It’s the 2018 Summer CSA Season!
Yay – our first CSA box is due to arrive next week and we couldn’t be more excited. Each year, for the past five years, we have been lucky to receive a box of fresh, clean, amazing vegetables from Burning River Farm in Frederic, Wisconsin. If you are at all interested in trying a CSA, I cannot recommend Burning River Farm enough. They provide a wide variety of vegetables, the produce is packed very well and is very clean, and Mike’s weekly newsletter is informative and fun. A fantastic farm, with great people – why not give them your support and get healthy organic vegetables all summer long?
We see our CSA as an “outward bound” of vegetable consumption. Because this big box of beautiful, fresh, organic vegetables shows up week after week, we have to come up with a plan and work the plan. This way of purchasing vegetables is so much better (for us) than going to the farmer’s market or coop and “choosing” what vegetables to buy. The big box of produce makes us deal with vegetable abundance instead of what we would naturally choose: eating more carbs and going out to eat more often than we should.
Vegetable Abundance – without the Waste
We hate when we don’t get to our vegetables before the next box arrives. We hate it when the greens go bad before they make it to our salad bowl. With this constant influx of vegetables, we need a to triage our bounty, make a meal plan to make sure we get to everything in our allotted time frame (one week), and have a wide variety of recipes so we don’t get tired of too many eggplants or that bumper crop of zucchini. Be realistic: sometimes the plan means you will want to freeze or can or pickle what you won’t be able to consume. Do this right away. Don’t wait to the end of the week, when the veggies are weak, to try to preserve them. It’s not worth it.
Triage Your Vegetables
Each week, a variety of tender greens, juicy brassicas, crunchy cucumbers, zucchinis, legumes, and root vegetables arrive. It’s important to create a meal plan that uses the most tender and perishable items first, saving the more hearty, shelf-worthy vegetables for later in the week. We like to inventory our box, creating a list of greens and vegetables in the order that they are most likely to spoil or wilt. This usually means salads and creamy green soups at the beginning of the week, grilling and fresh stir fries mid week, with roasting and more chunky soups end of week.
The Vegetable Meal Plan
Each week, after we’ve received and inventoried our CSA box, we will be posting a meal plan and recipes that will show you how we are going to enjoy the current harvest. We unpack out box, remove any greens from the roots (radishes, carrots, beets, etc.), estimate the number servings received, and make an ordered list (as mentioned above). Once we have a good idea of what we have, we map the servings to the meals available for each day of the week.
Technically speaking, each person eats 21 meals per week. That said, are you willing to eat vegetables for each and every one of those meals? We decided: YES !!
I can no longer find the original article that I read years ago. It was about living on a Paleo diet (hard to do on a plant-based diet). The main take away from that article, that changed our lives for the better, is: Stop Eating Breakfast. Eat Lunch TWICE. I know. Crazy. But we gave it a shot. Instead of having cereal (carbs), pancakes (carbs), muffins (carbs), or fruit smoothies (sugar and carbs) we started having soup. Sure, we love having our soup with fresh bread (carbs), but it really helped us eat more vegetables and made our task of getting all of the veggies consumed each week that much easier.
The Shopping List
Once we’ve mapped out the veggies to the days of the week, and have decided on the recipes, each week, we will make a shopping list to share with you. This will include a lot of the staples that we have on hand, in case those items aren’t a normal part of your pantry. We will also try to provide alternatives ingredients when we are using something that may not suit all tastes, but our main focus will remain on enjoying the vegetables. We are not experts on special diets and will assume you know how to make the proper substitutions for your specific situation.
Sign up for Updates
If you would like to receive the meal plan, shopping list and links to the recipes each week, sign up to receive our email updates. We would also love it if you shared our recipes on social media and rated any recipe that you have tried. We will keep adding recipes and meal plans as the summer progresses and beyond the end of this year’s CSA.