This week’s farm share had lettuce, cabbage, kohlrabi, broccoli, and swiss chard (finally!). Although I did have a meltdown yesterday where I destroyed dinner and had to dump the whole thing in the trash (Tommy ended up having a slice of storebought bread and an egg; Derek and I had dinner during our date night instead of going couch shopping like we’d really hoped to do), I am generally feeling more confident about using the strange veggies. I’m super-excited about trying several swiss chard recipes, so hopefully we’ll start getting plenty of that in the weeks to come!
I’m pretty sure this was the biggest cabbage I’ve ever seen. Here’s my hand for comparison. Definitely enough for two full meals for the three of us!
So, overall, are you glad you did the farm share? Has it been worth the effort for you? Any cons? Are you going to do it again next year?
I’m still not sure about it being worth the effort–especially with a newborn! I am definitely having to look for a lot of new recipes to use new ingredients, but that’s been good for variety to my menus, and I’ll have all those things figured out for next year. Cost-wise, the spring farm share was not a savings, but it wasn’t too expensive. I think so far the summer farm share has been about equal to what I would spend on produce at the store (and of course it’s a lot better than grocery store fare), and as the summer progresses and we get more summer staples like tomatoes and squash, I think it will start to be more and more of a savings. It is sometimes hard to use up this many veggies in one week, and we’re certainly limited to what we can cook (because too many meals that don’t incorporate farm share foods means I end up throwing out produce that is starting to spoil). So I would only recommend it to people who cook almost everything from scratch and generally like spending time in the kitchen. It’s fun for me, but pretty labor-intensive. I still haven’t decided if I’m going to do it next year or just find a good farmer’s market around here.