CSA Holiday Share, Part I

This year, I decided at the last minute that I was going to sign us up for the Holiday Share CSA. It was spurred mostly by a conversation with our farmer who I saw at my yoga class (small town living, small town connections) about how the onions weren't curing particularly well, so the box would have fewer onions than normal.  We'll come back to that statement later, but I decided that we could probably use a lot of the winter vegetables. We've never done the Holiday Share before because, well, because it seemed a bit pricey to me.  But 2017 has been the Year of Hemorrhaging Money, so what's a little more, right?

So the Holiday Share comes in two large deliveries, one today and one in mid-December. The cost was $130 and we'll use this year as a metric for whether or not we'll buy the winter shares next year. We got two big boxes at the pickup site today.

Not the pickup site. Our kitchen.

This share included:
Sweet potatoes
Savoy cabbage
Honeynut squash (x7)
Butternut squash (x2)
Beauty heart radish (x3)
Green kale (x2 bunches)
Leeks
Red and yellow onions
Garlic
Carrots
Romanescu (x2 heads)
Sweet peppers (x3)
Spinach
Celeriac (x2)

Our fridge is bursting with all these delicious goodies.  I just went to the grocery store last night, too, so we have so much food in our house it's insane. I honestly have no idea if we've ever had this much food for just the two of us in our entire married lives.

The plan is relatively simple, I think. I can take the carrots, radishes, peppers, and romanescu with me as part of my lunch raw.  That's actually enough carrot to get me through until the next share, I think, so I'm quite pleased with this outcome. The cabbage, celeriac (which is like uber condensed celery in bulb form), and leftover rutabaga from our regular season CSA will be turned into a slaw that I'm bring to Thanksgiving dinner next week because no one ever brings green things. The leeks we use when other people use onions.  I might also take it upon myself to make some potato leek soup in the next couple of weeks.

I'm going to be honest about it, we threw out the spinach. There's a lot of research that demonstrates is really hard to clean spinach and the threat of E. coli is real. I know I complain about Dr. BB's food issues here, but it has been recommended to him by doctors that he just not attempt spinach because food poisoning is such a big risk for him, so our new rule is that it is out. It is wasteful on our part, but there you have it.

I'm going to make sweet potato casserole for a book club I'm hosting this weekend AND I might take some with me to Thanksgiving as well.  If they aren't all used in these casseroles, sweet potatoes are always good sides for dinner.  The honey nut squash is a hard sell for us - we just don't like them as much as we like butternut - but we'll make them for sides at dinner, too. 

But this! This is the problem. WTF am I supposed to do with all that garlic?  And those onions that didn't "cure well"?  Ha!

I'm going to try to give them away to the ladies at my book club this weekend, to family members over Thanksgiving, and if that doesn't work, I may have to resort to freezing some. I'm mostly worried that I'm going to get similar numbers of garlic and onion bulbs in a month's time and I just can't deal with that, although I guess it will be close enough to Christmas that I can pawn more off on family members at that time, too.

Anyway, despite the onion and garlic overload, I think this share is full of very usable items and I'm excited to get baking and cooking.