CSA Weeks 1 and 2

Our CSA from Hickory Mountain Farm started last weekend. We pick up each Saturday at Johnny's in Carrboro, and we get to choose our items! Last Saturday we got spring onions, two kinds of beets, sorrel (a very lemony green that I got to eat for the first time), kohlrabi (also a first for me - it's the purple alien creature in the photo and tastes like the stalk of broccoli), bok choy, and very spicy and delicious mustard greens. So much food! There was also goat cheese from Celebrity Dairy.


We made lots of goodies, including the roasted beet, mozzarella, arugula, and caramelized onion pizza below. I love Barbara Kingsolver's pizza dough recipe. The beets were from the CSA, and the arugula from the garden.


Yesterday's CSA pickup included two sets of beets again, which I roasted while baking bread this morning and plan to put in salads this week. Also a lovely bunch of carrots, eggs, sugar snap peas, and broccoli rabe. Also goat cheese! I plan to try a carrot top pesto with the carrot greens, walnuts/pine nuts, olive oil, garlic, and parmesan cheese. Hopefully it'll be tasty, and a good way to use the greens.


Sara is out of town all week and I'm headed to NYC and my 5th college reunion (Go Wes!) in a few days, so I'm trying to quickly eat as much as I can! I prepped a bunch of lettuce from the garden for salads, roasted the beets, ate half the sugar snap peas raw, and cooked the broccoli rabe tonight for Kate and I using an easy Deborah Madison recipe. Just blanched the whole plant, then chopped it up and sauteed it with garlic, crushed red pepper flakes, and salt, then squeezed some lemon on it. And Kate had the brilliant idea of throwing some soy sauce on at the end. Great stuff! And went perfectly alongside our salad of garden greens, carrots, sunflower seeds, goat cheese, and dried cranberries.

In other exciting news, the first tiny tomatoes are here! They're tiny now, and it's so exciting to watch them grow and know in a few short weeks they'll be huge and tasty and it'll be really really summer.


After realizing that Celebrity tomatoes are determinates, meaning the tomatoes ripen all around the same time, we purchased some Pink Girl plants for the garden as well. They are indeterminates, which means tomatoes will grow at different times over the course of the season. Having a lot of tomatoes at once in a few weeks will be an exciting adventure - get ready for salsa, gazpacho, and if we're really ambitious, maybe even some canning.