Crop-share anyone?

So a friend of mine recently told me (and won me over) about joining a crop-share! There is a nearby USDA certified organic vegetable farm that is 10 minutes away. So I said, why not? If i can bypass the grocery store, I can cut out the middle man! :)

For those of you who don't know what a crop share was (I didn't), it is like placing an investment in that season of vegetables & paying on the front-end. Not unlike the stock market, it's kind of like putting money in a company and reaping dividends (if they gain profit). In this case, my dividends are a weekly harvest of vegetables!

There is definitely a slight risk though -- no one knows how great the harvest would be for that season until during or when it's over. So in the front end, you don't really know what vegetables you are going to get. However, because the farm grows a variety of crop, even if something fails, the odds are something else would be doing well. (Like say...if the Brussel sprouts didn't do well, maybe I'd get kale or cabbage!)

So with this being said, I committed and joined an 8-week Fall crop share. I figured I'd start small, commit to something short (like 8 weeks), and if it's too overwhelming or too crazy, it would be over soon. With my 8 week crop-share, I come to the farm once a week on my designated day and pick up my weekly share of crops. I never know what I will get until I come. Yes, I am SO living on the edge right now... (haha).

Nonetheless, this is a way I could support our local farmer, and not only that, we would get to eat organic vegetables. Every week, my challenge is to somehow incorporate all that vegetable into our meals. This is a good incentive to ramp up our vegetable in-take. Being a novice, I asked a neighbor to split the crop share with me. That way, it's not too expensive (averages to $20 per week) and I wouldn't have to stress if I had too many vegetables to deal with.

Here's what I got last week:

- leeks

- potatoes

- beets

- turnips

- buttered lettuce

- butternut squash

- broccoli

- red onions

I ended up making leek and potato soup for the first time. I also ended up roasting beets and turnips in olive oil in the oven. We eat the buttered lettuce with grilled chicken as a salad. We had butternut squash soup, and the broccoli and onion was made into a quiche.

Wow, maybe I am slightly biased...but I almost feel like the fall vegetables were bursting with flavors! Maybe it has to do with the fact that it was harvested literally a couple hours before I picked it up, as oppose to crops at the grocery which are transported halfway across the country. Or from out of country....like Mexico, Peru, or someplace foreign. Many of these vegetables had to be picked when they are green, so that they would ripen by the time they reach the shelves. It's different than vegetables picked at their peak.

Albeit, not all are not pretty (or big) like the vegetables at the grocery store...but they taste SO MUCH BETTER.

This week, I got cabbage, leeks, turnips, kale, acorn squash, purple lettuce, carrots, sweet potatoes...

Any ideas or recipe suggestions? :)

By the way, I think there are local CSA crop shares everywhere in US...check to see if there's one near you! :) It will be so great to support local farmers. Not all are USDA certified Organic Farms, but still, eating local is still waaay better than buying it at the store. It's also an educational experience (at least for me) to learn more about eating in-season (learning which vegetables are grown when).

There are also meat-shares, egg-shares, fruit-shares, etc.

But I'll just start with one thing at a time....