Blueberry Lime Preserves

I’ve been delinquent with regard to CSA-related posts lately, and all non-parasha posts for that matter. My main excuse reason is that I’ve been working on the high ropes course at a day camp, which means real physical labor each weekday, which in turn means I’m just tired a lot of the time. I am in decent shape—much better after five weeks doing this sort of thing—but I am not 18 years old anymore, and my body does not spring back from a day of running around in 100 degree weather as it once might have done. Time to start addressing my backlog of posts-to-be.

The CSA has dumped spadefuls of blueberries on us since it started, and we’ve struggled to keep up. We don’t eat blueberries out of hand very often, and while Terri makes a killer blueberry buckle, it’s something of an operation and requires an annoying degree of cleanup. (Turning the oven on in this weather isn’t much of an enticement either.) We put some of them in pancakes, but we rarely have a sit-down breakfast together more than once a week—something I’d love to change—and there are only so many pancakes one person can eat on a Sunday. We needed something to do with these berries that would either use them up before they rotted, or somehow preserve them for later.

Bread, though not for Balak

Well, it finally happened: I missed a week for challot. It wasn’t due to fatigue, laziness or lack of ideas. There was just no call for me to bake bread for Shabbat this week. (I did make a nifty chopped salad with a wild raspberry vinaigrette, but that is another story, and shall be told at another time if I get around to it.) Still, there was baking to be done over the weekend. Terri asked on Thursday if we could arrange for post-Shabbat pizza, which seemed like a simple endeavor until we started running late on Friday afternoon.

One odd thing about pizza is that if you’re going to make it (or at least, make it well) on Saturday night and happen to be shomer Shabbat, you have to start no later than Friday.

Eat all the parts of the things!

A little under two years ago I passed through the Union Square Greenmarket to pick up some groceries, and finding that the season was right, bought a stalk of Brussels sprouts. (I enjoy buying sprouts on the stem, both because they are often—though not always—fresher and more flavorful than loose sprouts, and because an intact Brussels sprout plant is one of the silliest-looking organisms I’ve ever seen.) After making the purchase, I took my enormous shopping bag over to another vendor, who remarked, “Those look like great sprouts. You’re going to eat the leaves too, right?”

Stock-free bean soup

Time to start answering the question from my first CSA post: What exactly does one do with broccoli rabe? For that matter, what is it? How do you even say it?

<nerdy stuff>The first thing worth knowing about Broccoli rabe—rhymes with “bob,” also spelled “raab”‘ or “raap,” otherwise known as broccoletti, broccoli di rape (pronounced RAH-peh, for Pete’s sake) and rapini—is that it’s not broccoli. Broccoli is a cultivar of the species Brassica oleracea that’s been selectively bred to produce clusters of edible flower buds on an edible stem. (Other B. oleracea varieties include cauliflower, head cabbage, collards, kale, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi and kai-lan.) Broccoli rabe belongs to a cousin species, Brassica rapa, which also includes turnips. In fact, the two plants are so similar genetically that you could say broccoli rabe is a turnip that’s been bred specifically for its leaves, or that a turnip is broccoli rabe bred for its storage root. You could spend a lifetime eating the stuff and never have to know any of this, other than the bit about pronunciation.</nerdy stuff>

Where was I?

It’s the most bountiful time of the year

Well, dear readers, today was an exhausting and exciting day. We’ve been keeping this quiet and up to now have only told a few close friends and relatives, but I am pleased to announce that my wife and I have welcomed a wonderful new addition into our family.

What? No, it’s not a baby. A lot of you know us personally—don’t you think you’d have noticed if Terri were nine months pregnant? We bought a CSA share. Sheesh.

CSA, short for Community-Supported Agriculture, is a business model developed to support small-scale, local farming operations. (That picture of a farm you’ve been carrying around in your head since grade school? It barely exists in the United States. Most American farms are enormous, highly mechanized operations that grow only two or three crops. The major intent behind CSA is to preserve, and encourage the growth of, the other kind of farm.) Rather than grow produce and then try to sell it, CSA-reliant farmers sell shares of their produce well before the harvest begins. They then distribute the fruits (and vegetables) of their labors to investors as the various crops reach maturity. Here’s how it looks from a consumer’s perspective: You throw money at a local farm in March, and then from June through, say, November, that farm returns the favor by giving you all sorts of great veggies on a weekly or biweekly basis.

Aside from the obvious pay-now-collect-later aspect, there are a few notable differences between being a CSA member and buying all of your produce at a supermarket: