I’ve been trucking along with ye olde CSA for a few weeks. I am really good about eating the fruits right away (we have had some delicious blueberries and cherries), and not so good about using up all of the greens. We had kale this week and I was so excited to make more sausage & kale pasta (see below)… and then I went to the Olive Garden instead. And IKEA. There is no time for cooking kale when trips to IKEA are on the schedule! So I’ve been eating a lot of pretzels out of a bucket that I found at CVS. I think my boyfriend and I ate two buckets last week. CVS is wonderful.

Other than that, I’ve been munching on cucumbers and carrots and whatever the farm sends my way. Honestly, my cooking in the past few weeks has been pretty much… nonexistent. I made some delicious blueberry pancakes a couple of weekends ago, but I think that’s been it.

I’m moving in a month and I’ve decided that I need to eat everything in my pantry to avoid moving extra things (like a bag of beans is so cumbersome). So I’m probably going to be eating a lot of lentils in the weeks to come. I have a lot of lentils stocked up. I can’t even say why I have all of these lentils. I’m not obsessed with lentils. Lentils lentils lentils. Hopefully I’ll get some veggies to throw in with them. Or I’ll just buy them.

Challenge status: begrudgingly plodding along, but I still mostly eat gummi bears for lunch. It’s hard to break habits, people.

Olive Garden status: leftovers from the Garden smell like steaming garbage. Why is this?

IKEA status: I bought 3 glass vases and desperately want a white Expedit for my new apartment.

Apparently the flooded soil does not bode well for crops like peppers. We should have a plethora of various lettuces, as well as cucumbers and zucchini. It’s also almost time for corn! And melons! I have high hopes that everything will work out. I don’t really care all that much about peppers anyway.

In the absence of my CSA this week I have been eating a lot of pasta. And more pizza. I also loaded up on blueberries and cherries from my favorite neighborhood grocer, HarvesTime Foods. Of course, I ate two containers of blueberries in two days, so obviously I need my big box of weeds back, stat.

My friend was not able to properly split the veggies with me this week, as he was going to be out of town for several days and knew he would never finish everything. This left me with a lot of asparagus and lettuce. I wasn’t able to finish everything, either, but here is a list of things I made:

1. Rhubarb pie. After the embarrassment that was my rhubarb curry, I decided to play it super safe and just slap all of my rhubarb into a frozen pie crust and call it a day. My baking adventures usually involve very complex cakes that require 5 hours of my time, and I feel weird that this 10-minute pie tasted as good as it did. I usually turn my nose up at such endeavors, and I begrudgingly admit that I am wrong to do so. Here is my “recipe”:

2 9-inch frozen pie crusts (I used the store brand variety)

Big ole handful of rhubarb, chopped into 1-2″ pieces

6 table spoons of flour, 1 1/3 cups of sugar, and a sprinkle of cinnamon – this is the dry mixture that the recipe I found on the internet called for, but I used less than half of it. Did my pie suffer? I don’t really know.

1 tbsp butter

So I let the frozen pie crusts defrost a little and then I dusted the bottom of one crust with the sugar mixture. Then I piled on the rhubarb and poured some more sugar on top of that. Then I placed small pea-sized morsels of butter randomly among the rhubarb, covered everything with the other defrosted pie crust (I didn’t do a great job at making everything smooth and pretty, but this pie was all for me) and stuck it in a 400 degree oven for about 20 minutes.  My oven is not calibrated correctly and tends to cook everything very quickly, so in case you want to make one of these delicious pies, you should probably read the original recipe here.

2. Steamed carrots. I steamed some carrots.

3. Asparagus with eggs. I scrambled some eggs with salt and pepper and blanched asparagus. If there is one thing I really pride myself on knowing how to cook, it is scrambled eggs. (Do not ask me how to boil one.)

4. Whole wheat pasta with sausage and kale. My sister recommended this recipe to me, and I followed it exactly. Well, I didn’t use the same brands, and I used about half the oil. It was amazingly good.  The recipe made an enormous amount of food, which I ate over the course of 3 days. If I get kale again, I am making this immediately. I would eat it every day. Again.

5. Salad. What else is there to say?

Overall I did a lot better this week than last. However, I couldn’t help but supplement my diet with Cheezits and ice cream. And I don’t really even like ice cream! Sigh.

My first CSA trek was a minor adventure. The pick-up location is in a residential neighborhood near where I work, which is wonderfully convenient as I can just stop by on my commute home. The pick-up is in a tiny shed behind someone’s house. To get to this shed, you must traverse through what I would call a jungle (by Chicago’s standards anyway). I felt like a creep,  crawling through someone else’s weeded backyard. Especially since I could hear conversations and screaming children. Oh hey, just taking a box of vegetables here. Pay no attention.

Even after splitting the vegetables (I am sharing the box with a friend), I had a veritable ton of food. My first order of business was to make myself an enormous salad comprised of kale, spinach, and lettuce. I drizzled some lemon juice on it and threw some Trader Joe’s Everyday Seasoning on top and called it done. It took me 14 seconds, which is almost a little too much prep time for me to make a meal for myself. I also took a photo of this, which I will also post later. I mean, in case you wanted to see how I did it.

I ate this salad for pretty much every meal for the rest of the week, save for the weekend when I ate real food (e.g. Spacca Napoli) with my boyfriend. I also had a failed attempt to make a curry dish that incorporated rhubarb and apples and delicious spices. I was inspired by this recipe, which I swear I followed exactly, but it turned into sour mush. It looks really beautiful on that blog, and I bet it tasted it amazing. Mine was not so. It really wasn’t all that bad, but it certainly wasn’t good. Reviewing the recipe, I see now that I left out the cilantro. This is probably what did me in. I will never forsake you again, cilantro.

TUNE IN NEXT WEEK (or whenever I update this next) for more kale salad adventures. I’m pretty sure I’m going to make kale chips tomorrow! And no more sour curry – I will bake a delicious rhubarb cake.

My decision to join a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) was not a light one. The number one reason for a person like me to never do something like this is, quite simply, I do not cook. My idea of dinner is three pretzels and half of a cucumber. It’s not that I don’t know how to cook. I know how to read and am reasonably confident that I can understand recipes. It’s not that I don’t have time to cook, because any person that takes a three hour nap after work every day probably has a few minutes to throw some things in a pot. I don’t dislike cooking. I actually find it pleasant. Maybe not as pleasant as ordering a pizza, but it certainly can be enjoyable in its own way. The reality is, I just don’t cook. It doesn’t fit in with my wild lifestyle of chatting on the internet and eating chocolate chips.

The other reasons for not joining a CSA are: I probably won’t want to lug a wooden box of vegetables around once a week, it’s a bit pricey up front (though in the long run, I don’t expect it will be), and I share a refrigerator with another person and there’s already not much space. ( It’s filled with instant potatoes, cheese, and beer.)

Why do this, then? The first reason is that I desire a Summer Challenge. The challenge will be that I have a CSA box filled with vegetables that I may or may not enjoy that I must eat within a week’s time (unless I start canning, HA HA). Sounds fun, right? I think so. What if I get 8 pounds of kale? It’ll be such an adventure! Another reason is that I actually do want to be a healthy person, and not subsist for days on a 3 pound bag of Haribo gummi bears. Belonging to CSA will likely force me to be healthy, and I like that. And the final reason, and perhaps the biggest reason of all depending on how tree-huggy I feel, is that I think supporting local farms is a spectacular thing. I could go on about eating seasonally and smaller ecological footprints and all of those concepts that are in vogue, but many people have said it already and they’ve said it far more eloquently than I.

I’m really just a girl trying to figure out how to eat like a civilized human being!

We’ll see how long I can keep this thing up. It may or may not devolve into posts about how much I love chinese takeout.