Our First Farm Share!

On Wednesday (07.08.2009) we picked up our first farm share at Kickass Cupcakes in Somerville. I'm not sure what sort of deal Kickass Cupcakes and Enterprise Farm have worked out, but it's very convenient to pick up our produce there. It only puts us 5 minutes out of the way on our walk home.

So, we signed up for a half-share, which is 10 lbs. of produce a week. This week we received:

Blueberries (1 pint)
Arugula Salad Mix (14.45 oz.)
Scallions (6 oz.)
Lettuce (13 oz.)
Snap Peas (8.45 oz.)
Collard (15.30 oz.)
Cabbage (3 lbs., 10.75 oz.)
Zucchini (1 lb., 2.75 oz.)
Potatoes (12.75 oz.)

I assume that it all adds up to 10 lbs. We were able to unpack our box and weigh everything with our food scale. Immediately after which we made a list of what we would cook in the next 7 days. We're both convinced that if we don't make meal lists as soon as we get our share, we'll wind up throwing most of it away at the end of the week. Neither of us had ever cooked collards, so we knew we had to learn a few things too.

The following night our friend Luke stopped by for dinner and we were able to cook up the collard. Now, we had no idea what we were doing, but it still came out pretty well. We washed and chopped up the greens, fried some olive oil, garlic, salt, and pepper, and cooked it together for less than 10 minutes. They were pretty al dente, but tasty. I cooked the rest of it yesterday after watching this video on YouTube. I learned a few things right off the bat. First: we never removed the stems. Those were definitely the crunchiest part of the meal. It turns out you're not supposed to eat them. That makes sense. Second: we didn't cook them nearly long enough. I corrected both of these problems yesterday and was much happier with the result. I stopped short of the hour and a half the guy on YouTube was recommending, but long enough to get a much different result.

It's going to take a little while to learn how to cook with new ingredients, but I think we're both very happy with the farm share so far. Oh yeah, and we haven't found any bugs on our food or anything like that. We were prepared for it, since this is all organic, but it wasn't a problem. And everything has been delicious so far. Today I'm going to make pulled chicken and D is going to tackle cole slaw with our giant head of cabbage. She made zucchini bread yesterday and it was awesome.