The CSA: Week 4

One thing that’s great about visiting the Farmers Market each week is the comfortableness that comes with recognizing return vendors. It’s the same feeling you get when you go to your neighborhood bar and the bartender starts mixing your drink, or when you go to the bakery and get a rousing hello from the staff.

It doesn’t happen often anymore – in my life, it hardly happens at all. So I enjoy each return acquaintance. Even if I never actually talk to them (which I don’t) they’re always there. Always selling the same stuff, always watching the same people browse through the same stock.

Like the people who sell aquatic plants, a niche market if there ever was one. They have water lilies and water lettuce and tons of things that would be useful if we had, you know, a pond.

This week I noticed that they sell carnivorous plants. Actual carnivorous plants. Like, Venus fly traps and pitcher plants and all of those crazy plants you thought only lived in the Amazon forests and couldn’t survive outside of an arid heat that produces the monster insects it needs to survive. But here they were – $10 a piece, ready to take home and plant next to your tomatoes.

(Which, by the way, probably isn’t the best place to plant them.)

Another welcome site – especially now that I’ve switched allegiances and joined the omnivore team – is the Goosemobile: a dark trailer filled with freezers, each lovingly stocked with free range, organic meats, from pork to beef, chicken to whatever parts are left over.

Kerrie buys eggs from the Goosemobile every once in a while, so it wasn’t a new experience by any means. But with the expanded menu, the Goosemobile – and the woman who keeps it alive – has reached a more prominent place on my radar. She sells nearly everything you could think of, and is proud to have never received a bad check. No, really. It’s right there on her order forms – she has never received a bad check. Ever.

In a time when most meats are handed out in spotless, sterilized butcher shops or the cold confines of the supermarket, it’s refreshing to find something like the Goosemobile – a full-service meat van, decorated with an array of country knick-knacks, with jellies and quilts adorning the outside tables and customers lining up to order a couple dozen eggs or free range chicken breasts. It’s friendly. Functional. Down-home, and perfect for the scene. She’s a mainstay at the Farmers Market, and I look forward to getting to know her.

Oh yeah – the CSA. We got many of the same veggies, with the addition of yellow beets. Last week’s veggies were used mainly in salads and muffins (we have rhubarb coming out of our ears, so thankfully that crop has petered out). We did use the onions in a phillo dough casserole that also included ricotta cheese and spinach. For this week, we’re looking at creative ways to use:
Kohlrabi
Green onions
Radishes
Lettuce
Beets
Yellow Beets

I’d add it to my organically raised, antibiotic-free, free range chicken breasts, but they won’t be in for another two weeks.

The Goosemobile, however, will be there next week. Just like it always has been. Just like it always will.