#farmshare

First, does anyone recognize these green guys?

I'm guessing maybe some kind of radish? I haven't cut them open yet.

Here is the group picture:

I got radishes, rhubarb, asparagus, green garlic, greens of some kind, a big bunch of sage, beets, and Jerusalem artichokes (which I only recognized because of that "this isn't ginger" picture that made the rounds last week or so.) I also got the cheese share, which is three cheeses every other week; this time it's gouda, baby swiss, and a sheep's cheese spread. I'm signed up for the fruit share, too, but that doesn't start until June.

Here's everybody hanging out in the box--

and a little free advertising:

In wintertime, you take them down, soak them in water, and cook with a ham hock or similar. My sources varied on whether it's best to hang them in sun or not-in-sun, so I did two short strings and hung them in different spots in the kitchen.

I don't know how well it'll actually work--I'm having visions of the beans just rotting up there--but I'm getting a lot of beans from the farmshare. Like, a lot. I already froze three quarts, and I have two more quarts (green and yellow) coming this Friday, so I figured I'd give this a whirl and see what happens!

I made a big salad with the lettuce, carrots, and radishes, and a few other things from the grocery store. With the regular peas, I tried my hand at pasta carbonara again--I've never gotten it quite right, but it came out reasonably OK this this time:

I made a bowl of creamed spinach with the spinach--there really wasn't much of it--and the sugar peas, I'm eating lightly steamed with butter. The strawberries, I'm still Just Eating.

I'll have some radishes and onions left, but I was able to opt out of getting them in next week's box, so that's OK.

Next week's lineup is cabbage, carrots, lettuce, peas, sugar peas, spinach, zucchini, and rhubarb.

(No strawberries! That's OK, but I'm hoping I haven't seen the last of strawberries.)

Here's what I got:

This subscription runs for 22 weeks, from this week until mid-October, and I get 8 things every week. (Usually 8 different things, but I'm not complaining about this week's double strawberries!) The farm I subscribed to has a good variety of things planted, so I should get all the good stuff as it comes along.

Total cost is about $400, which is a big whack to pay at once, but I had one of those months where you get three pay periods instead of two, so I paid for it then. I get slightly fewer hours a week at work in the summer, so it actually works out pretty well to pre-pay part of my grocery expenses.

And here's what I did:

With the lettuce, a bit of the onion, and some grocery-store ingredients, I made a big salad:

There are three of those, earmarked for work lunches. I'll add dressing and croutons when I'm ready to eat them.

With the kale (and more of the onions), I made soup with potatoes and sausage:

I ate one bowl of that right away, and I have three more servings for weekday meals. I had the sausage, chicken broth, and cream in the freezer, and I had potatoes and garlic that needed using up, so all I had to buy for this was the parmesan cheese.

The radishes were a two-fer! With the actual radishes, I made a little salad that my cousin-in-law recommended:

It's thinly-sliced radishes, green onions, and hard-boiled egg, and the dressing is greek yogurt and dill. Sort of a coleslaw vibe, although I think the dressing needs a little something more. I put it on a little nest of kale, because I had a lot of kale to deal with, and you kind of want something to cut the pepperiness of the radishes. Four servings of that left in the fridge. (The bowl with the green dots is a little one, about the size of the palm of your hand--you wouldn't want to eat a big cereal-bowl sized serving of this salad

And the radish greens were beautiful, so I sautéed those up as a little snack while I was cooking:

Olive oil, green onions, garlic. No leftovers of that; it was just a handful of greens. While I ate them I thought about how nice they would probably taste if you were, say, a medieval peasant who had been slowly developing scurvy all winter since the last fresh food ran out.

If that is not your experience, they're okay--a bit chewier than spinach, less tough than kale. However, if your radishes usually come with wilted, mangy-looking tops, or no tops at all, this is not necessarily a situation you need to remedy.

With the rhubarb, I made rhubarb crisp:

I ate one serving of that right away, and I have four more in fridge ready to warm up, add ice cream, and eat. (I only had a little over two cups of rhubarb, so I a-little-more-than-halved @bitletsanddrabbles's dad's recipe.)

The asparagus, I roasted with some olive oil, salt, and pepper:

I had it with some tilapia that was in the freezer, and sweet potatoes that needed using up. One serving I just ate, and two more in the fridge for later.