What To Expect When You're Expecting Your Farm Share

I can't say enough wonderful things about farm shares/CSAs.  

They provide you with a weekly batch of fresh, organic produce, allow you to explore foods you've never tried, and are (mostly) low-cost.  

You also make friends with the people you see every week.  You get excited about trying new recipes.  And you learn SO much about farming and fresh produce.

And you automatically eat better.  You just do.

When I have a bag of fresh vegetables on my shoulder, I NEVER go into the Popeye's on 125th St.

Oh, I still think about those spicy little fried shrimp perfectly-battered in corn starch...

But I walk right past the Popeye's and get my vegetables home to mama!

Last week, my summer farm share program had its first delivery of the season.  I was SO happy to walk in there and see old friends I hadn't seen in months and pick up my vegetables.  This is my second year doing this and I've talked with several friends about their programs, as well.

I don't have all the answers, but here are my tips:

If you don't already belong to a farm share program, you can usually sign up at any time during the season.  Some will deliver to your home (read---more expensive).  But most have pick-up sites not far from your home.  They tend to use community centers like the YMCA, churches, or food pantries.  This could potentially mean that you have to wait in the same building as homeless people waiting for the soup kitchen upstairs to open.  If you have a problem with that, um....

Get over yourself.  It's not a methadone clinic.  It's a food pantry.  You're there for the same reason as everyone else---to get food.  In fact, if you've got some free time, you might want to consider volunteering.  Food pantries are always looking for a few extra hands to cook and prep all the Meals-Without-Wheels that go out every day to people just looking for a decent dinner. 

Be a helper, not a hater. 

Don't know if there's a farm share in your area?

Just Google "farm share" or "CSA" and the name of your city or town or neighborhood.  You can usually sign up online and pay by the season or by the week.  Some even have a way to allow shareholders to pay with their food stamps.  

Quality produce is NOT expensive.  You're getting it straight from the farm.  You don't have to pay huge corporations and their thousands of employees and CEOs with huge benefit packages and their marketing companies and pesticide companies and the government agencies that THESE companies pay to keep their horrible farming practices a secret and keep the money "all in the family".

You're paying a farmer.  And the guy who drives the truck.

Being as it's "organic", they probably won't supply you with those demon plastic bags to get your little lovelies home.  Some CSAs will put everything in a box and hand it to you.  But others are more like a farmer's market.  You show up with your "reusable container" and pick the produce yourself.  Five potatoes, three onions, two cucumbers, one bunch of spinach, etc...

A cloth bag is probably your best bet. The first few weeks I went in with a wicker basket.  Not to say a basket isn't a good choice, but strolling thru Harlem in my hand-sewn skirt with a wicker backet, I looked like the "Bougie Girl" in "The Beauty and the Beat" video. 

Oh yes I did.

And now I give you my newbie mistake.

BEWARE OF THE EGGS!

Share programs will often offer the option to add-on things like cheese or honey or farm fresh milk.

Or eggs.

I'm not saying that eggs are a bad choice.  Add-ons can be a beautiful thing. 

I thought it would be a good idea to sign up for the egg share.  Because I bake a lot.  And I enjoy egg salad and deviled eggs and a poached egg on a piece of toast when I'm up writing late at night.  Not to mention my love of meringues and béarnaise sauce...

But I'm one person.  I can only eat so many eggs.  Unless you have a family to feed, a dozen eggs a week is a LOT.  At one point last summer, I had six dozen eggs nesting in my refrigerator.  I also gave away two or three cartons just to make room for the Swiss chard.  And then there was the week I was desperate and used eight eggs yolks to make ice cream and eight egg whites to make angel food cake.

I spent two days of my life just trying to get rid of a dozen eggs.

And then there was that horrible time I just couldn't take the pressure anymore and emailed my farm share claiming I was going to be "on vacation" and could I suspend my share for the following week?

I wasn't on vacation.  I didn't go anywhere.

I lied.  

I lied to my farm share! 

Twice!!!

You can see the frustration building in my very first post on this blog titled, "Love's Labor's Lost or How I Came To Hate My Farm Share".

At the end of the season, we were asked to fill out a questionnaire.  One of the suggestions I made was, "Could there possibly be an option for HALF a dozen eggs?"

I was happy to discover that this season they took my advice.  Half a dozen is now an option.  I would have enjoyed this small victory in my life, but last summer was like Nam.

Nam with eggs.

Not quite napalm or a scene from Apocalypse Now.  But I was mentally scarred by the experience.  Over the winter, I began buying my eggs from the "grass-fed, pastured" butcher shop in Harlem---Harlem Shambles.

I'm very happy with these eggs.  They're from Autumn's Harvest Farm in Romulus, NY.

It's possibly the only egg carton in the world with a review from the NY Times on the carton:

"For eggs from chickens that live in the sort of utopia conveyed by the images on most egg cartons, look for 'Animal Welfare Approved'." 

Okay---it's not a review of those particular eggs.  Just eggs in general.  I'm a savvy enough consumer to get that.  But the eggs are fresh and perfect and I can get them Uptown without trekking all the way down to the Union Square farmer's market. 

Down there is a guy who REALLY loves and takes wonderful care of his chickens.  He only sells eggs.  Occasionally, people ask if he can supply them with a whole, fresh chicken?

Well...of course, he can; but...

That's like saying to someone, "Wow.  You take such great care of your dog.  You cook homemade organic meals for him and he gets veterinary care and you take him to the dog park to exercise so he can just 'be a dog in his natural environment'.  And I can tell that you really love and care about him a lot.

Could we eat him for dinner?"

I mean, the guy realizes that it's a chicken.  And that people eat chicken every day.  And even he's had chicken for dinner, but I'm sure he's also wondering...

Who ARE you?

You show up at my booth with your hemp bag and your "Eat More Kale" t-shirt and want me to decapitate Henny Penny so you can look like "wife-and-mother material" for guy you met last week on JDate?

Who is this Mr. Big, anyway?

And why isn't he here with you?

Exactly how solid is the foundation of this relationship?

Could I...maybe meet him?  I mean, if he's going to be eating one of my pets...

Okay, I'm fully aware that I'm making up this conversation in my head.  But that's the kind of devotion this man has towards his chickens.

So this summer, I passed on the egg share----even with the half dozen option.

I just create too much inner dialogue between man-and-chicken to justify the stress caused by too many farm fresh eggs.

I signed up for the dried heirloom bean option instead.  If I don't have time to get to the dried beans...  Well, they're dried beans.  They keep for a long time.  And I have yet to extend my anthropomorphic tendencies to dehydrated legumes.

Not yet, anyway.   

The biggest piece of advice I have about a farm share (or even just a day at the farmer's market) is that once you get your goodies home---wash and prep them right away!

First off, this stuff is organic.  That means no pesticides.  Get where I'm going with this?

Last week I found a ladybug in my spinach.  Granted, who doesn't want a ladybug in their home?

A ladybug in the home means good luck.  I have a particular fondness for them.  If I were a painter, I think I would paint them with as much passion as Georgia O'Keeffe painted irises.  Of course, they wouldn't look like vaginas, so they probably wouldn't sell too much in the galleries.  But I was thrilled when the little guy crawled onto my finger.  I watched him for a few moments, and then I took him outside and let him go.  He took off flying the instant he hit the fresh air.

Every time they do that, I feel like a kid who just lost their balloon for the first time.  Because the first time little children lose their balloons to gravity, they don't cry.  They're too magnetized by the fantastic idea that something that was JUST in their hands is now flying up towards the clouds.  

It's not a loss; it's a wondrous mystery.

But I highly recommend that you wash everything.  Even if you don't actually SEE bugs, their eggs may be on the produce.  I haven't had anything like those stories of hundreds of baby spiders flying out of a bunch of Ecuadorian bananas.

But I've seen some larvae. 

Yes.  Larvae.  

I don't know what they turned into, because I took them outside.

I've released my share of "inchworms" to no longer have any regret that I never got the plastic riding toy of my dreams---The Inchworm from Romper Room.  Only Coca-Cola's "I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing" was a catchier commercial tune than the one with the little blond-haired girl twerking on a worm across a pedophile's grassy knoll as the Emmylou Harris knock-off sang, "Inchworm, inchworm.  I love you." 

Root vegetables that are still attached to their tops may look pretty and poetic in your fridge, but the tops will suck the life out of the roots in a day or two.  You'll have gorgeous carrot tops, but mushy carrots.  Same with beets.  You'll notice that parsnips never come with the tops attached.  Why?  Parsnip tops are toxic.  This week I got kohlrabi (which sounds Japanese, but is actually a German root vegetable).  It looks so gorgeous and perfect; you hate to break it up.  But Brad and Jen both seem to be doing a-okay these days.  So stop putting your hopes and dreams into vegetables you don't even know.  Sometimes it's just not meant to be.  Let them live their own separate lives and just mind your own business.

My final word---eat this stuff!!!!

To make eating it all even easier, the first thing you do when you get your bounty home...

Okay, well...  If you're a total dork like me, the first thing you do is arrange your vegetables on a velvet bedspread and take some glamour shots.

But if you're not that much of a geek---clean them, chop them up, cook them, freeze them, can them, make soup...  

Anything!

They're not there to look pretty.  They're there to eat. 

Outside of living on an actual farm, a farm share is the closest you can come to how people ate from the land for thousands of years---only the Native Americans didn't have blenders and freezers to make a fruit smoothie.

A farm share forces you to be creative and adventurous and push yourself to new culinary heights!!!

Or to just eat more lettuce.

So join a CSA today!

(Psst---watch out for the eggs.)