This post was written by the amazing Elizabeth Evans, farm member and in full disclosure, my sister.  Part of our goal with this post was to document one person using up a CSA Share.  Success! Thank you to Elizabeth for taking the time to write this up! One observation I have to share from reading Elizabeth’s post is that we are all very different and our tastes reflect that.  While she found the hardest thing to use up was the greens, I usually find I use them right away at the start of the week.

Hello! Margaret asked me to spend some time documenting how I use my farm share. So here I am, fulfilling my food blogger fantasies. I hope this documentation provides some good ideas, but more than that I hope it sparks other, even better ideas that you will share with other farm members!

So, first thing’s first. Here’s the share for this 2 week period:

In the veggie share this week there we have: Spinach, Kale, Upland Cress, Napa Cabbage, Black Radishes, Carrots, Butternut Squash, Turnips, Potatoes, and Sweet Potatoes.

For my 17 points of meat this month I have: Pork Steaks, Ground Beef, Soup Bones, Ground Lamb, Lamb Chops, Hot Italian Sausage and Breakfast Sausage.

Stir Fry

What I used from the share:

• 1 pork steak
• Pea greens (from the previous week’s share! Is that cheating for the purpose of this project? Oh well! I intended to use spinach, but wanted to use the older greens while they were still good…)
• 3 carrots
• 2 black radishes
• 1 egg

What else I used:

I made a sauce with…

• Soy sauce (about 1/3 cup, but I didn’t use all of it)
• Minced garlic (about a teaspoon…more would have been ok)
• Brown sugar, a couple of pinches
• Red pepper flakes (a few good shakes)

What I did:

1. Peel the carrots and radishes and then slice thinly on a mandolin.   (I usually “clean” the root veggies by putting them in a bowl of cold water just to get the worst of the dirt off and then peel them…that seems faster to me than actually cleaning them.)
2. Slice pork thinly, sprinkle with salt and pepper and throw for a very short amount of time into a hot pan that has a little bit of hot oil.
3. Remove pork from the pan, add a small amount of oil if needed and put sliced carrots and radishes in the pan. Salt and pepper them. Let them cook for a while…they should be nice and brown/charred on the edges.
4. Add the washed and dried greens to the pan and put the pork back in. Throw some of the sauce and some more red pepper flakes and cook for not very long at all, until greens are just wilted.
5. Take all that stuff out of the pan and put it somewhere. Put some more oil in the pan and fry an egg, because it is not a lie that everything is better with a fried egg on top.

Yum.

Ahhh, I just realized: Sriracha. Sriracha AND an egg. I totally dropped the ball. You should do it the right way.

Sheppard’s Pie

So on some Buzzfeed list of healthy things to eat I came across a vegetarian Sheppard’s Pie that used premade lentil soup, which led to my attempt at Sheppard’s Pie.

What I used from the share:

1. 2 turnips
2. 6 carrots
3. 2 black radishes
4. ½ bag of kale

What else I used:

1. Lentils
2. An onion (small chop)
3. Salt and pepper
4. Minced garlic
5. Mozzarella cheese

What I did:

1. Peel and chop turnips and radishes. Boil until soft.
2. Cook lentils. I cooked 1 dried cup which was way too much, but I did have enough lentils for about three meals…more on that later.
3. Clean and slice the carrots and sauté with onion and some garlic.
4. Clean kale. Once the carrots are as soft as you want them, add the lentils and mix everything together. Salt and pepper to taste.
5. If you are me, at this point you remove about a third of the lentil and carrot mixture because you realize this is way more than you need for the smallish corning ware you decided to use.
6. Add the kale to the lentils and carrots and keep heat on until the kale cooks down a bit.
7. Drain the turnips and radishes and using a food processor or electric hand mixer, mash them. Salt and pepper to taste.
8. Put the lentil mixture into your baking dish and cover with the mashed turnip/radish stuff. Sprinkle mozzarella on top and broil to melt/brown.

Here’s how it turned out.   I got distracted for a minute and the cheese got very browned…but still delicious.

So learned a couple things from this…like, I have no idea how much lentils increase when you cook them. I also learned that boiled radishes don’t have much taste (this I was actually counting on) but DO have a strange-ish texture that I didn’t love. If I did this again—and I would, with some other refinements, like chopping the greens up—I would use just turnips, or turnips and potatoes, rather than getting all ambitious with the radishes.

Lentil and Kale Salad

Like I said, I had a lot of lentils left over. For lunch a couple days later, I cooked the remaining kale with red pepper flakes and garlic (olive oil in pan, and heat up with the pepper and garlic before adding anything else) and mixed that with the lentils. I dressed it with a generous amount of lemon juice and ate it cold—it was very good.

Baked Sweet Potato Chips

What I used: 1 large sweet potato, very little olive oil, salt and pepper, parmesan cheese

What I did: Slice sweet potatoes on a mandolin. Bake in a 400 degree oven for 20ish minutes, turning over half way through. Make sure they don’t touch.

Remove and sprinkle with parmesan. Or chipotle? Or whatever else you like…

Roasted Carrots and Radishes, with Hot Italian Sausage

Oops, I forgot to take any pictures of this, but you know what roasted vegetables look like, you have a CSA share. I chopped up some radishes and carrots and roasted them at 400 degrees for about half an hour (longer for the radishes). While they were cooking I seared an Italian sausage in a pan on the stove and then covered it and let it cook at a medium low heat while the veggies roasted. Then I put an over easy egg on it. Obviously.

Orange Pork with Pan Roasted Carrots and Radishes; Mashed Potatoes

What I used from the share: A pork steak, a couple of carrots, a radish, all of the white potatoes from the share.

What else I used: Orange juice, olive oil, garlic, soy sauce, honey, salt and pepper; whole milk from the farm store

What I did:

Pork:

1. Mixed the non-share ingredients (not the milk) together to make a marinade. Removed some of the marinade to use later, and put the pork in with the rest in a container to marinate.
2. Broiled the pork on low for about 15 minutes per side.

Mashed Potatoes:

3. Boiled the potatoes.
4. Mash the potatoes with some whole milk from the farm store, salt and plenty of pepper.

Pan Roasted Vegetables:

5. Chopped the vegetables and put in a non-stick pan with a small amount of olive oil.
6. Roast them.
7. When they are mostly done, add some of the reserved marinade that was used for the pork. So good.

Leftover Breakfast

What I used from the farm: An egg (fried), leftover pork from previous meal, curry-kraut from the farm store

What else I used: ¼ of an avocado, whole wheat bread

End of Week Reflection

I learned a lot from my (almost successful!) attempt to use the entire share this week—like, I do not have the patience to clean leafy greens (I never used the spinach, and the upland cress went south before I got to it), and that I will never use 3 lbs of white potatoes in a week unless I have a sick person at home who needs soft foods to eat. Also, that sprouts container was so small in my refrigerator that I both forgot to include it in the initial picture and to use it all week—the good news is that they have held up in the fridge all week, and I used some of them on a breakfast sandwich with a piece of lox and cream cheese this morning—super yummy.

Every week Margaret writes on the board to take what you’ll use up to the listed limits. I learned that I basically CAN use an entire share, mostly on my own, but that to do so requires great time and dedication.   The results, though, were very much worth the efforts.