CSA – Kathy May & Silas

This Week’s CSA: 4/21/2016

Kathy May — Sat, 23 Apr 2016 04:04:40 +0000

This will be our very last food box from our CSA here in New York City. As a grand finale, we have Jonagold apples, ramps (wild leeks), golden beets, Treviso radicchio, tatsoi (AKA spinach mustard or rosette bok choy), purple top white globe turnips, and chef potatoes.

Perhaps we have unknowingly consumed them before, but we’ve certainly never heard of ramps. What we’ve learned about them is fascinating! They’re scarce because they grow exceedingly slowly (four years!) and are only in-season a few weeks of the year. In recent years, they’re all the craze among foodies and chefs: “The Church of the Ramp is one of the fastest-growing denominations in the religion of seasonality.” Due to a combination of the plant’s rarity and the explosion of enthusiasm for it, wild ramps are wantonly overharvested. In Quebec, there are firm restrictions on commercial sales and harvesting more than personal consumption, giving rise to an active black market for the coveted wild ramps. Smugglers bring bulbs to neighboring provinces including Ontario, where sales are legal… and they make a cushy profit. If you’re interested in learning more about the role of ramps in the food universe, here are a couple of amusingly written reflections on ramps from Huffington Post and TIME Magazine.

The other vegetable in our food box with which we’re less familiar is radicchio. Radicchios aren’t lettuce or cabbage. They come from northern Italy and the varieties are named after towns within the Veneto region. We Americans are most familiar with Rosso di Verona radicchio while Italians most commonly eat Treviso radicchio. Now – late winter – is exactly when radicchios peak.

Looking back, our first experiences with a CSA has been quite a fun and delicious culinary adventure! It’s provided us with months of experimentation, learning, and full stomachs for us and our friends! Each week we’ve had the pleasure of produce that is fresh from the farm; we’ve tasted foods we’ve never purchased or even encountered; and we’ve discovered new recipes along the way. Even beyond the kitchen, we support the overall concept of community-supported agriculture and the economically and environmentally sustainability that it facilitates. There is an obvious relationship between farmer and consumer with the sale of any kind of produce, but CSAs make that relationship more of a partnership that benefits both parties. Hopefully CSA models will become more common and more available – because it works!

By the way, if you are familiar with any CSAs in the Boston area (that are reliable and have flexible terms) please let us know!

Until next time,
Kathy May and Silas

This Week’s CSA: 4/14/2016

Kathy May — Fri, 15 Apr 2016 23:37:38 +0000

Our CSA food box for this week contains very colorful and classic fresh goodies! We have organic curly kale, baby heads of lettuce, Empire apples, red onion, crimini mushrooms, red tomato, orange carrots, parsley, and pinto beans.

While the intent of our CSA is to provide seasonal produce from local farms within a 300 mile radius, the winter months require a little stretching of the rule – that is why we have had apples for many weeks in a row. Apples are easily pulled from storage in months when farmed fruits are scarce. We’ve had no repeats in varieties, however, and this week we have Empire apples! Empire apples are named for our great state of New York. They were developed right here by a Cornell University nutritionist in the 1940s and are a cross between McIntosh and Red Delicious apples. The Empire apples in our box came from Upstate New York.

FYI, in case you’re wondering… a cremini/crimini mushroom is actually just a baby portobello mushroom that is immature with a brown cap. We were hugely surprised to learn that an even earlier stage of maturation, before the cap develops a darker flesh, it is called a button mushroom!

Until next time!
– Kathy May and Silas

This Week’s CSA: 4/7/2016

Silas — Thu, 07 Apr 2016 15:25:41 +0000

Here’s what we’ll be having for dinners this week: Golden grape tomatoes, zucchini, Lacinato kale (AKA black, Tuscan, or dinosaur kale), Jonagold apples, Poblano peppers, sunchokes (AKA Jerusalem artichokes), and rolled oats.

Fun facts for this week’s CSA box:

That is not ginger you see in our photo! Sunchokes are yet another food that we’ve never encountered (why we love our CSA). Believe it or not, sunchokes are the tubers of a plant related to the sunflower! Even though they’re also known as Jerusalem artichokes, they have no relation to the city (actually, they’re native to North America) nor are they a variety of artichoke (though they are related via the daisy).
It is not surprising why Lacinato kale is also known as dinosaur kale. As you can see, the texture of its leaves creates a pattern reminiscent of how we think the skin of ancient monsters may have looked.
So far, we have had a number of apple varieties come through our CSA – Cameo, Mutsu (Crispin), Pink Lady, Fuji, Gala, etc. The Jonagold apple in this week’s box is a cross between Golden Delicious and the heritage Jonathan apple. The variety was developed fairly recently in the 1950s at Cornell University.

We’re off to enjoy our culinary excitement for the week!
– Kathy May and Silas

This Week’s CSA: 3/24/16

Silas — Fri, 25 Mar 2016 05:55:14 +0000

This week’s box is the heaviest yet: red potatoes, red chard, leeks, celery root, eggplant, Gala apples, and baby arugula. We have never seen or heard of celery root before so it will be interesting to figure out what to do with it! Supposedly the flavor is a cross between celery and parsley and can be used in soups and mashes.

CSA Highlight: French Breakfast Radishes

Silas — Sat, 19 Mar 2016 04:56:57 +0000

We’ve seen radishes before, but what are French breakfast radishes? They are smaller and more elongated than the familiar variety. Apparently they are also milder as well. We decided to try them sautéed them in butter, inspired by this recipe.

[See image gallery at www.kathymayandsilas.com]

We trimmed off the greens and the root, and sliced them in half lengthwise. Then we heated butter in a pan and added the radishes when the butter started to foam.

[See image gallery at www.kathymayandsilas.com]

We added salt and pepper, and sautéed them until they started to brown and become translucent.

[See image gallery at www.kathymayandsilas.com]

They tasted quite good with butter and had a very mild flavor. Too bad we didn’t have more! Leave us a comment if you’ve tried it or if you have a favorite recipe!

Enjoy,
Silas and Kathy May

This Week’s CSA: 3/17/16

Silas — Fri, 18 Mar 2016 02:47:13 +0000

This week we have spring garlic, Fuji apples, Little Gem lettuce, medium green peppers, parsnips, and grape tomatoes. As with last week, the local farm produce is supplemented with produce grown in Florida since not much is growing here yet, though it is starting to get warmer! You may remember that green garlic was in one of our first CSA boxes last year. It is not-quite-ripe garlic with a stalk that is also edible and a bulb that does not need to be peeled. It’s like a cross between garlic and scallion. Can’t wait to try it!

This Week’s CSA: 3/10/16

Silas — Fri, 11 Mar 2016 03:15:44 +0000

Very little produce is harvested during the winter until April (mesclun and parsnips are the earliest), so the contents of our colorful CSA box this week either comes from storage or from non-local farmers (i.e., Florida). Still delicious! We have cherry bomb peppers, French breakfast radishes, baby bok choi, Mutsu (AKA Crispin) apples, red onions, green peppers, lacinato (AKA black) kale, and orange carrots. These radishes are new to us! They are an heirloom variety that is sweet, mild, and can be eaten plain as a bite-sized snack.

Yum!
– Silas and Kathy May

CSA Highlight: Romanesco

Silas — Thu, 10 Mar 2016 04:40:27 +0000

This week’s CSA food box featured a vegetable that we had never seen or heard of before – Romanesco. It’s in the same family as broccoli and cauliflower, and you can definitely see the resemblance. Looking closer, you can see the fascinating fractal structure where the spirals are made up of smaller spirals which are themselves made up of even smaller spirals.

After looking online for recipes, we decided to keep it simple: roast the florets and sauté the greens and stems. The head cuts apart very easily by cutting the florets from the stem from the bottom up.

We tossed the florets in olive oil and Cajun seasoning (Tony Chachere’s) and then roasted them at 400°F for 20 minutes.

We sautéed the greens and stems in olive oil and garlic with salt and pepper, adding a small amount of water and covering for about 5 minutes to steam them.

Here are the final results! The Romanesco is crunchy and looks like broccoli but tastes more similar to cauliflower and has a bit of a nutty flavor. The greens seem similar to other kinds of greens that we’ve had such as turnip greens.

We had a great first experience with Romanesco! Leave us a comment if you’ve tried it or if you have a favorite recipe!

Enjoy,
Silas and Kathy May

Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA)

Kathy May — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 05:12:18 +0000

Since June 2015, Silas and I have had the pleasure of indulging in community-supported agriculture (CSA) foods. Prior to that, I was not familiar with the idea. In a CSA, the consumer’s funds go directly into the farmer’s cost to run and maintain the farm, which is usually a smaller scale operation. Because risks such as bad weather are shared between farmer and consumer, the farmer is less reliant on banks and loans and can instead devote more effort in producing quality goods. In return, the consumer gets produce that is ultra-fresh and in-season. Furthermore, because the farms are local (in our case, within 350 miles of NYC), less cost and waste goes into food distribution. It’s an economically and environmentally sustainable model!

On the individual experience, each week Silas and I get produce that’s hugely diverse. Much of it includes foods we would not ordinarily purchase or foods we’ve never even encountered! It has provided us with culinary experiments and adventures. Here are our delicious and healthy options so far…

[See image gallery at www.kathymayandsilas.com]

Keep an eye out for future blog posts! We plan to share our future CSA boxes with you and maybe even some of the dishes that come out of them.

Happy and healthy eating,
Kathy May and Silas