Chowing Down

Over the past few months, Chris and I have been making a concerted effort to integrate more produce into our diets.  While we generally eat pretty well, calorie-wise, and maintain our weight within a reasonable margin, we mostly do this through lean proteins and healthy grains.  While these are essential to health and we’re not giving them up (you can pry my bread from my cold, dead hands, thankyouverymuch), we know we need more actual vegetables in our diets as well.*

To help with this, at the start of the new year, we made sure that each grocery trip ended with us buying at least two night’s worth of broccoli, asparagus, squash, or something that could be grilled, sautéed, or steamed, and perhaps one bag of salad.  Not perfect – I know – but it was a start.  Now, we’re kicking things up another notch by starting a subscription with a nearby Community Sponsored Agriculture (CSA) group known as Chow Locally.

Look, a logo!

When we lived in Casa Grande, we used to belong to a CSA of this type, but we found the structure to be too rigid; you signed up and paid for ten weeks at a time, and you couldn’t opt to skip a week if you were out of town, had too much food, etc.  Since we signed up in winter, we endured ten weeks of nothing but swiss chard and kale over and over again until we just couldn’t do it anymore (so.much.swiss.chard).  So far, Chow Locally seems to be a good solution to this; you let them know by each Monday night if you’d like to opt out of your box for the week, and if so, you don’t pay.  There’s no end date but there’s also no commitment, so you can cancel at any time.

So far, we’ve received two boxes, and most of the produce is what we expected, given that we’re coming out of the winter season and moving toward spring here in the Valley.  We have seen swiss chard and kale, but we’ve also received onions, garlic, beets, spinach, carrots, celery, and even some potatoes.  All of the produce has been fresh and tasty, and they drop it off right at work on Thursday afternoons, so it’s highly convenient (at least for me).

Our first box!  Look at all that health!

We even ended up with fresh AZ honey!

Another thing we like with Chow Locally is they know you might not be familiar with everything, so you get a sheet with pictures that shows what’s in your box as well as recipes and nutritional information you can use.  Our other CSA didn’t bother with this, so there were several weeks when we spent time on the internet searching Google images for “green, leafy, red-stemmed vegetable,” trying to find a match.**  The price seems reasonable - $24 per week plus a $20 one-time initial fee – given that the contents of a single box will probably keep us happy for two weeks at a time.

The info sheet.

I’ve also enjoyed playing around with new recipes, both from the Chow Locally archives and sites like Cooking Light and the Food Network.  Here’s a pizza rustica recipe I made with some of the chard and kale that came in our first box...time to ooh and ahh:

NOMS.

I've also been chopping beets...

That’s all for now!

Amy

PS – No, I’m not sponsored by Chow Locally.  I don’t know if they do that sort of thing.  Figured I should mention that.

* As my buddy Taira said, “you know, for someone so concerned about fiber, you don’t eat as many vegetables as I would expect.”  Duly noted.

** Which led us to assuming swiss chard was rhubarb and trying to make cobbler out of it.  Yes, seriously.  No bueno, that.