Hello there, fellow local farmer supporters! My name is Kristina, and I’m going to be sharing some tips and recipes on how to best utilize your CSA share this season.
First, a little bit about myself. I’m a first time mom – Madeline is 15 months old. In our spare time, my husband and I are renovating a house built in 1894. Due to finances, it’s a sweat equity job, but we haven’t killed each other yet, so I hope we’ll make it through OK. I have never seen an heirloom tomato that I didn’t want to grow – I once fit 43 tomato plants (35 different varieties) on a city lot. I’m also a huge fan of sweet peppers, hot peppers and eggplants. Due to a bout with cancer and a rambunctious baby, my gardening has been downsized a lot, but I still have to get my hands in the dirt a little bit each week. I love to fish, hike and spend as much time outdoors as we can. I practice yoga very impatiently. I own too many cats. I also intermittently blog at Mouth From the South.
Supporting local farmers has always been important to me and my husband. I’m friends with several farmers, and I know how back breakingly hard it is to run a farm. Small farmers are our best hope for keeping alive all of the wonderful heirloom varieties that have been grown over the years – not the varieties that ship well and look uniform – the ones that grow well in our region, and most importantly, taste amazing! We’ve been a member of a CSA for over ten years now.
I’m a cancer survivor, so good health is important to me. You know what else is really important to me? New experiences and finding joy in cooking. I love trying new recipes, and I’m learning to balance my love of cooking with the time constraints I have now. I plan on sharing all kinds of recipes. If you love a cooking project or you just need to get a meal on the table in 30 minutes or less, I’ve got you covered. I’m not a vegetarian, but using up a CSA share means eating lots of vegetarian meals, so I’ll post plenty of recipes for those.
I’m going to be posting recipe ideas at the beginning of each CSA week to help give you some ideas on what you can be doing with yours. I’ll also frequently share how our family used our share, and I PLAN TO BE BRUTALLY HONEST. We’re a family of 2 1/3, so I’ll be giving a few things away each week, but I’m not going to post aspirational menus. I’m going to post what a normal family eats. I’ll also post the recipes (or links to them) that I’ve tried and reviews for each one. I’ll post what Madeline decided to eat, and what she spit on the floor for the cats to eat.
She does eat books.
What other kinds of things will I post? Next week, I’ll post a “How to plan a menu using a CSA share” guide. I hope new members find this helpful. As we move through the summer, I’ll be posting some more informational posts. For example, I plan on posting about some of the catch-all recipes I make when I need to use up a bunch of vegetables quick and what I like to keep on hand in my pantry and fridge to make dinnertime easier on us.
I’m really looking forward to sharing this experience with you all! Let me know what you’d like to see here on the blog, and please let me know if you’ve tried any of the recipes I’ve posted and post other recipes you’ve tried and liked!
Kristina