I know the title probably doesn't bring a lot of flash to this post, but I seriously ate the best salad of my life yesterday. My kids even ate most of it, which was completely surprising.
If you've been keeping up with my sporadic posts, my family participates in a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). We get a weekly shipment of fruits, veggies or herbs that are fresh and organic. Yes, I get a lot of Swiss chard that I still don't have a clue how to use (most of it ends up in my vegetable broth recipe). However, most of the time I get the best strawberries, huge avocados, spinach that tastes SO much better than the store kind, and last week I got a huge bundle of basil!
The only issue we have had with joining a CSA is what do I do with this stuff when I get home? The fruit, snap peas or grape tomatoes barely make it home from pick-up, so that leaves lettuce and other veggies/herbs. Yes, salads and veggie sides are a huge part of the week's menu, but fortunately that is changing.
Every year, our CSA (JR Organics) has farm tours complete with customer appreciation lunches. While it was great to visit the farm with the kids, I do have an Animal Science degree and I've spent A LOT of time on farms. I was more interested in the customer appreciation lunch. I wanted them to show me how they can feed over 100 people AND create various things out of their CSA products. They did not let me down; I even bought their recipe book on the way out.
While we were walking around the farm, a booth caught my eye, well, mostly the kids were dragging me towards it because it had free smoothie samples. While the kids were trying to negotiate more samples I was finding out, this couple formed this company to help educate people on how to prepare healthy, in-season foods. They offer a recipe subscription service in which you are sent 5 recipes each week that use in-season ingredients.
I know, I know, why would I pay someone to send me recipes when I can just look them up myself? Go ahead....look them up. Try spending the 2 minutes I do - to open up my email and save them to my computer for later use - to find 5 healthy recipes using in-season ingredients that are also cheap to make.
I call this being efficient, not lazy. I have better things to do with my time than get hungrier searching the Internet for breakfast/lunch/dinner/dessert ideas. I also forgot to mention, they include a shopping list with their recipes, so you could plan your meals for the week this way too!
ANYWAY...I haven't been using their recipes as regularly as I like because sometimes the CSA sends different ingredients depending on crop success. However, I started planning weekly meals for the last couple of weeks and we've been very happy getting out of the meal rut we were in.
Last night I made one of their recipes, called "Peach Basil Salad." As I was preparing it, I was already imagining Little Dude protesting dinner, so I made salmon with it. Both kids ate the salad and actually thanked me for dinner!
Today for lunch I made them PB&J sandwiches and tried to eat what little was left of the Peach Basil Salad. Let's just say, I had to share and ended up making myself a PB&J too. It's amazing how one meal can make or break everything. Before this salad, the kids weren't real excited about salads, because we eat them A LOT. However, now that we know we can add all sorts of interesting things to make it different and exciting, the kids are questioning the recipes on the menu and helping me plan a little.
I figured due to the success of this one little salad, I would give a shout out to "Cooking with CSA!"
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