It’s been a while since I’ve written a food post, and I think it’s time. Y’all seem to like them almost as much as I like food, so why the heck not. This time, though, instead of writing about places where I like to eat out, I’m going to write about a bunch of unfamiliar foods that keep making their way into the house week after week after week.
This, of course, is the CSA, an unrelenting onslaught of these things called vegetables, which are as it turns out are things I should have been eating all along. It’s actually nice to have a reason to try a bunch of new vegetables, especially the wide variety of leafy greens that I think I knew existed on an intellectual level but couldn’t have picked out of a lineup with a trowel to my head.
Our CSA (community-supported agriculture) is actually within the Philadelphia city limits, with all of the food grown on a small plot in Fairmount Park, close to the Please Touch Museum. Every Tuesday, I use my flexible schedule to exchange our empty reusable grocery bag for our new, fully stocked bag, which usually has around 5-6 different vegetables or, on occasion, fruits.
It’s not the most impressive CSA, at least according to those my friends have described. My friend Sarah not only gets mounds of vegetables, but also receives eggs, fruits, meats, and even homemade jams. Still, our weekly vegetables aren’t exorbitant, and it forces us to be creative with how we use the vegetables we receive. I mean, we’ve eaten (and will continue to eat) a bunch of salads, but we’ve also made some other discoveries that we never would have found without Farmer Kim and her little bags of veggies.
Some of the vegetables we receive are more or less strictly salad greens. Even then, it’s a welcome change to our typical baby spinach routine, which we usually spice up with red peppers, mushrooms, grape tomatoes, and usually a protein, like hard-boiled eggs, deli ham, or goat cheese.
The biggest revelation has been red lettuce. It’s got more flavor than iceberg, a lighter texture than spinach, and plays well with other greens. It’s a solid base for any salad, and we’ve used it to bulk up spinach salads or a spicy Asian salad mix (also a CSA contribution, although what was in it, I couldn’t tell you).
We’ve eaten a lot of arugula as well. It’s strange that something as simple as a spicy leaf has caused so much division. While Obama might have made a mistake in asking Iowa farmers about arugula prices at Whole Foods, the bigger affront for many seems to have been his preference for arugula over more…I guess, American(?) greens, like iceberg lettuce—that tasteless, watery green that’s good for crunch but not much else.
For us, arugula blends in with other greens to add a little kick, something interesting break up a salad that would otherwise just taste green. The last batch we received was pretty strong stuff. I never considered having to ration a salad green because it would be too hot, but jeez…
The green that every CSA customer knows, though, is kale. Kale got a big boost a few years ago, when it was declared a superfood—quite the elevation for something that used to be called peasant’s cabbage. While the health benefits have been extolled repeatedly (including its colon-scrubbing properties, which people extol a little too much), it’s tough and sharp. The one morning I decided to blend some leaves into a banana-blueberry smoothie, the result was not unlike drinking a yogurt-based beverage blended with ground glass.
However, years ago Caitlin discovered a massaged kale salad at Chelsea Market, with parmesan, golden raisins, and lemon, and we tried making it ourselves in our New York kitchen. The one critical step we missed was the actual massaging. You see, to make this salad work, you have to literally rub olive oil into the leaves themselves, crumpling them like little pieces of paper. The end result is a much softer leaf, infused with olive oil and ready for the lemon dressing.
Any CSA participant, though, will tell you that you get a lot of kale. It grows quickly and easily, and it adds a lot of bulk to your order. So that means you need to find ways to use it, like braising, massaging, sautéing, or adding it to a smoothie. Thanks to Sarah, we also now add frittatas to the list.
I’d like to take a quick break, if you don’t mind, to recognize the beauty of the frittata. Traditionally cooked in a cast-iron skillet, first on the stovetop before being finished it in the oven, it also works just fine in a baking dish, which is our preferred vessel. You take any vegetables you need to use up, cook them a little to get some seasoning, then mix them with a whole host of eggs and bake until firm. You can add bacon or sausage, cheese, whatever. The world is your frittata. It’s that simple.
We’ve made two of these delicious garbage dishes, one with kale and the other with mustard greens. Mustard greens…woah. The first time I took a bite, just to get a sense of the flavor, it actually made me cough. I’m a big mustard fan, in just about all its forms (yellow, brown, Dijon, stone-ground, dipping, honey, whatever). But I was not prepared for the peppery tang of the leaf itself.
The greens were too tough to use in a salad, and the massaging angle didn’t seem quite right, either. So I cooked them down in a little bacon fat, mixed them with sauteed mushrooms, garlic, and onions, poured them into a bowl of nine pre-beaten eggs, dumped in 4 ounces of feta, whisked it a little, then baked it in an 8×8 Pyrex for about 25 minutes. We had delicious mustard green frittata for the next three days.
We received some spinach, which was fine if familiar, although it did put the “baby” of baby spinach in perspective. But much more interesting was bok choy.
I’m not a cabbage guy. I hate cole slaw, I will not eat kimchi. Brussels sprouts literally make me gag—according to my parents, the first time I ever said no to anything was when they tried to feed me Brussels sprouts. I like egg rolls well enough, but I would love them if they didn’t have cabbage. The bitterness hits me in just the wrong place, and as soon as the flavor hits the back of my tongue I want to ralph. Even as I write this, I can feel my gorge rising.
But bok choy, a Chinese cabbage, doesn’t bother me. I learned this in college, when our campus commons offered a Chipotle knock-off called a Cyber Wrap. One of the common toppings they had available for their burritos was bok choy. Being in college, I was up for an experiment, and not knowing what it was I told ‘em to pile it on. And I loved it.
I tried roasting the bok choy, but it turned into a stringy, soggy mess, never really crisping while taking on an acrid bitterness that I did not care for. The best solution, I found, was what I had learned years before, but apparently didn’t trust: bok choy is best eaten raw. I added it to salads, and it worked perfectly, adding some crunch and flavor, as well as salad bulk.
We received some broccoli rabe, which was something I wasn’t familiar with. By the time we received it, I was a…well, I wasn’t an old hand. Middle-aged hand. I was a middle-aged hand at sauteing greens, so I cooked them down a little and served them as a side dish with some grilled chicken. It turned out okay, with the garlic and onion flavors coming through fine. But it would have been better with a pasta, maybe with some kind of piccata.
Collard greens, though…man.
When I worked at Baltimore Center Stage, it apparently had become tradition to serve fried chicken, collard greens, and a host of other delicious southern food for Thanksgiving. The folks who brought in the food made a mean collard green, and I went back for thirds.
The Chowhound burger truck that visited every Thursday also turned me on to collard greens, with a specialty burger they had for all too short a time called the Southern Drawl. Eight-ounce beef patty, pimento cheese, bacon-braised collard greens, and a fried green tomato on a brioche bun. It was messy, and it was exquisite.
I braised my own collard greens, serving them alongside a pork tenderloin and mashed potatoes (from a box—so sue me). I cooked up some bacon lardons, added some extra bacon fat, then some garlic, red pepper flakes, and lemon zest, before simmering the greens themselves for about half an hour. They were juicy, tender, and oh-so-savory. They’re probably my favorite cooked green to this point.
We received some very tasty radishes (six, actually), and a bunch of strawberries early in the growing season, which were both phenomenal. The strawberries were a special revelation. I knew that fruits and vegetables from local farming were supposed to taste better. But I had forgotten what an actual strawberry tasted like.
I had grown used to the big containers of strawberries you find at the grocery store, gargantuan monsters that taste watery and washed out. But the pints of strawberries from our CSA were scrumptious. They were juicy and sweet and so, so flavorful. It’s just a shame the season was so short.
There have been some other weird veggies that I’m still not quite sure what to do with. Garlic scapes, for instance, look a little like the tentacles of some plant-based octopus, long, rubbery tubes with bulbous protrusions near one end. I trimmed off the ends (including the protrusion), tossed the scapes in olive oil, and threw them on the grill, since the internet said they acted a lot like asparagus. Final verdict: just get asparagus. Don’t grill the scapes unless you know what you’re doing. They’re basically sticks that smell kinda like garlic.
Kohlrabi is also weird. If you’re unfamiliar, imagine a root the size of an apple. It has purple skin, as well as some skin tags growing at uneven intervals. Out of the top of this root are a number of tentacles that branch into leaves. On first impression, a kohlrabi looks like someone removed the CPU from some futuristic plant-based computer, the torn wires still dangling, except with leaves instead of cartoony sparks.
How do you use kohlrabi? I honestly don’t know. It doesn’t taste like cabbage, despite being a cruciferous vegetable. But it doesn’t taste as sweet as I’ve heard several others make it out to be. I tried slicing it thin and sauteing it with some garlic, but neither of us cared for that. Some have suggested adding it to salads, and that might work, but I’m not sold.
Last but not least, we got a big ol’ fennel bulb last week. The voluminous fronds actually make a refreshing addition to a salad, adding just a touch of fennel’s anise-like flavor as well as a jolt of freshness. The bulb is still in our crisper, just waiting to be roasted. In the meantime, the crisper smells amazing, a much more concentrated anise scent. And I don’t even like licorice.
Technically, we have gotten some cabbage. We had an entire head of Napa cabbage that we didn’t use, partly because I hate cabbage, but largely because any recipe that isn’t kimchi calls for, like, an eighth of a leaf. But Farmer Kim is a good listener, and she remembered that I don’t like cabbage—so she gave me the smallest one they picked.
All in all, the CSA has been a smashing success. I’ve never eaten as many leafy greens as I have over the past few weeks, and I’ve got to say I’m surprised at how well it’s working out for us. Sure, my wife has to take a bunch of salads into work, and there’s always the chance that we’re going to burn out on salads, what with one accompanying almost every meal. But there’s usually enough variety in our greens to keep things at least a little interesting. And add-ins are really easy.
I’m looking forward to seeing what the rest of the season has in store for us. Farmer Kim plants in rotation, so we should have more greens repeating throughout the summer—and I’m sure we’ll keep getting kale. But in a few weeks, we’ll have tomatoes, and I can see the corn growing every time I drive by the garden.
Perhaps next year we’ll look into other CSAs, ones that might provide more than just a handful of vegetables every week. Now that we’ve done at least this much, I’m less concerned about food wastage. I’ve grown in my confidence as a cook, and while I know I’m still no great shakes, I feel like I can turn just about anything we’d receive into something tasty.
It’s also nice to know that by joining this CSA, Farmer Kim can help volunteers to learn more about urban farming, and we can invest in producing tasty, local produce. I’m sure there are all kinds of reasons why this food is better than what we find at the grocery store, but I actually don’t care all that much. All I know is I’m eating good food, and learning a lot about my palate.
MetaFrizzics 