It’s not that I’m one of those veggie-hating vegetarians. I love vegetables, I just hate having to cook them — or anything else. I really wasn’t kidding. After those first couple weeks, the excitement fizzled out of the relationship. Week after week of kale and beets were more commitment than my limited culinary patience could handle.

But I found someone else. We were introduced by Laura (who also had commitment issues with the traditional CSA relationship).

Friends, meet Harvest Kitchen. This is Community Supported Agriculture for lazy people, busy people and those who hate to cook. (I might be all of the above.) You buy the farm share, they cook it up with other locally-sourced ingredients. 

The menu for our first date: Lentil Shepherd’s Pie, Marinara Sauce with Pasta, Potato Leek Soup, Coleslaw, and Deertracks Farm Salad Mix with Honey Dijon Dressing. Sigh. This could be The One.

It wasn’t all bad with Frog Holler Farm. After all, we had the newsletter. Week Six had an update that made me smile: “A happy, probably chubby, and still very elusive groundhog has made a nice lunch out of one end of the new broccoli patch, preferring the stiff and fibrous broccoli leaves to the juicy cantaloupe with which we have baited the live trap.” I could get along with that smart, broccoli-loving groundhog.

It was exciting when zucchini came around at Week Seven. I love zukes almost as much as I love broccoli and the recipes for zucchini fritters and zucchini chocolate chip cookies (which is apparently Barbara Kingsolver’s recipe) on the Frog Holler blog almost made me wish I could cook.

Week Eight also had quite the newsletter gem about carrot shenanigans: “If you have grown carrots in your garden before, perhaps you have already witnessed some of the hanky-panky that happens under the covers. Carrots may seem straight-laced in your cole slaw or stir-fry, but don’t let that crunchy exterior fool you. We have found many a carrot entwined in a passionate embrace with its neighbor.” Anyone else blushing a little?

But the charming broccoli-hog, the zucchini temptation and the passion of the carrots weren’t enough.

Frog Holler Farm, you’re an awesome organic community farm with a very cool animal welfare history. Really … It’s not you, it’s me.

Harvest Kitchen, I’m looking forward to our time together.

photo credit: ilovemypit

Clearly, I’ve been remiss in my CSA blogging. And, after learning that some people are using salad spinners to save lives, my weekly lettuce adventures kind of, well, wilted in comparison.

But for those of you who aren’t looking to create centrifuges out of kitchen gadgets and just want to know how a person wrangles a weekly farm share when her cooking prowess really needs no more than an easy-bake oven, or for my friends who wonder how I manage to survive without the pizza delivery guy on speed dial (he’s not … I swear!), here’s an update from weeks four and five.

Week Four’s Share:  carrots, zucchini, pac choi, broccoli, purslane, arugula, basil, lettuce, parsley, rainbow chard, scallions and,  yes, kale.

So, the problem with having limited abilities in the kitchen is that you’re, well, limited. I had a lot of the same this week – more concoctions involving kale, scallions, olive oil and rice. It’s good, it’s easy, but it’s not the most exciting dish by the eighth time in four weeks. However, this week did mark the introduction of my farm share to my George Foreman grill. I made sandwiches of grilled zucchini with a little parmesan that were excellent. I’m a big fan of grilled zucchini … fingers crossed that there’s more to come.

Interesting newsletter tidbit of the week: “Last week, we sent 80 beautiful leaves of Rainbow Chard to a former CSA member’s wedding … to be used in the table bouquets! There was a chard theme throughout the wedding, even with small drawings of chard leaves gracing the invitations.” That’s some serious chard love. (I was hoping for a chard bouquet photo for this post, but when you put “chard bouquet” into the creative commons search, it basically tells you that combining those words is crazy talk.)

Week Five’s Box o’ Goodness: celery, eggplant, potatoes (yay!), carrots, beets, cabbage, pac choi, lettuce, chard, scallions and more kale.

First, the newsletter, because it featured … me. In case you missed it, I wrote about the incredible animal welfare history of Frog Holler Organic Farm over at Change.org, which they shared with the handful of people who read the newsletter as closely as I do (thanks!).

This week, our third CSA-buddy was back from Africa (really), which took a bit of the kale/chard/scallion pressure off. As we divvied up our share in the middle of a parking lot, some sacrifices had to be made. There’s just  no good way to third a head of cabbage or an eggplant on the hood of a car. I let those go. But somehow I ended up with all the beets. The roasted beets had worked out okay the other week, but the problem with beets is that you need something to go with them. You can’t just cook them all up, throw them on rice and call it a meal. Last time I had leftovers I could add them to … this time, I was stuck.

At the end of another week of veggies stir-fried with rice or sauteed with pasta, with a drawer full of beets, I’ve come to the realization that I might need to resort to recipes. It will probably involve grocery shopping, too. And, thus the CSA adventure becomes adventurous once more. I’m not sure I can handle it. So, if anyone knows what to do with beets in 5 ingredients or less, let me know.

Photo credit: eflon

Okay, how much kale can one person eat?

I have nothing against kale; it’s just not the first thing I grab in the fridge. The CSA newsletter this week was pretty kale-focused, admitting that “there is a slightly unusual presentation of kale in the box” (I assume they’re referring to the big chunk of kale on the stem instead of just getting the leaves) and offering up a blog called 365 Days of Kale. I guess that answers how much kale one person can eat. More power to the blogger, but that’s probably about 300 days of kale more than I can handle.

I had a backlog of last week’s curly kale in the fridge and there was more regular kale this week. With Russian kale on the list for tomorrow’s box o’ veggies, you can probably guess what dinner was tonight. Kale. Okay, not just kale, I threw in the beet greens, garlic scapes, olive oil and pasta. (Ingredient Count: 5)

This week’s share, in addition to kale: cabbage, rainbow chard, scallions, lettuce, romaine, beets, garlic scapes, arugula, radishes.

Find of the Week: Whole Foods has these awesome salad shakers. I don’t know about you, but I love salad with a lot of stuff on it – different veggies, grains, nuts, olives, whatever. I’m into everything-but-the-kitchen-sink-or-meat salads, but obviously, unless I hit up a salad bar, creating one of those concoctions exceeds my internal ingredient limit. That’s why Whole Foods salad shakers rock my world – one cup with half a dozen pre-chopped ingredients, plus dressing. They’re pretty good on their own, and they add a whole new level of excitement to CSA greens and cabbage.

The last two big accomplishments of Week #3:

1) Thanks to a Mom-internet tag-team, I successfully roasted raw beets. But the real accomplishment? I did so without tie-dyeing my clothing or making my kitchen look like a crime scene.

2) There was more bartering of HBO for cooked veggies. What can I say? I put the “share” in CSA-sharing. And there’s a good chance this will be an ongoing deal.  Makes this whole CSA thing a lot more palatable (literally and figuratively).

Photo credit: Darwin Bell

The second eleventh hour (for the vegetables, not for me) achievement was my quick fried rice. A little olive oil, chopped up garlic scapes and the rest of the scallions. Add brown rice (the three-minute microwave kind from Trader Joe’s – I’m not waiting all day for rice to cook!), toss in some soy sauce, and voila! Yeah, I came up with this one all by myself. So big! And it was tasty, too. (Ingredient Count: the Big Five)

I started off Week 2 with a little cheating … I mean, bartering. Bartering is all in the CSA spirit, right? Right? My co-sharers were both out of town this past weekend, so I traded my HBO and some veggies for someone else to pick up my share from the farmers market. I also conned her into a little cooking and got an awesome rice and kale and random other stuff dish (but I’m pretty sure it stayed close to my five ingredient limit).

This week’s share included: curly kale, scallions, beets, radishes, garlic scapes, spinach, sweet basil, purslane, strawberries, red bibb lettuce, and parsley.

What the f#*% is purslane, you ask? (At least, that’s what I asked…) Apparently the dish in the photo I’ve included is sauteed purslane. Whoever made that wins, because that’s not what my dinner looks like. According to this week’s CSA newsletter: “Purslane’s leaves are tender and succulent; its flavor has been described as peppery cucumber.”

If they say so. I can’t say I have any strong feelings about purslane so far; it’s just little green leaves to throw in other dishes.

However, I am excited about the fresh basil. Going to whip up some pasta with basil, spinach, tomato and olive oil for dinner tonight (Ingredient Count: 5).

Sorry, no fun fact from the newsletter this week. There was an article on the history of the salad share, and if you’re that interested, you can read it here. But I can smell that basil, so it’s time to sign off and get started on dinner. Maybe I’ll even throw in some purslane. (Nah, too many ingredients!)

For the first time, I’m splitting a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) share with some friends. It’s a pretty monumental deal for me. It’s not that I don’t support local farmers, or that I have something against sharing, or even that I don’t love veggies (I could live off broccoli!) it’s just that mounds of fresh vegetables in the house require preparation. And I don’t cook.

So, the goal with my share of the CSA share is to put good veggies to good use with as little effort as possible. I’ll even include the ingredient count for everything I try to see how many times I get beyond five ingredients. Believe me, this is no Julie & Julia knock-off. This isn’t going to be a daily blog topic and, besides, we’re talking a kitchen acumen somewhere between the Swedish Chef and Moby, my big-pawed, year-old pit bull who likes to try and help with the dishes. It’s not my mom’s fault.

I know, this is more vegetable rescue than animal rescue, so it’s a little out of the norm for what you see on this blog. But it’s not totally irrelevant. For one thing, these veggies will stay vegetarian. As my friend Lauren (farmer’s market maven who I will no doubt rely on for quick prep tips) would say, nothing with a face will be on this menu. What’s even more interesting is that my friends and I chose Frog Holler, a local farm that’s not only organic, but has a big-time animal welfare tie-in.

… which brings us to this week’s Fun Fact from the Newsletter (paraphrased by me):

Frog Holler was owned for a couple of decades, back in the day, by the Gesell family. Dr. Robert Gesell was the chair of the department of physiology at University of Michigan’s med school, and he rocked his colleagues’ world by publishing a paper calling for the humane treatment of lab animals and an end to vivisection.. His daughter, Christine Stevens, carried the torch and became known as the “Mother of the Animal Protection Movement” for her work on many of our major federal animal welfare laws and founder of the Animal Welfare Institute.

So, yes, there’s a newsletter each week that tells us what we’re getting and, sometimes, what to do with it, plus some other random bits of information. Now, on to the main event.

This week, our share included: red salad bowl lettuce and red romaine or salad mix, red russian kale, spinach, scallions, French breakfast radishes, broccoli (yay!), garlic scapes, rhubarb, and strawberries.

Day One: The newsletter suggested slicing up the French breakfast radishes onto a sandwich, which is a good thing because I would have had no idea what to do with them. I tasted one in the raw and it was nice and crunchy, but on the bitter side. I added it to an English muffin with a bit of cream cheese and it was quite tasty. I will probably get rid of the rest of the radishes tomorrow with the same breakfast. (Ingredient Count: 3)

For lunch, I mixed up the salad-y stuff, chopped up some scallions, drizzled a little olive oil and cheese, and had a big salad. Easy ’nuff, though my big adventure there was digging out my old salad spinner. (Ingredient Count: 4, maybe higher if you counted the salad-y stuff separately, but since it all came to me in a big box and that’s how I grabbed it, I’m counting it as one.)

For dinner … I ordered take-out. I’ve got to pace myself here. But I did slice up some of the strawberries on top of a brownie for dessert, and that was a definite win.

My next meal adventure was dinner on Day Two. I sauteed broccoli and garlic scapes in some olive oil and poured it over pasta with a little Italian seasoning. (Ingredient Count: 5!) If you’ve never seen garlic scapes, they’re kind of fun. Apparently they’re the curly flower stem produced before garlic bulbs mature. They have a scallions-meet-curly-straw look and the flavor is, as you might guess, garlicky.

Oh, and I managed to use both a pot and a pan for this meal without setting off the smoke alarm. But the alarm batteries might be low (seriously).

The rhubarb still taunts me, but I have some ideas from friends on how to conquer it.

My final thought for my first few days in Produce Land: Olive oil is a farm share’s best friend.

photos by: sciondriver and grongar