Fresh Produce

I've joined a CSA - community supported agriculture - and our first food delivery was yesterday.

Pretty neat idea, you pay a membership fee, in this case $25.00 and that's payable once a year. You then get a weekly delivery of fresh produce and/or meat and eggs for a weekly fee. The minimum with this group is $20.00 for 1/4 bushel of fresh produce. That is what I started with, but I'm sure I will increase my order!

Yesterday the truck arrived at the newly renovated Coleman Park Community Center. The folks delivering were extremely nice and everything went really smooth, especially for the first time for a drop in this location. Several of my neighbors and friends were participating, so we were all there to take possession of our boxes.

My box included a good nice mess of green beans, about 10 new red potatoes, 6 summer squash, one large onion, 2 large bunches of green onions, about 10 green cucumbers and 4 lemon cucumbers! And a pint of blackberries!!

All very good quality and extremely fresh. I snapped the beans and put them on, got a blackberry cobbler in the oven, and make onion/cucumber salad to marinate in the fridge. Everything else I put in ziplocs for use today and thru out the week. The potatoes I scrubbed up and put on top of the green beans to cook.

I should probably be ashamed to say that I had 3 cucumbers and a huge serving of blackberry cobbler for supper! And, I had a huge serving of cobbler for breakfast! It's been years since I had fresh blackberry cobbler and I'm not sure I've ever had any better than what I made last night.

Renee got home from work after 10:00 PM - she had a bowl of the green beans and potatoes and said they were so delicious she was about to eat them all!

I can add one serving of meat and 1 dozen eggs to my haul for $10.00 more - which is probably what I'll do next week. This week, the folks that got meat got pork chops.

The meat raised, beef, pork, lamb and chickens, are all free range. No pens, no corn feed, they graze and mingle as livestock should. No antibiotics or steroids and the vegetables are grown organically without pesticides.

Most interestingly, Good Morning America did a segment this morning on CSA's and that you actually save money over the course of a year, besides getting better food products and supporting your local economy. I have much more to say on this issue - another blog, another day!