Eat Outside the Box

Tuesday was our first CSA (community-supported agriculture) day, courtesy of Eat Outside the Box. My mom went to pick up the produce in Lafayette. It was a very decentralized, informal affair: she parked on the street, walked into a CSA members' backyard, and weighed our share of the produce. She bagged it and drove home. Refreshingly non-corporate. Whole Foods is great; it has lots of organic, free-range food, but it also has a giant brand and suppresses unions. In addition, Whole Foods doesn't offer you the opportunity spend a day working on the farm where your food is grown (like Eat Outside the Box). CSAs encapsulate Dorothy Day's description of anarchism:

"an order made up of associations, guilds, unions, communes, parishes, voluntary associations of men [sic], on regional vs. national lines, where there is a possibility of liberty and responsibility for all men."

Anyhow, our basket came with all of this produce: garlic, lettuce, chard, pea greens, peas, lambsquarters (a spinach-looking green!!!), arugula (and arugula blossoms), Valencia oranges, tangerines, baby carrots, mint, Rainier cherries, and apriums (I think it should be "apria" but Wikipedia doesn't think so).

But not only did we get all of this delicious, fresh, and unique produce, but we got (in an email) five different recipes that incorporate the produce we picked up. My mom has already prepared three of the recipes (a spread, a salad, and the sauteed vegetable recipe below). I grow snowpeas myself, but I never would have thought to consume the blossoms, stalks, and leaves along with the pods. Genius!

Sautéed Snow Peas, Sugar Snap Peas, and Pea Shoots

SELF | July 2008 by Anita Lo

This summer side cooks quickly, so the veggies retain their nutrients.

1 tablespoon canola oil

6 large cloves garlic, finely chopped

1/2 cup chicken stock (or water)

1/3 cup oyster sauce

3 cups snow peas, strings removed

4 cups sugar snap peas, strings removed

5 cups pea shoots

Heat oil in a large, shallow pan over high heat. Cook garlic 30 seconds, stirring to prevent burning. Combine stock and oyster sauce in a bowl; add to pan. Add peas; cook, turning peas constantly, until bright green and crisp, about 2 minutes. Divide among 8 bowls; top each with a handful of pea shoots.

Thanks to Michael Iafrate of the blog Catholic Anarchy for alerting us to the Dorothy Day quote (this post).

U-Pick

On Memorial Day we decided to spend our day off gettin closer to the land! We took the truck (ahh manly! we could stack all our boxes of produce in the bed ;) and drove to Brentwood. Walnut Ave is the Las Vegas Strip of "u-pick" fruit. The place was filled with handpainted signs, orchards, and cars everywhere. We went first to pick some peaches, but the cold weather in the preceding weeks had delayed the ripening and the peaches were hard and a bit tart. We did find some apricot trees in the peach orchard though, and they were tasty. That is John and Christy posing with an apricot tree.

Then we jumped back onto Walnut Ave (no walnut orchards though) and followed directions from one of the peach people to a less popular cherry orchard. So we didn't have to share a tree... It was kind of like Disneyland. But we picked a bag full of cherries, and of course made it into a competition. Cherry trees are actually really cool because they start branching out really close to the ground. In order to find big bunches of cherries (they hide really well) I found it useful to slither between some branches so that I was basically inside the tree. Then I would turn around so that I faced out, away from the center of the tree. Then it's often a matter of stretching high enough for my 5'9" frame to reach the hitherto unmolested fruit.



The attendants said the cherries were called "coral" or something to that effect. I can't find information on any cherry with a name that sounds like that. But here's a picture. The cherries are certainly ripe enough to eat when they're still reddish-purple, but the near utter blackness signals complete juicy-ness.

By the way, our first pick-up for the CSA is Tuesday.