Salad.

Salad goes with everything, and it’s quick and easy to make. Salads are easy to change up so that you don’t get too bored. They can be simple sides or a meal if you add some protein. And fresh salad greens really put their conventional counterparts to shame. Local lettuce is one of the highlights of CSA-dom.

Spring salad crops

• Arugula, spinach, lettuce, and field greens form the basis of salads.
• Carrots, radishes, broccoli, and green onions can be chopped and tossed with salad greens.
• Fresh herbs like parsley, chervil, salad burnet, par-cel, dill, mint, and cilantro can also be added to salads if you don’t have other plans for them. Or you can use them to make an herb vinaigrette dressing.

Essential spring tools

There are a couple essential tools when you’re in salad-making season: a salad spinner and good knives. A salad spinner is not a silly gadget that will take up space in your kitchen; it’s the best way to wash, dry, and store fresh lettuce and other salad greens. Look for one the spins easily and will fit in your refrigerator.

The chopping of salad toppings is much more fun with a quality knife and something with which to sharpen it. Look for deals on sets of knives and find some that feel good in your hand. Three knives to have are a small paring knife, a large chef’s knife, and something in between. I got this set from Tuesday Morning a couple of years ago. I’m guessing it was about $40. I’ve used them nearly every day since, and they’re holding up well.

Chris made me this awesome custom knife rack!

Here’s my favorite knife story. When I first got this set, my favorite knife was the Santoku, the second from the bottom. It’s a nice, all-around size and you can kind of scoop stuff with it. A couple of months later, I decided that my favorite knife was actually the utility knife, the one at the top. A couple of months after that, my favorite for sure was the little paring knife – it was so easy to work with. A couple months after that, my favorite became the big ol’ chef’s knife. It was so useful for chopping large things but still good for the small ones.

A couple of months after that, I finally realized my favorite knife was the sharpest knife, and I went out and bought a knife sharpener.

Now I like all of them best for their intended uses.

Why not start in summer?

Most people think of summertime produce when they imagine local produce – tomatoes, blackberries, zucchini, etc. So why not start in the summer? Well, you can of course, but it’s jumping in the deep end. Summertime can be overwhelming with week after week of lots of produce to cook. If you start in spring not only do you get lots of easy salad, but the summertime produce starts sneaking in during late spring so you have time to play with a little bit of it before the real harvesting starts.

In addition, many of us will go on vacations in the summer, and vacations wreak havoc on CSA meal planning. Better to get a season of meal planning under your belt first.

Read more CSA tips

• Your schedule is too crazy.
• Your household is too small.
• Your score on this CSA-readiness assessment is too low.

If this is you, consider a different kind of commitment to a local farm and yourself – buying market credit. You can think of market credits as gift certificates you buy for yourself from a farmer.

How do you get a market credit? Different farmers will handle things differently. Some will keep a notebook, while others might give you a card to keep and bring with you. Either way, you’d have a declining balance account to use at farmers markets that the farmer attends. Credits are offered in increments of $50 – $100 and may expire after a season or be good for as long as a year.

Why market credits?  They let you have some of the commitment of a CSA subscription while maintaining more flexibility.

The flexibility comes from shopping at the market rather than receiving a CSA share. Go to the market when you have the time and the impetus to cook. Buy things you know you like or want to try. Weeks you’re out of town or working non-stop, you can skip.

The commitment is both to small farms and to changing your own behavior. CSA subscribers and their upfront payments are crucial to a farm with small margins and capital projects. There’s so much uncertainty built into farming small and sustainably – weather, predators, freak accidents. Removing some of the income uncertainty is a big help.

That’s one side. The other aspect is an upfront financial commitment simply makes it more likely you will eat your local, healthy veggies. If it’s already paid for, how much more likely are you to get, prepare, and eat local produce? Will it tilt the scale between getting to the market and cooking vs. ordering take-out again? This little spur could make a big difference in your feeling good about what you eat.

As a CSA member, I still think CSA programs have an edge over buying credits:

• You’re more likely to share in the rewards as well as the risks. CSA members are more likely to benefit from bumper crops and banner years than market shoppers.
• There’s discipline in eating what the earth provides via local farms on a weekly basis. You learn to eat more produce in more ways, you eat a bunch of healthy food every week, and you better appreciate the different seasons and the good times. Moreover, you avoid that double-edged role of “customer” and rediscover more fulfilling ones based on relationships, not transactions.

Still, if a CSA program is just not an option right now, buying a market credit from a farmer may be the answer. Here are three Atlanta-area farms that offer credits and the farmers markets where you can find them:

• Heritage Farm (website/Facebook): Peachtree Road (Saturdays), Carrollton (Saturdays), Dunwoody (Wednesdays), Douglasville (Thursdays)
• Ivabell Acres (website/Facebook): East Atlanta Village (Wednesdays), Douglasville (Thursdays)
• Stems n Roots (Facebook): Piedmont Park (Saturdays), Douglasville (Thursdays)

In addition, Farmers Fresh CSA offers gift certificates that can be used the same way. Buy yourself some credit up front, order from their online catalog, and have your order delivered to a convenient pick-up location.

The Decatur Farmers Market also offers gift certificates good for any market vendor.

Score yourself on each statement from 1-5 (very untrue, untrue, neutral, true, very true)

1. I am comfortable cooking and enjoy being in the kitchen.

This statement is all about attitude – how much fun is cooking for you? If it’s a chore to be in the kitchen and always has been, then it will be harder to enjoy your CSA subscription at first. It’ll take more energy to commit the time required to prepare meals with CSA produce. If the kitchen is a nice place to be, then it will be that much easier.

2. I am used to cooking a variety of things from scratch.

While the first statement is about attitude, this one is about experience. Everyone has different levels of cooking experience, and the more you have, the easier it will be to jump into a CSA subscription. You can definitely learn as you go, but it will take extra time and energy to do so. (This was my second-lowest score when I started with a CSA subscription.)

3. I have time to spend in the kitchen (at the very least a few hours a week).

Cooking real food regularly is time-intensive; there’s no way around that. And the less experience you have, the more time-intensive it is. This may be the most important statement on the list.

4. I am intrigued by regularly planning meals around a given amount of random, seasonal produce rather than choosing my own ingredients.

This is a personality thing but really important. Are you happiest when you’re in control of inputs? If so, you may not enjoy being constrained by your CSA share when it comes to cooking. Do you want what you want when you want it? Seasonal produce is a fact of CSA life, and you might not be okay with that. How’s your ability to see problems as challenges and opportunities? Nobody can do this all the time, but it will definitely help you manage your CSA subscription week after week.

None of these personality traits is a deal breaker when it comes to joining a CSA, but you should be aware of your tendencies so that you can recognize them when they come into play. Or opt to spend your local food money at a farmers market.

5. I love vegetables.

If you like vegetables, you’ll be inspired by the variety and quality of what you get in a CSA. If you don’t, well, the CSA produce will taste better than conventional produce, so give yourself some time and you might come around. (This was the lowest-scoring statement in my 2007 results.)

6. So do the other members of my household.

If you’ve got other eaters, it will definitely help if they’re game to eat vegetables and to try new ones. If not, just go slow, cook smart, and prepare yourself for some whining.

7. I really want to eat local food.

A high score on this statement will keep you motivated. People want to eat local food for different reasons. Figure out what your top reasons are and keep them in the front of your mind. This will help you get through some tough spots. If you’re not that motivated to eat local food, you may not find the expense and effort worth it.

8. So do the other members of my household.

If you’re sharing the expense and effort with others, their commitment to the project is important to consider.

Score yourself on each statement from 1-5 (very untrue, untrue, neutral, true, very true)

1. I am comfortable cooking and enjoy being in the kitchen.
2. I am used to cooking a variety of things from scratch.
3. I have time to spend in the kitchen (at the very least a few hours a week).
4. I am intrigued by regularly planning meals around a given amount of random, seasonal produce rather than choosing my own ingredients.
5. I love vegetables.
6. So do the other members of my household.
7. I really want to eat local food.
8. So do the other members of my household.

Notes:

• This entirely unscientific measure assumes that you already have an interest in joining a CSA program. Why else would you be reading, right? (For more details, read an explanation of these statements.)
• Statement #3 is the most essential. If you don’t have time to work at this, then every other factor needs to be in place. (On the other hand, if you have time, it can make up for other shortcomings.) Cooking real food regularly is time-intensive; there’s no way around that. And the less experience you have, the more time-intensive it is. So if you’re scoring “untrue” or “very untrue” on statement #3, consider knocking yourself down a category until you have more time.

35-40 points: Um… what are you waiting for? While it still may take some time to get used to working with a weekly share of local produce, you are more than up to the challenge.

17-34 points: You can do this, but it’s not going to be easy all the time. Start in the spring, be prepared for the first season(s) to be full of “learning experiences,” and build in extra time, energy, humor, and slack. Be especially aware of places you’re likely to run into trouble, i.e., your lowest scores.

0-16 points: Bravo for thinking ahead! But now may not be the best time to join. Stick with farmers markets for another season. (Try market credits instead.)

I would have scored an uninspiring 18 when I joined Farmers Fresh in 2007. Clearly, I was not an ideal candidate, but I’ve made it work and am so glad I tried. (Read more about my scores and history.) After four years of CSA membership, however, I’m a stone-cold 40. The questionnaire is based mostly on my experience, so it’s not surprising I aced it. However, the difference in my scores point to a chicken-or-egg effect with CSA membership.

Wait till you’re in the ideal range or make the leap of faith and figure it out as you go? It’s your call. Just be prepared for the inevitable ups and downs – especially in the areas where you score lower. I’m certainly glad we made the leap in my house.

So another way to tell if you should join a CSA is to ask yourself the question, “how badly do you wish your scores on these statements were higher?” A CSA membership can be a tool to get there and not just the goal.

Finally, avoid making a decision after the first season if you can. Try to stick with the program for a full year. Practice will get you there, not practicing won’t. Plus, you get to see the year’s possibilities instead of just one season.

Read more CSA tips

The vegetables named in the article are carrots, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, bell peppers, spinach, kale, and cantaloupe. A little more research shows that beet greens, turnip greens, collards, cabbage, winter squash, and pumpkin also have high levels of beta-carotene. And according to Mother Earth News, the eggs of free-range chickens contain 7 times the beta-carotene of regular eggs. Beta-carotene is what causes the yolks to be that happy neon-orange color.

I’ve definitely been eating my share of greens, carrots, sweet potatoes, winter squash, and eggs lately.

See?

And I think I know what they’re talking about. The effect may be short-lived – only a day or two, but in the mirrors at the gym last week after eating the lunch pictured above, I noticed my skin tone looked more even than normal – like it does with a little sun. (This was at the beginning of a workout. At the end, I looked like a strawberry.) I also remember getting into the bath a couple of weeks ago and thinking my legs looked oddly not pale for the end of January.

I’m one of the paler people on the planet, so the effect may be more obvious on me. But I’m also eating a lot of these vegetables, and the ones I’m eating are more likely to have high amounts of nutrients, having been grown in good soil nearby.

It definitely doesn’t top my reasons for eating more local food, but it doesn’t hurt either!

Is your operation sustainable?

It’s a good idea to prepare for this long-term effort by dreaming up and adopting sustainable practices for you and your household. By sustainable, I don’t mean environmentally sound. I’m talking about  careful stewardship of your household’s most valuable resource: your sanity.

• Sustainable farmers avoid artificial fertilizer. Sustainable cooks have to ignore some whining about what’s for dinner. (Even if it comes from you.)
• Sustainable farmers have to watch their crops carefully for signs of pests. Sustainable cooks have to spend lots of time sorting and prepping produce and meal planning.
• Sustainable farmers invest years in replenishing poorly-farmed soil. Sustainable cooks must be patient with themselves, their families, and the years it can take to change food relationships on a permanent basis.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be offering up some sustainability tips to keep you and your CSA subscription on friendly terms.

Got a tip to share? Please leave a comment or send me an email, and I’ll post it.

CSA Tips (a growing list)

Cook like a peasant

Know thyself

Start in the spring

Err on the side of prepping too soon

Establish pizza night

But I think fall produce is way yummier: salads, greens, and winter squash. It’s also much more pleasant to “slave over a hot stove” when the days are cooler and the nights are cooler still.

So here are some recent autumnal meals we’ve had with local produce from Farmers’ Fresh. They’re repetitive, but we love them. If you’ve been overwhelmed lately with greens and winter squash, maybe this will provide some inspiration.

…

The Way to Cook Greens

sweet potatoes roasted with olive oil, salt, and winter savory, grits topped with chives, and Komatsuna greens cooked with raisins and walnuts.

This greens recipe is our favorite. We eat it probably three times a week when the greens start pouring in and love every plate. (Here’s the original recipe from The Cartoon Kitchen.)

Start with washed, chopped greens, some raisins (or craisins or dried sweet cherries), and walnuts (or pine nuts).

(Ignore the bowl in the upper right corner; it’s the chives for the grits.)

Sauté the nuts and fruit in olive oil until they’re brown and toasted (five minutes or less). Remove them and sauté the greens until they are wilted (again five minutes or less, although it will depend on the type of greens).

Add the nuts and fruit back and mix them together for a minute. Salt and serve.

So far, we’ve used this recipe with mustard, turnip, tatsoi, beet, kale, and Komatsuna greens. The only thing that hasn’t worked so well is arugula, but that might have been user error.

Here’s another example with tatsoi leaves.

leftover turkey and dressing, roasted butternut squash, tatsoi greens with raisins and walnuts.

Tatsoi has pretty dark leaves at the end of long stems. To me, it seemed easiest to use the two parts separately.

The leaves we ate as shown above, and the stems we used in a lo mein dish below.

…

Lo Mein!

Actually, we used a bunch of things in this lo mein. Lo mein is great for using up bits and pieces of produce.

aging radicchio, Asian turnips, the all-important stir-fry sauce, daikon radish, onion, beet stems, tatsoi stems, and garlic.

The first step (even before all the chopping) is to defrost a handful of shrimp.

These are the sustainably harvested Georgia coast shrimp available at the Farmers’ Fresh store online or in Carrollton. They’re also very, very good.

Here’s the quick lo mein down:

Cook some pasta al dente.

Stir-fry in peanut oil over medium-high heat…

1. cleaned and chopped shrimp and garlic until slightly pink (the shrimp, not the garlic), then remove
2. 3 or 4 beaten eggs until just barely not runny, then remove
3. vegetables in order of how long they need cooking: daikon radish, Asian turnips, onions, tatsoi stems, beet stems, and radicchio. The vegetables will cook the longest. Taste them to see when they’re ready. Then remove them.

Add the stir-fry sauce along with some of the pasta water if it’s still around. Maybe a splash of rice vinegar and dark sesame oil. Then add the pasta and cook in the sauce for a couple of minutes.

Add back the shrimp and eggs and then the vegetables. Heat through and serve.

…

Butternut Squash Three Ways

We’ve baked one butternut squash this week three ways. The first was sliced and baked with Nutty Girl’s rosemary nut mix. I sliced six pieces off the neck of the squash and baked them in the oven covered and with a little dish of water in the hopes it would keep them from drying out. Once they were done, I brushed them with olive oil, topped them with nuts, and put them back in for a few minutes. I kind of overdid the nuts here, but it was still really good.

butternut squash with rosemary nut mix, whole-grain bread, arugula with roasted beets and goat cheese and muscadine jelly vinaigrette, and scrambled eggs. (All local except for the oils and salt!)

The second butternut venture was roasted cubes. I cubed the remaining section of the neck and tossed the cubes in olive oil, salt, and winter savory. Then I roasted them for about thirty minutes at 350 degrees.

Déjà vu, huh?

We ate the last of the squash last night with the original greens recipe: (Tuscan) kale with raisins and pine nuts. Yum.

I baked the bottom of the squash in a dish at 350 for about an hour. I sat it up on its bottom and covered the top with tin foil so it wouldn’t dry out. Once it was a little browned and soft, I took it out, cut it in half, and removed the seeds. Then I dropped some sea salt, chopped savory, and a splash of olive oil in the cavity. I brushed some of the oil over the rest of the squash, too. Then the two halves went back in the oven cut side up for maybe ten minutes until everything was nice and soft. This method worked great, and we ate it down to the scraped skins.

We’ll cook other winter squash similarly, like the two pie pumpkins on our table and any acorn or Kabocha squash that come our way. If you prefer sweet to savory, replace the olive oil and savory with maple syrup and butter. Mmmm…

And there are seeds to toast the next day. After removing the seeds from the squash, I rinse them, leave them out on a paper towel for a few hours, and then remove the towel and leave them on a plate over night. They’re dry enough to toast the next day. I tossed these seeds in olive oil and salt and toasted them in the toaster oven for a quick afternoon snack.

Chopped arugula stems, beet stems, broccoli stems, and garlic

I cooked this with four beautiful CSA eggs, noodles, and Annie Chun marinade. It was delicious, nutritious, and in no way compromised by consisting of veggie parts of lesser charisma.

This dish would have been even nicer with thinly-sliced beef. Next time.

If you need a lo mein recipe, here’s Rachel Ray’s. It calls for hoisin sauce, but could use any stir fry sauce you like (or find on sale). Or you can make your own. This site has some great details on how.

Stems also work with fried rice. If you’re more into fried rice, here’s a good place to start.

If there’s a good part to colds, it’s coming up with new theories of cold-handling while you’re shuffling around all bundled up. A few years ago, I swore by Airborne, the tablet that dissolves in water with lots of herbs to stimulate your immune system.

This year I’m of the mind that stimulating your immune system is like when your boss hires a consultant to help you finish a big project. You don’t need an outsider peddling advice. You need money, manpower, coffee, and pizza. You need tools.

So I decided that my immune system needs only basic tools: fluids, salt, and rest. I’m doing pretty well with the first two.

Fluids are coming almost entirely from lemon verbena tea from Fran. Lemon verbena tea with generous amounts of honey is like a liquid cough drop. Very nice.

Hey, that's a local mug, too, made by Helen Helwig in Carrollton!

Salt comes from ramen noodles. (The extra fluids are a bonus.) Something about hot, salty broth makes me feel better. I dress up regular ramen with a couple of local eggs beaten and then gently stirred in for the last few minutes of simmering.

The results are delicious and fortifying. Of course, if I were awesome, I’d discard the packet and use homemade chicken stock made with local chicken scraps. But I am not awesome and have no stock.

One thing I’m pretty sure of is I caught this cold after consuming entirely too much sugar on Halloween. Lucy sent me home with four iced, sprinkled sugar cookies, and I sat down and ate them all as soon as I got home. First, the rush, then the crash, and a day later, the cold. I don’t think it’s coincidence. Back to good, local produce for me! Or at least only one iced sugar cookie per day.

And even if you’re not all about art, there will be more to do at FarmArt:

• Impromptu farmers’ market – chat with farmers, buy yummy and interesting stuff!
• Yoga demonstrations!
• Other local merchants and their wares!
• Live music!

And the Farmers’ Fresh store will be open, too. (Hint: stuff’s cheaper at the actual store than it is online. No cost to deliver. So it’s a great chance to stock up on stuff like meat, seafood, cheese, etc.)

So come to downtown Carrollton next Saturday, October 23rd between 8 am and 2 pm.

See you there!