CSA Adventures: I Love the Farm

Tuesday afternoons are my happy time. It’s CSA day!

It’s not just the abundance of vegetables I get to take home that makes me happy. It’s the whole farm experience.

CSA Adventures: Kale Chips

Among the vegetables I came to dread the sight of during last year’s CSA season was kale.

I know, it’s good for me. It’s loaded with calcium and beta carotene . A cup of raw kale takes care of the RDA for vitamins K, C and A. The Internet differs on how much, but every place I checked had values over 100% for these vitamins.

The problem is I hated it.

I tried it sautéing it with garlic and butter. I tried steaming it. Then I stopped. Two tries was enough for me to say “I don’t like this bitter cooked green and as an adult I don’t have to eat it.”

Kale, which seemed to always be on the tables at the CSA last year, was a frequent visitor to the leftovers market at work. Some people snatched it up and would rave about it. I made notes to never accept dinner invitations to their homes.

Someone mentioned making kale chips and how awesome those were. Right, kale tastes bad no matter the form. Making it crispy won’t cancel out the crappy taste.

Well, I was wrong.

With this year’s CSA, I want to eat or put up most of my portion. Sorry, work people, my goal is feed you less, feed me more. And I want to get back to more of a vegetarian diet.

With that in mind, I decided to give kale another shot. Maybe there was something to these kale chips.

Turns out, there is. Twenty minutes at 300° got rid of the bitterness. Woot!

I ended up coating mine with olive oil and sea salt and shredding some Parmesan cheese over part of the batch. I’ll give it another whirl with this week’s kale haul, but will probably reduce the salt and oil. My first version is hovering around the line of too salty to eat, making it impossible to describe what they taste like other than salt. Parmesan will stick around and I may play with some other herbs to jazz it up.

The key to crisping seems to be a single layer of ripped kale leaves (throw away the center rib). I needed two baking sheets lined with parchment paper for my batch. Just like with Christmas cookies, I switched the sheets in the oven about halfway through baking.

The house smelled like something while the kale was crisping. Not sure how to describe it. It wasn’t a bad smell though.

You can find tons of recipes online for kale chips. They all agree on oil and salt. Baking times and temp differ. I ended up using the time and temp from Smitten Kitchen.

I’m just happy I found something to do with kale now. If these suckers last a while, I’ll be eating kale chips come January.

Hmm … I wonder if I can make chard chips as well.

Time to Kill?

Looking for a quick break from spreadsheets or calls from irate customers? These sites have caught my fancy over the last few months. Check them out.

Sunshine in Your Mouth

My favorite CSA food (and perhaps favorite vegetable of all time) are sugar snap peas. The peas were part of the pick-your-own CSA share in June. We got to head into the fields and pick our share of peas right off the vine. As my strawberry-picking friends can testify, I’d make a mean migrant worker.

Yummy

Down on the Farm

Related to the last entry, my vegetarian diet has been helped greatly by joining a CSA this year. A CSA – Community Supported Agriculture – allows you to buy a share of a local farm and reap the benefits of the harvest. Your part of the harvest depends on the weather and deer, just like the farmer.

A sampling of a CSA haul