Kitchen Tools
-
Recipes
Category Archive
Category Archives: Community Supported Agriculture
Prescott Frost Organic Beef Venture
I love benevolent crazy people, people who just do things because they have to. Sometimes they make sense (Dickson Despommier and vertical farming). Sometimes they make no sense at all (making a farm and raising livestock in urban Oakland, which is what Novella Carpenter did—totally crazy, and she wrote a fabulous book about it called Farm City). I know benevolent insanity the moment I hear it and I heard it the moment I heard Prescott Frost's voice:
“Every acre I can change from corn to grass, the better. It’s the only way we’re going to change this train wreck that we have now,” he told me by phone last week. He was calm and direct. “My mission is to change ...
Also posted in Beef, Business, Farming, Food Politics Tagged agriculture, farming, grass fed, Opensky, organic beef, Prescott Frost Organic Beef Comments closed
Pig Tour
Also posted in Article, Charcutepalooza, Charcuterie, Pork! Tagged cochon 555, cooking competitions, heritage breed pigs Comments closed
Video: Making Artisan Cider
Also posted in Article, Cocktails, Video Tagged apple brandy, apples, artisan cider, british cider, cider, Guardian UK, Julian Temperley, somerset apples, somerset distillery, video Comments closed
CSA Week 20 — The Final Delivery
So this is it, a gloomy fall day, and smallish haul (summer's bounty fading, sigh), with a lot of green plum tomatoes, not even very good green plum tomatoes. Anyone have a good pickling recipe for them!? Think I may try a curry flavored pickle. Would fry them but have been having too much fun frying the sweet potatoes—so much better than russets!
Parsley, kale, lettuces, beets, some nice crisp apples, onions, scallions, delicious watermelon.
So what's the final verdict on this summer's CSA experience? Ours? The product over all was good. I think the value was acceptable, and worth it for the quality and for our desire to encourage and support the farmers who help us get good food for our families.
There is only one negative, ...
Posted in Community Supported Agriculture Tagged Community Supported Agriculture, CSA, green tomatoes Comments closed
CSA Week 19
This was what I was looking at when my vegetable love alarm went off. A San Francisco hotel room during BlogHer 2010. Unfortunately, it's going to happen. We forgot to pick up our CSA. Donna had flown to New York first thing Saturday morning after a last minute invite for some city fun (bloodies at Balthazar, Aquagrill for cherry stones and oysters, Eataly for pizza and pastas, the rooftop terrace at the Grammercy Park Hotel for drinks and then Peasant for a late dinner of razor clams, octopus, tripe, cuttlefish and veal bolognese over a thick eggy pasta—oy, I went to the wrong coast!)—so asking a friend to pick up our share had not been on my pre-flight to do list, and Donna, in her haste, didn't think of it. When I remembered, it was 8 am Saturday, west coast ...
Posted in Community Supported Agriculture Tagged CSA. Community Supported Agriculture Comments closed
VEGETABLE LOVE! (CSA Week 17)
Fall: Butternut Squash Soup, Poached Lettuce
Yesterday was 92 degrees. This morning was low sixties, with that wonderful slate sky that descends in fall and the chill wakes me up and makes me want to cook. There’s still corn the farmers market, fat kerneled and juicy, still very sweet, still aching to be baked. The green beans are getting big and tough and can be roasted (hot oven, chilli flakes, cumin, smashed garlic, 20 minutes). The chillis are vivid and the jalapeno plant that Donna planted in the spring is loaded down with fat hot ones. I got a jar of chilli’s pickling, more or less this recipe here out of this awesome book, only I’m going ...
Sweet Potato Fries: CSA Week 16
CSA week 16 is easily the heaviest bundle yet, with the apples, big tomatos, the (surprise!) bok choy, more nice green beans under all the lettuce. Apples, fall is here. Sweet potatoes, more fall. I'm getting pretty goddam tired of those green peppers though. Wish the dog would eat them. I ordered eggs this week $2.50 extra, well worth it. They're a buck more at the farmers market. And I just ate two of them, another Saturday morning favorite: egg sandwich, yolks intentionally broken, fried gently in butter, salt and pepper, topped with chopped bacon and slipped between two pieces of soft white bread fresh out of the plastic, one piece generously smeared with Hellmann's. Yes, Hellmann's mayo. I know I make a stink about making your own mayo and how easy ...
Cherry Tomato Pizza Margherita
(CSA Week 15)
Week 15 from Geauga Family Farms. I think they're getting better—the lettuce is fresher, there's less signs of travel in the soft vegetables. As I've pointed out before, just because you grow heirloom fruits and veg, doesn't mean they're good. You've got to be a good farmer or grower. And just because you grow excellent fruits and veg, doesn't mean they're still excellent when they arrive on the table of the family that purchased the CSA. Every part of the process matters.
Fun CSA this week: I'm not a huge fan of cherry tomatoes—too much skin relative to the amount of flesh, and frankly, I don't love them enough to blanch, shock, and peel them. But last night, photographing a bacon and eggs pizza for the new book, I had some leftover dough ...
How To Cook Okra (CSA Week 14)
Cool surprise in today's CSA. Okra! Something I almost never cook, and something that when I've had it, is cooked into slime.
The key to cooking okra is to not cook it too much. Saute it in a tablespoon of canola oil in a hot pan, salt and pepper, red pepper flakes if you want some heat, till tender but still crunchy. When I was working on Return To Cooking with Eric, he sauted them this way and served them on mahi mahi with a citrus vinaigrette. They're delectable. Truly, and so rarely do I eat them, they taste and feel like a delicacy when prepared this way.
Or, cook okra the southern way, dipped in butter milk or egg, rolled in a corn-meal-mixture and fried. That's delicious, too. Goes great with ...
CSA’s from Around the Country
This is week 13 of my CSA from Geauga Family Farms (my iPhone, Donna was on the road). Very happy (green peppers went into a steak and bell pepper stir fry). Tomato garlic basil pasta for dinner tonight, along with a green bean, onion and corn salad with a creamy lemon peper vinaigrette. The cubanos will be stuffed with sausage and cheese and grilled.
The photos below show a nice cross-section of CSA's from around the country, from Cape Cod to San Diago, thanks everyone. It would be interesting to see fall CSA shares from southern states. Hold your cursor over the photo for the name and location of the sender. I was unable to add the name of the farm or the CSA or link to each one, but if you see yours here, please ...
Posted in Community Supported Agriculture Tagged Community Supported Agriculture, CSA Comments closed

















