offering seasonal produce from a single source, but also by sharing news about what is happening on the farm and by having members come and see the farm for themselves (as you can do on Saturday, June 26^th). But for better or worse we all have a direction connection to the sources of all our food. Food is not just from but of a place, whether that place is a processing plant in the Midwest, a plantation in Honduras or the field behind my house. Wherever your food comes from, you are eating a bit of that place, and that is a pretty direct connection.

What a CSA farmer tries to do is make that connection as simple and clear and healthy as possible. For consumers, understanding how a Hot Pocket comes be would require degrees in chemical and industrial engineering, a solid grasp of marketing and economics, and a fistful of subpoenas. The food in your CSA share is a lot easier to understand, even if you do not recognize it. It all comes from the dirt on our farm, dirt you can come and stick your hands in—and I hope you will. We would love to show you where the different crops are growing, answer your questions about what we do, listen to your suggestions, let you pitch in with a simple farm chore to get a sense of how we spend our days growing your food. You have every reason to want to know about the farm. After all, you are going to be eating a share of it.