I’m still a huge proponent of CSAs and think the one we had or even a different one could work for us in the future but, right now, it’s just not meeting our needs as well as a weekly trip to the farmers’ market could.  I’d encourage everyone to try a CSA for a season–it can open your eyes to new, exciting fruits and veggies and give you a honed perspective on what’s in season when.  But, like many relationships, you have to assess your own needs and know when to end it to move on to better options.

Six Reasons to Break-Up with Your CSA

1. “The long distance thing is killing us” : You picked a farm that was 30 miles away thinking it would be worth it and once you were bumped from wait list to membership, you figured you’d be so excited about picking up that share every week, you wouldn’t mind the commute.  Except then you found out you have to leave work early every Tuesday to get to the pick up site on time and God help you if there’s traffic or you get stuck at a long red light and you’ve actually been too busy (or lazy) to make the drive for several weeks now.  You’re not getting your money’s worth, food may be going to waste, the gas you’re using certainly isn’t the most environmentally-friendly and you’re taking up a membership spot.  Look for markets, produce stands or direct-from-the-farm options closer to home.

2. “We just don’t have that spark anymore” : At first, you were happy with all the delightful new things your CSA was providing you– kohlrabi?  COOL!–but now, you know you’re going to get 12 tomatoes, 6 pickling cucumbers and a cantaloupe in your bin and the variety just isn’t doing it for you anymore.  If your family has enough of an appetite, you could first try supplementing with interesting finds from the market but if not, if you’re just plain bored with what you’ve been getting, maybe getting all your local produce at a big market with tons of vendors would be a better fit.

3. “It’s not you, it’s me” : This was our problem.  Our CSA just stopped meeting our changing needs.  I meal plan so one small eggplant or 7 zucchini were either too little or too much for me to plan a weeknight meal for 2 adults.  We really like to make meals that transform the ingredients instead of just eating them in a close-to-raw form so having several weeks of cucumber salad just wasn’t satisfying us anymore.  The way our lifestyle is now, choosing our perfect quantities at the market is a more prudent way to spend our money.  On the flip side, I do a lot of canning and need bulk produce at several points in the season.  For this, trips to a you-pick farm are better than using CSA fruits and veggies.  Again, it’s just a matter of how the share no longer fit our changing eating style.  This may also be the case for you if your needs have changed and no longer fit your CSA, e.g. you’ve gone organic while your farm uses conventional methods.

4. “You’ve changed”: Like #3 but it’s the CSA that changed, not you.  Maybe they aren’t offering half shares anymore and a full share is too much for you or maybe they’ve increased their prices and a share is now out of your budget.  By nature, belonging to a CSA requires some flexibility but if their changes mean you’re way over budget, wasting food or otherwise not eating how you want to eat, it’s time to shop elsewhere.

5. “I’ve found someone else”: New CSAs are starting every year (some with inventive twists on the traditional CSA model) and you may find that a new one is a better fit for you–closer to home, cheaper, offers more added-value items like bread and meat, etc.  Hopefully, you joined a CSA that allowed you to connect with a farmer, the other members and the land on which your food was grown but that doesn’t mean you are tethered to them should a better opportunity come along.

6: “You cheating bastard!” : Ok, in my rosy world of local food and farmers, I didn’t think this would be a problem.  Except, a friend of mine ran into this and shared his experience with me.  If you feel like you aren’t getting quality produce, it’s time to get out.  My friend found out his farm was selling the best-looking produce at the market and at the on-farm produce stand and the CSA seemed to exist as a prepaid dumping ground for sub-par items.  There is no excuse for that, no matter how rare that experience might be and if you run into it, run away.  I’ve also heard an account of a CSA that often didn’t have bins available at a pick-up location they advertised and another account of produce that had rotted or was infested with bugs.  Any fresh food lover will tell you a larva here, a beetle there, some dirt and sand and some holes from insect nibbles are par for the course but if your produce is regularly unavailable or not fresh, ditch that CSA for another one.

No one likes a break up but sometimes it’s necessary to make sure you are happy with your local food purchases and feel you are getting a fair value that fits your eating style.  If you do feel like you’re going to cut ties with your current membership, think about your back-up plan.  If you have your eye on another attractive prospect, make sure they have an opening or at least get on their waitlist for next year.  Alternatively, commit to getting your local produce some another source (farm stand, farmer’s market, you-pick farm, etc) about once a week.

And, as a last note, help your ex-CSA farm learn from the experience by giving them feedback about where the relationship went wrong.  Letting them know that they no longer fit your budget or don’t offer organic options or that you prefer a value-added CSA share helps them strategically plan for next year.

Best of luck and stay strong if you really aren’t getting what you need from your CSA partners.

In case you haven’t seen the zillions of commercials telling you to buy flowers and candy or taken a stroll through a card aisle that has been swathed in pink or red, Valentine’s Day is upon us.  As such, the theme for this month’s What’s Baking is baking with V-day colors.

I had those leftover pieces of summer-picked strawberries from when I strained the liquid part of canned preserves for the linzer cookies and I was itching to use them in something pink and sweet and delicious.  The perfection of strawberries and chocolate can’t be denied and as soon as I remembered that I had a never-used heart-shaped whoopie pie pan sitting in storage, I had whoopie pies in my head.

So I found a recipe and got to work.  For the first round, I spooned in the batter and they turned out not like cute heart cookies but  like blobs.

For the second round, I piped in the batter and used a wet finger to distribute it evenly throughout the heart-shaped wells.  Ok, now we have more heart and less blob but they still didn’t have flat sides that were good for icing and sandwiching together. 

Bottom line, this pan would be great for heart-shaped mini muffins or something but not whoopie pies–they needed a nice flat side which I’d have to get from a baking sheet.

So, I abandoned the shape but kept the flavors.  Which were awesome.

The chocolate is deep and rich but not too sweet and the cake is soft.  The strawberry filling is creamy and bright with a little tang from the cream cheese and pretty pink from the strawberries.  Reminiscent of a chocolate covered strawberry but much friendlier and homey, like a baked good should be.

When I was in middle school, I despised Valentine’s Day with the fire of a thousand Black Hole Suns (you like the grunge reference, teenagers of the 90′s??).  The whole day was the epitome of preteen/teenage awkwardness.  The guy you liked gave flowers to someone else, your best friend was embarrassed to the core because she got a singing Valentine from the guy who still wore Bart Simpson t-shirts and the weird kid who writes depressing poetry watched too many John Cusack movies and decided today was the day to profess his love for you.

Those early Valentine’s Days were full of unfulfilled expectations and the idiotic version of romance that 7th graders had picked up from watching 90210, Titanic and Friends.  I was having none of it.

But God bless one of my best friends, Lis.  She is perhaps the nicest person anyone has ever met, ever, and was all in on Valentine’s Day.  She’d buy every one of her 1, 785 friends a drama-club sponsored candy rose bud (two Hershey kisses, flat end to flat end, and wrapped in red cellophane with a fake stem attached) with a sweet, upbeat message about how much the friendship meant to her.  And every year Lis had a boyfriend so at the end of the day she’d haul home teddy bears and flowers and balloons and all those other expressions of young love that 13 year old boys can buy with their allowances.

While I wouldn’t have been caught dead in red or pink on V-day, Lis liked to wear a fluffy white wool sweater with a big red heart on the front.  She embraced the holiday for what it was and didn’t get caught up in how to deal with the flowers that went to other girls or the weird kid’s poetry.  Looking back, I probably would have saved myself some self-inflicted angst if I had just rolled with it like she did.

These cookies remind me so much of Lis.  They are so sweet with their ruffled edges, snowfall of powdered sugar and glossy red jam peeking out of a heart-shaped cut out.  These are not romantic aphrodisiac cookies that will get your husband all hot and bothered and they are not the cookies that should accompany five stanzas with a quatrain rhyme scheme to finally tell the love of your life how you feel.  No, these are cookies to be shared with your best friends or your mom, to pack in your kids’ or husband lunch, to stash in your neighbors’ mailbox.  These are the sweet expressions of love and appreciation you can give to whomever you want to this February 14 just because it’s fun.

The flavor is out of this world.  Very sweet with depth in the buttery cookie from those crushed almonds (watch them like a hawk when they’re in the oven–they can burn very easily) and a tangy contrast coming through from that fruity jam.  I hate to brag (ok, if I really hated it I wouldn’t type it) but the homemade jam I used was pretty spectacular.  The fresh strawberry taste absolutely shines.

Or, alternatively titled, “Oh shit, I let the expensive artisan bread get kinda hard and stale.  Now what?”

Because that’s exactly how this meal came to be.  I bought a nice loaf of rosemary-olive oil bread to be cubed for a fun cheese fondue dinner.  That night, I worked until 8 pm and just really, REALLY didn’t feel like going through the trouble of preparing all the components of fondue.  I think we ended up having Chick-fil-a.  The next night, we had plans with friends and by the next night, that nice loaf of bread was pretty hard–fondue night would have resembled eating cheese-covered rocks.

So, do I throw it out and chalk it up as a loss?

No, I saw through the thing and make croutons!

These are dense, hard croutons, not the light crispy kind you want for a caesar salad.  Instead, they would go perfectly in a brothy soup.  I thought about a tomato bisque but I could bring myself to make tomato soup with pathetic January tomatoes–blech.  So, I went cruisin’ through William-Sonoma’s Soup cookbook and found just the thing–Garlic Stracciatella, broth-based with the addition of winter-friendly spinach and carrots and full of rich garlic flavor that would be an awesome complement to the rosemary flavors already baked into the bread.

The croutons take just a few minutes to make.  I experimented with dipping the cubes in melted butter, brushing them with melted butter and drizzling them with olive oil and they came out pretty much the same so do whatever is easiest for you.  They come out hard and crunchy (depending on how stale your bread is) but they sop up all that delicious garlicky broth and get soft but not mushy.

The soup is spectacular.  Rich in flavor, but not too heavy, with hearty doses of veggies that complement the bread nicely.  I used CSA spinach I had frozen last summer but you can use fresh or frozen chopped.  Make sure your carrots are thinly shredded to give the best texture–you don’t want hard matchsticks of carrot floating around.

I love love love runny eggs and they have been BIG on the food scene in the last few years.  Runny eggs on burgers, salads, pasta dishes, you name it.  Sometimes I thin foods are suited to having dripping, underdone, should-be-gross-but-is-delectable yolk gushing out over them and sometimes…not so much.  Because I think runny eggs, especially fried ones, are too rich for already fatty foods like burgers, I’ve been particularly keen on trying to make one of the many recipes with eggs baked into something simple and veggie-based like tomato sauce or greens.

So, when this recipe caught my eye in Bon Appetit last month, I dog-eared the page and jotted down the ingredients on my grocery list.  Without really looking at them.

It wasn’t until I got into making it that I realize all the components of this dish. Egg–got it, we talked about this one, remember?  I’m in favor.  Wilted spinach with leeks and scallions–fine, yum, I love this stuff and can still get it locally at out winter farmer’s market.  Homemade chili oil–ok, I like spice and I like hot sauce with my eggs.   And…yogurt…with garlic–hmmm…

I had never had yogurt with eggs or spinach and it seemed a little suspicious but Bon Appetit rarely steers me wrong so I gave it a try.

Damn if yogurt with eggs and spinach isn’t delicious.  The creaminess cools off the heat from the chili, the garlic and tang of Greek yogurt offset the coating richness of the egg yolk and butter and setting all those bold flavors on a background of wilted spinach and delicate onion kept the whole thing balanced.  I felt like a cooking reality show judge when my inner monologue was “I was a little nervous when I saw you putting all those components together but it really WORKS!”

I love the combination so much I loaded a half serving on a crusty roll the next for lunch and it was absolute heaven.  This could be a breakfast sandwich or a dinner entree or brunch, for that matter.  This sandwich can do it all!

And the best thing about this recipe (aside from the flavor) is that it is deceptively fast to prepare.  If you’re good with the knife, you can go from start to finish in about 20 minutes.  If you’re the type who likes leftovers, just saute extra onions and leeks and make extra doses of the yogurt and oil–you can’t bring the spinach or egg back to life once they’ve cooled.  Besides, on the second day you’ll be able to dump in the onions, wilt the spinach and bake the egg in a mere 12-13 minutes and add the roll, if you want.  Not bad for a fresh second showing.

We got snow in October.  OCTOBER!  And, since then, we’ve had just a small dusting.  Lucky for me, I happened to bake for this month’s challenge–a “snow day treat”–on the day we got that dusting.  It was cold and icy and even though I wasn’t the one who had to walk the dog, I wanted to warm up with some hot chocolate.

So I had my hot chocolate and thought about how tasty the stuff was.  Dutch process cocoa, creamy milk and a pinch of cayenne pepper topped with fluffy melted marshmallows.  Uh, that sounds like a delicious beverage CUPCAKE!

I actually made these twice.  The first time I used a buttercream that incorporated marshmallow fluff.  It was absolutely delicious but someone in our house, who shall remain unnamed but is not me and is not a cat or a dog, didn’t like that it didn’t have enough marshmallow flavor.  So, I switched recipes to one that was far more inspired by the method for making homemade marshmallows.  Still good, definitely more hot chocolate-y, but not as rich.  And the second frosting starts to crust so eat them just after icing while it’s still spongy and soft.

The perfect pizza crust is an elusive animal.  It needs to be kinda crispy on the outside, chewy and soft on the inside, not go limp when sauced and topped and have a pleasing taste that isn’t bland but doesn’t compete with the other ingredients.  Texture is the biggest component for me but Greg likes a thinner pizza with a good crispiness while I like a big crust-to-toppings ratio (seriously, half the time I’d rather just have breadsticks, as fat as that sounds).

Well, I can’t say there’s no better crust out there but we’re pretty smitten with this version from Williams-Sonoma.  It’s from their Bride and Groom Cookbook which is sweet because it fits both me and Greg just fine.  It’s pretty soft but not super bread-y or thick.  We topped it with chopped chicken, caramelized onions and smoked Gruyere cheese for a sweet-salty-smoky combination that we couldn’t get enough of.

My very first experience with food photography wasn’t for the blog or Facebook or even practice shots (uh, have you seen the first few posts?  There was little practice).  No, the first photo I remember taking of food was a plate with a basic split chicken breast, a pile of Lipton’s seasoned rice and some reheated frozen peas with butter and salt.  Why did I capture, for all time, this most mundane of dinners?  Because this was the first dinner my roommate Noelle and I made as real out-on-own college women the first night in our apartment.  It was monumental enough that I used a real 35 mm film exposure to freeze that culinary moment in time.  Yes, I’m old enough to have used a film camera in college.

Noelle and I went on to make many meals in that kitchen (amid all the Slimfast and Coronas) but that was 2003, before most of today’s food blogs were in existence and we didn’t own any cookbooks (needed the counterspace for all the Slimfast and Coronas).  So, when we had kitchen questions or needed a recipe, we turned to our moms.

Among that advice and those recipes, Noelle’s mom, Colleen, blessed us with a chicken noodle soup recipe to die for.  It makes use of dark leafy greens that add vitamins and an interesting vegetable contrast to the typical celery and carrots while cream of chicken soup elevates the stanard broth with a rich taste and velvety texture (I used the homemade cream of chicken I posted yesterday.

All in all, it’s hearty, healthful soup that just hits the spot on a wintry day.  And it’s easy enough that two college apartment dwellers can whip up a batch!

Cream of Crap.  That’s how condensed cream of whatever soups are jokingly referred to in the foodie world yet these pantry staples end up in lots of tried-and-true recipes.  Not wanting to forgo all of these comfort food recipes just because Campbell’s adds coloring, inexplicable flavorings and MSG to their product, I test-drove a homemade version that includes basically chicken stock, milk, flour and common spices.

The result was thick, flavorful, creamy, and easily applied to a variety of recipes calling for cream of crap chicken.  I made a double batch, using half in a chicken soup recipe (posting later this week!) and freezing half for another day.  By using homemade stock, I believe I can make this at home without all the extra, well, crap, for even cheaper than the canned stuff retails.

Hello, comfort food.  Nice to see you again.

My birthday was last week and Greg had planned an awesome trip to Virgina wine country for 2 relaxing days in a hotel complete with spa treatments for me, nice dinner reservations and successive tasting tours at 3 nearby wineries.  Sounds like a blissful and romantic way to forget about welcome turning 30, right?

Until we both got super sick.  We made a pretty great time out of it considering most of the day was spent catching up sleep between the fever and chills, the wine tasting was pretty much devoid of the “taste” part for Greg and my facial was equally as useful for loosing up the mucus in my sinuses as it was for giving my skin the glow of a still-29-year-old.

Luckily, the bug took it easy on me and I was well enough to enjoy some amazing food and wine.  Greg was a little worse for wear.  So, when we got home, I dropped the birthday girl act, put on my dutiful wife apron and brewed up a big vat of minestrone soup–full of nutrient-packed veggies, lean protein beans, filling pasta carbs and that no-fail get-well ingredient, homemade chicken stock.  A tremendous amount of flavors and textures contribute to this soup, making it so satisfying as meal even though it’s incredibly low in fat and calories and all that goodness just melts down your sore throat in a swirl of tasty, hot, healing broth.

After several bowls of this home-grown medicine, hubby is finally on the mend and we can enjoy those souvenir bottles of wine