Week 2: Roasted Broccoli & Salad Galore

Sadly, it took three days to break our veggies out of the fridge because Sunday and Monday nearly killed us. We made a grueling trek to Austin for a baby naming on Sunday that involved the following spirit-crushing foods: kolaches (could you drive past the Czech Stop Truck Stop without making yourself sick?), chalupas, sangria, Mexican flag sugar cookies, spinach balls (thank goodness), cappuccinos, chips and a cheese sandwich on sourdough. I wish I were exaggerating. Our excuse is that Passover was going to start on Monday night, so we needed to ingest as much leavened food as our bodies could tolerate before it all came to a screeching, no-carb halt. Monday became a fast day (now I'm exaggerating) since I was still horrified at the prior day's gluttony, and that evening was our first night's seder, which I did not cook. So by Tuesday, I was ready for some seriously divine natural foods. Because we had more lettuce than I had ever dared to consume in a month, let alone a week, I knew my lunch was going to involve my new friend, Romaine. I loaded up my bag with the lettuce, almonds, sliced radishes, green onions, cranberries and blue cheese, then threw in some matzo for good measure. The salad was like a peace offering to myself and upon eating it, I felt the bliss of The Very Hungry Caterpillar when he eats a nice green leaf after days of wrecking his gullet on junk.

It was my job to bring roasted broccoli for 18 people to Tuesday night's seder, so I hit up Costco and bought a huge bag of it pre-chopped. I drizzled it with olive oil, mixed it with garlic and a ton of finely chopped green onions, and roasted it until the edges were crisp. I had never added green onions before, but because I add them to everything now, I had no choice. They turned out to be a tasty addition and I was inwardly joyous when a girl who "hates onions" requested a second helping.

While I dreaded the departure of leavened foods for a week, I was also bolstered by this new complication. On top of the CSA challenge we had undertaken just 10 days prior, Week 2 now became the Passover CSA challenge and we were going in armed with matzo and primed with produce.

Week 2: Pick-Up Day & Veggies With Personalities

Still riding high from our first week's success, we were excited to pick up more of nature's bounty for our next meal plan. To help our kids understand the mysterious cooler exchange that happens in the Korean Church parking lot, we decided to unleash them from their car seats and let them help us inspect the goods. There was no stopping our children from descending on the cooler like a lifetime supply of Skittles was inside, so I was more than happy to show them the big reveal. To my shock, they were genuinely elated to see the beautiful produce piled inside. My daughter even exclaimed, "Look! More rabishes!" Considering she literally cried after biting into a radish only seven days prior, I was awestruck. In this week's delivery was mustard greens, turnip greens, purple kale, green kale, red romaine, green romaine, radishes, green onions and arugula.

I really wanted this week's clean-up to go more smoothly than the last. But try as I might, it was like climbing a mountain. So I decided to take it in baby steps: remove the cooler from the car, watch Tangled; remove the produce from the cooler, go to the playground; rinse the produce, bathe the kids; let the produce air dry, order Thai food and put the kids to bed; sip a glass of wine, enjoy my meal. And then it dawned on me that the produce still needed to be chopped and stowed away. So I was well into Saturday night and had a solid 30-45 minutes to go before completing this task. The hubby was in his own personal purgatory with pool maintenance, so I was on my own.

Probably due in part to the wine and the fact that I had run out of options, I had a critical zen moment while chopping and storing. Like a whisper in my ear, it occurred to me that vegetables have personalities. Yes, romaine is spry and playful, each layer revealing masses of zest and crunch until you reach its perfectly delicate little heart. Green onions appear graceless and a little unkempt, but are really a force unto themselves –– strong, confident, even standoffish. Radishes are cunning –– small, inviting and vibrant, yet one taste bites you with a spicy, almost unfair twinge. And then there are the greens. Greens are the inner sanctum of the vegetable kingdom. Take mustard greens, for instance. They don't have a beautiful hue, they are rough with prickly edges and have a root system that resembles a roadmap. They seem moody and unyielding. But the moment you pour hot water over them, they give. They give until you begin to worry that they have given too much and will soon disappear into the recesses of the pan. They surrender their strong, bitter taste with just a dash of brown sugar and become downright delightful when stewed or sauteed with vegetable broth and a dollop of butter. There are noble, attractive greens like rainbow chard, whose very name imbues a sense of joy. But the unsightly greens hold a secret: they are desperate to be tasted, adored, discussed. And so now my heart aches for leafy greens. And I have a newfound respect for green onions; a charming comrade in romaine. The moral of the story is this: pick-up day might have seemed like one big chore, but when I gave myself over to it, I was repaid in a way that I will not soon forget.

Week 1: Pizza Night

And then it was Friday, the last day of squeezing produce in before next week's pick-up. Upon assessment in the fridge, I realized that the items we had left were pretty random. And what better to put a lot of random stuff on than pizza? We are frequent consumers of yummy pizzas made at home because I've found that I can get the kids to eat mushrooms if I chop them up and hide them under the cheese. Sneaky yes, but do they stuff their cute little mouths? Also, yes. It's not like I haven't presented them with real, live mushrooms on multiple occasions, but without fail, I get a resounding "NO" every time. So I sneak, and I think it means I care.

We like to use the small, pre-made pizza crusts that come two in a pack because, 1.) it means we don't have to share with each other, and 2.) we can go as wild as we want on our pizzas without offending anyone else. So I made four pizzas with the following ingredients: 

Kids' Pizzas:

crust

pizza sauce

finely chopped mushrooms

very finely chopped sprinkle of green onions (CSA)

mozzarella cheese

blue cheese (just a sprinkle)

Wife/Hubby Pizzas:

crust

pizza sauce

mushrooms

green onions (CSA)

arugula (CSA)

basil (CSA)

tomatoes

mozzarella

blue cheese

truffle oil

Ahhhh, pizza night. The night at our house when everyone is uncharacteristically happy. Except both kids burned their mouths on cheese and had meltdowns, but what can you do? Tears are shed about something all day, every day at our house and I've become very blasé about them. Kids learn through tears. If I see blood or injustice, I step in, but otherwise a tear just means a lesson is being instilled. In this case, if mommy says it's too hot, don't eat it. (Disclaimer: this is not a parenting blog).

I'm not a fan of arugula and actually felt dread at having to deal with it all week. But because I have to take my vegetables seriously now, I followed the advice of an enlightened girlfriend and tried it on pizza. To her credit, it added an earthy taste and a light crunch that went well with the other toppings, but I'm still not a fan. I'd add it to pizza again though, because since my discovery of truffle oil, I'm pretty sure I could drizzle it on carpet and proclaim to have found the best food on earth.

Even through the tears and arugula, pizza night was a great success. With this grand finale to our week, we used nearly all of our first 48 quarts of produce. We raised a glass and patted ourselves on the back for a job well done. It fills me with regret to say, however, that we did suffer one casualty in CSA Week One: the radishes. So next week, I will overcompensate and let no radish go unconsumed.

Week 1: Simple Salad With Brie & Bread

Thursday afternoons are pretty relaxed at our casa, which is a relief after the wrench that Wednesdays throw at us. When I say relaxed, I mean that after the work/preschool day, we only have one appointment (speech), at 6pm and it's five minutes from our house. Score! Perhaps it's becoming clear why being a member of a community supported agriculture program posed such a challenge for us. Because in order to cook all of the veggies you receive each week, you have to be HOME! Vegetables aren't like potato chips, nuts, or even fruit - vegetables require thought, effort, labor. So on this particular Thursday, I refused to harbor rushed, negative feelings against the unsuspecting produce in my refrigerator and decided to feed the kids chicken nuggets and edamame, do the speech run with the entire family (we call that quality time), and make something beautiful for the hubby and I after the rugrats were in bed. As all parents of young children will tell you, eating a meal sans kids, even if it's in the car at a traffic light, instantly qualifies as a date night.

Since I was getting hives at the thought of our lovely lettuce going black and slimy in the fridge, I decided that our spontaneous date night was going to involve mass quantities of crunchy green. Upon inspection, the lettuce was holding up pretty well (thanks to the entire roll of paper towels required to lovingly pat it all dry after a thorough washing), so I set to chopping the four heads of romaine in this week's supply. I sauteed raw pecans with brown sugar and butter, threw some CSA green onions, blue cheese and dried cranberries into the romaine, mixed in balsamic vinegar and olive oil and voila - in 20 minutes we had a stunning salad. As the daughter of a highly resourceful southern woman, I didn't bat an eye at substituting leftover whole wheat hot dog buns for dinner rolls, spreading on some Tuscan butter and brie cheese and calling this a seriously gourmet meal. Knowing we may not get another date night for a while, we went ahead and topped it all off with chilled white wine and chocolate. If I could treat each day of the week as a person, I'd have to say I pretty much have a crush on Thursdays.

Week 1: Buckwheat Veggie Pancakes

Wednesdays are another source of white knuckles and high blood pressure for me, relentlessly, every week. Traveling downtown and back in one of the worst traffic cities in America on a daily basis is one thing, but to turn around and go halfway back downtown every Wednesday afternoon for my daughter's OT appointment is just brutal. It involves snacks and sippy cups and trips to the potty and an hour of holding my almost two-year-old son back from systematically destroying the waiting room. Yes, this is every single Wednesday. Obviously, the last thing I want to do is chop and whisk and whip my way around the kitchen when we make it home at 6:30pm. So, my goal is to pre-plan for these nights, which until now, I admit have been veggie corn dog or Grape Nut nights. Enter my CSA vegetable pancakes. I call them CSA pancakes because I put an entire bunch of green onions into them, along with zucchini and parmesan cheese. And let me remind you that a batch of CSA green onions is at least two times the size of a batch from the supermarket, if not three times. The veggie pancakes were good. I say only "good" because I'm about to make a terrible health food admission: I loathe buckwheat flour, but I didn't know it until these pancakes. Buckwheat may be nutritional manna from heaven, but there is a strange aftertaste to it that repels me. But guess what? My son LOVED them. I topped the veggie pancakes with Tuesday's leftover rotisserie chicken, drizzled some maple syrup on top and honestly, I thought the child was going to make himself sick. I couldn't have been more thrilled. My daughter, on the other hand, either hates buckwheat like her mother or got wind of the green and fibrous nutrition hidden within and avoided the pancakes like the plague. I had a flashback of the kale "chips" and realized that pre-schoolers come hard-wired to sniff out nutrition in places they know, without a doubt, nutrition does not belong. Shocked that the addition of maple syrup didn't slow my demise, I celebrated the win with my son, watched my daughter dip chicken into syrup, and closed the book on Wednesday.

Week 1: Mustard Greens, Kale, Cornbread & Chicken

Monday was really hectic and we ate something like cardboard for dinner because we had to be at a speech appointment at 6pm. Tuesday welcomed a completely horrible work day and I knew that having all those veggies aging by the hour in my fridge was only going to make me panicky. So upon arriving home from work at 3:30, I squelched my motherly guilt over leaving my kids in childcare, popped open a bottle of wine and began chopping. As I was mourning the loss of what could have been a perfectly decent Tuesday, I was distracted by the extreme health of the green onions. Like no spring onion I've seen before, the white bottoms were gleaming like a force of nature, while the green tubes were strong, thick and crisp. The fact that there was something so utterly perfect before my eyes dissipated my bad mood. Before I knew it, I had multi-tasked my way to the following:

Green onion and blue cheese cornbread

Green onion/zuccini pancakes (for the following night's meal)

Braised mustard greens and kale (and, of course, the remaining green onions)

Because the rest of my family is carnivorous, I also picked up a (free range, naturally raised, blah blah) rotisserie chicken from Whole Foods. All in all, I spent about 1-1/2 hours chopping, cooking and cleaning up before picking up the kids (slightly mortified that the teacher might smell the one glass of wine on my breath and declare me an unfit mother). The kids loved the cornbread and chicken, but the greens were an absolute no-can-do. They wouldn't touch them. But that's okay because in that one meal, the hubby and I scarfed down two batches of mustard greens and a large batch of kale. I couldn't believe how great they were. I was expecting the stems to be tough, the leaves to be soggy, and my outlook on the whole CSA thing to be a bit tough and soggy as well. I've never been so happy to be wrong. The hubby was convinced I'd drunk the whole bottle of wine because I literally couldn't stop talking about how amazing the greens were, my dismay at how amazing the greens were, how beautiful the greens were... You get the point. My vegetables saved me that day, saved me from what would have ordinarily been an I'm-too-stressed-out-to-cook-let's-eat-cereal-for-dinner kind of day, and for that I was grateful. But let's face it, if given the choice between chicken, sketchy greens and cornbread for dinner OR crispy, processed cereal floating in milk turning various shades of food dye, the kids would have opted for the cereal.

Week 1: Pick-Up Day & Kale Chips

We picked up our first gaggle of vegetables at the Korean Church parking lot on April 9th. Our 48-quart Coleman was literally packed to the gills with mustard greens, purple kale, arugala, romaine, radishes, basil and an intimidatingly large quantity of green onions. For some reason I was expecting the ice chest to beam rays of light when opened, so I was ever so slightly disappointed when instead I saw clumps of dirt stuck to what seemed like a highway of roots attached to the greens and a few stray bugs floating on melted ice. Still, this illusion shattering moment was a thousand times better than the rash I normally get when deciding between conventional and organic produce at the supermarket. So we waved goodbye to Farmer Gene and the mothers who are homeschooling their already bohemian children and went home to remove the sod from this week's rations.

I admit that the adrenalin surge and subsequent crash from my first vegetable pickup left me listless and unable to face the dirt and bugs waiting for me in the cooler until late Saturday afternoon. I finally emptied the cooler and, like a haze lifting, there on my countertop was a glorious mound of vegetables in all their natural, local, organic glory. And they were mine! And since the hubby wasn't about to spend the hour it took to get them cleaned, chopped, patted dry and stored, I tuned out the hyperactive children and became one with my produce.

Since I was slightly daunted by having two enormous batches of kale, I decided to try my hand at making kale chips. I'd been seeing recipes everywhere whole-heartedly praising the kale chip and since I now had enough that I felt like I could experiment (a fabulous CSA perk), I felt inspired. I also had high hopes that the word "chip" being attached to anything, even if it was a parched, green, paper-thin leaf, might make my children's eyes glaze over with excitement. Not the case. The kids literally handed them back to me after one bite. To his credit, the hubby actually liked them, though he was sure to note that I over salted. All in all, the kale chip experiment proved two things: 1) I like my kale cooked in water and eaten with stir-fry, end of story. And 2) The foodie world has officially gone mad and is trying to convince us that kale can be baked in the oven and come out miraculously tasting like a bag of chips. Hopefully we'll have better luck with the radishes.

The Seed Was Planted

Movies like Food Inc. and The Future of Food, while completely enlightening, can also come with a serious side effect of trauma and paranoia in a small percentage of people who consume them. Unfortunately, I am one of those people. While my husband was back to scarfing down microwavable beef burritos a week after watching said movies, I continue to have a panic attack each time the automatic doors slide open at the grocery store. For a year now, my weekly foray into grocery shopping has become a dreaded roller coaster ride of emotion based on having to identify genetically modified ingredients, organic labels, free range this, naturally raised that. Ugh. I can feel my heart begin to race and palms start to sweat just thinking about it. Since I've undoubtedly shaved a few years off my life with the physiological damage that occurs during these two hours each week, I have finally decided it's time to find a way out of the madness of corporate controlled food.

A quick search of the web led me to a community supported agriculture farm outside of Dallas. Shocked that Dallas has something as progressive as a CSA to offer, I signed us up right away. Admittedly, I did have a moment of buyer's remorse upon hearing my husband's deep, yet unsurprised sigh over spending an untold amount of money on produce this year. Not to mention that most of the funds are due before receiving even the first leaf of lettuce. And that's where the challenge of a CSA commitment comes in. Will we be able to nibble our way through a 48-quart cooler of expensive and beautifully organic produce every 6 days before the next week's delivery comes in? Will we get beaten down by this fibrous culinary challenge? Most of all, will we ever be able to convince our 4-year old daughter and 2-year old son that mustard greens can be gleeful and little red radishes don't have to make you cry?