CSA Challenge

Normally, I like to plan about a week's worth of dinners ahead of time, go shopping for the ingredients, and cook nutritious dinners for my family all week long; however, we now belong to a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) program through a local farm, and my original way to plan our week's meals has been turned upside down.

So, instead of picking a recipe and then shopping for the ingredients like I've been doing, I now have the ingredients and must pick out a recipe.  This whole process makes my brain hurt!  Thankfully, Hubby is the type of person that sees an ingredient and immediately gets inspired; he's a walking, breathing, living cookbook, and that's a pretty handy thing to have around the house.  Soon, with all this experience, I should be able to do the same thing too.

Every week, we get a box of organic produce delivered directly to our house. Since it's too early in the season to get a bountiful supply of locally grown produce, the CSA supplier supplements the boxes with organic produce from outside the area until enough local produce is available to fill the boxes.

This week, in our CSA box, we received the following:

• Green Garlic
• Spinach
• Mustard Greens
• Dill
• Bananas
• Apples
• Tomatoes
• Celery
• Carrots
• Lettuce (Romaine)
• Strawberries
• Zucchini
• Mangoes
• Lemon
• Lime

The challenge is to use all the produce from the box before it spoils. So far we've already made a spinach salad with strawberries, sautéed zucchini, Caesar salad with the romaine lettuce, sautéed mustard greens with green garlic, and some of the carrots.   Today, in order to use the dill, we will be having Greek spinach pies made with phyllo dough and feta cheese.  I also have plans to make a vegetable beef soup, which is a great way to use up miscellaneous vegetables.

Let's see if we're successful in using all the produce before it spoils, but, if not, I guess we'll just have really expensive compost for our garden.  Let's hope for the former rather than the later.