The CSA: Week 2
It’s been said that a diet filled with fresh fruits and vegetables will help keep you healthier. You will feel better. Your immune system will be stronger and more robust. In fact, you’ll be like a natural immunity machine, able to take on anything, including but not limited to bicycle crashes, lawn mower accidents and certain brands of bullets.
So it’s with a heaping dollop of irony that I spent the last four days – the end of the first week of our CSA share – in bed. With flu-like symptoms. Body aches, fever, blinding headaches, the works.
So much for my immune system. So much for those vegetables.
To be fair, our veggies were pretty much spent by the time I went down for the count. Most of our greens – including the kohlrabi – were thrown together into a salad, and only the green onions managed to make it past Wednesday.
What do you do with kohlrabi? The choices are a little sparse. When sliced, the root is like a radish, while the leaves (not usually kept) are a little bitter. We steamed the leaves and served them with lemon and garlic, and sliced up the root and stalks for our salad. (The radishes, lettuce and spinach were also included).
Usually, kohlrabi is harvested much later. According to our new Simply in Season cookbook (a must have for in-season vegetable recipes) kohlrabi is a late summer/fall vegetable. They tend to be much larger than our scrawny crop, leading Kerrie and I to figure that they needed to fill space in our bag and grabbed some immature veggies.
Kerrie made a fantastic Lemon Asparagus Pasta dish (recipe here at bottom of page) that used up our asparagus and gave us leftovers for a few days. This is where the bulk of our green onions ended up, though we still have some today.
The real feat was Kerrie’s innate ability to keep our home filled with some of the best rhubarb treats I’ve ever tasted. Rhubarb muffins, rhubarb crisp, strawberry-rhubarb strudel (from Eating Well magazine) – you name it, Kerrie put rhubarb in it. In fact, she was overheard wishing for more rhubarb this week.
Well, her wish was granted. Week two’s haul:
Kohlrabi
Rhubarb
Green onions
Radishes
Lettuce
Beets
We’re looking at the same bunch of vegetables as last week, with the added wrinkle of finding a useful reason to cook beets.
Yeah, those nasty, slimy, too-red canned monstrosities. Or, at least, that’s how I envision beets – I’m sure many of you feel the same.
Though, at this point, I’d be happy if beets could be dried, ground into a fine powder and used to cure non-curable virus sicknesses. Like this headache. And this fever. And these aches.
I know, I know. Eat more vegetables. Trust me. I’m trying.