Yesterday, I sat down for a cup of coffee and a chat with Carla, the editor of Local Houston magazine, who gave me about a million amazing tips and tricks for Houston, including the best farm shares and organic food co-ops. So yesterday afternoon I made a last minute run to the Houston Arboretum to collect my very first vegetable farm share box! My sister has had CSA boxes and farm shares in Maine for years, but I never found an equivalent that made sense for us in Ireland. When Carla mentioned Rawfully Organics, I practically ran home to look it up. Turns out their pick up was yesterday afternoon and they had an extra box of veggies available!
So, for $25, we got a big box of these organic vegetables:
a spaghetti squash
a butternut squash
an acorn squash
4 big potatoes
4 big tomatoes
4 little cukes
4 little summer squash
4 little zucchini
2 little eggplants
about 35 okra
and three bunches of new-to-me greens (as in, I have no idea what they are and should have asked!)
Rawfully Organic’s Tuesday boxes are technically a co-op, not a farm share. With a farm share or CSA, you pay in advance for a certain number of weeks and your money helps support the farm in advance. With a co-op, the veggies and fruits have already been grown and you’re supporting a collection of farms at once. (But correct me if I’m wrong!) With this particular co-op veggie system, you can order each week before the Monday cut-off and pick up your veggies on Tuesday or even have them delivered. We’re going to see how long these veggies last us but I imagine it will be about a week.
I’m still new to the grocery store prices over here, but I’m pretty sure our box was significantly cheaper than it would have been to buy all these veggies individually in a store – and these are organic so they would have been even more expensive!
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Last night we came home and I tried to do what I’ve seen my sister do with her farm share, and get it all washed and stored so nothing goes to waste. And then I promptly faced what I’m sure is a common farm share panic – what the heck to do with all those vegetables! I figured we may as well start with the most foreign vegetable, the okra, so I Googled “okra for beginners.” Ha! I landed on roasted okra which involves very little work, hardly any ingredients other than okra, and would give us a sense of what okra actually tastes like for the future. We gobbled up every last bite, it was that good!
One of the fun things (although I think some people would hate this!) about a veggie box like this is that all the decisions about what vegetables you get are made for you. There’s no choosing vegetables, you get what’s in season and what’s available in abundance. For me, this kind of thing gets us out of the rut of making the same four dinners over and over again. I’ve had pretty good success Googling or Pinteresting ingredients and landing on recipes that will use certain vegetables. In the name of being prepared to use up all those vegetables, I thought I’d do a little research this morning to make sure nothing goes to waste.
Coconut eggplant curry / Eggplant shakshuka / Sichuan eggplant
Spaghetti squash with bacon, spinach and goat cheese / Southwestern stuffed spaghetti squash / Thai peanut spaghetti squash
Okra maque choux / Lentil okra curry / Armenian vegetable stew
Quick fridge pickles / Asian cucumber sesame salad / Healthy butternut squash stew
Now, if anyone has any recipes for mystery greens, be sure to pass them along!
1 Comment
Could we see a picture of the mystery green?? You’ve got me curious now.