CSA Report

There are boxes of vegetables stacked up in our livingroom, so it must be Monday. (Well, it was when I sat down at the computer anyway.)

Every Monday, the delivery day for our synagogue's CSA, KosherCook comes home with a few boxes of vegetables that people have forgotten to pick up. This was the first week, however, that no one stopped by as I was trying to get KosherCop ready for bed. He absolutely loves this little ritual - people he doesn't know arrive at our door and instead of brushing his teeth he stands there interrogating them.

Those shares that don't get picked up by 6:30pm on Mondays (or by 7pm when the volunteers ACTUALLY leave the synagogue, or by the time we close our front door for the night) get donated to Manna Food Center, a local food bank, on Tuesday morning. Some people are away, but some actually forget to come get their veggies. For most people, knowing their food went to a worthy cause takes the sting out of not getting the produce they already paid for.

This week we received in our box: Snow peas, hull peas, head lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli, a bag of salad greens, garlic scapes, collards, and mint.

I had never heard of garlic scapes until we received them in last week's box. The Washington Post food blog, A Mighty Appetite describes them:

Here's the anatomy lesson: Garlic and its relatives in the allium family, (leeks, chives, onions) grows underground, where the bulb begins its journey, soft and onion-like. As the bulb gets harder (and more like the garlic we know), a shoot pokes its way through the ground. Chlorophyll- green like a scallion (maybe even greener), the shoot is long and thin and pliable enough to curl into gorgeous tendrils.

Meanwhile, we have been using them in place of regular garlic for the past week. They aren't as delicious as the spring garlic we received the first week, but they have a mellow garlic flavor with a crunchy consistency - at least the way we have been sauteeing or roasting them.