summer
When I opened my CSA box this week, I could not help letting out a geeky little sigh of happiness, because:
tomatoes! tomatoes! tomatoes!
We actually got our first tomatoes last week, but there were only a few. This week there's a whole bagful. Tomatoes with mozzarella! Tomatoes for my favorite tomato-onion spaghetti! Tomatoes to drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and eat on toasted sour dough!
Tonight, in a scenario out of every CSA-subscriber's dream, we will be having spaghetti with fresh tomatoes and new garlic and basil, all from the CSA, and local olive oil.
Also in our box this week: new potatoes, what look like doughnut peaches, carrots, pattypan squash, green beans, and oddly, Valencia oranges.
(Green beans take FOREVER to trim and cut. I have no idea where I got the energy to do this for ten people on Elba; I want to scream halfway through doing enough for two. Of course, I do remember swearing to myself that I was never going to pick beans again during that summer, because picking enough for ten or more people just made me dizzy; I'd sit between two rows in the kitchen garden and probably pick half a pound without having to move, but I never wanted to see another green bean again. Mid-July I was thrilled to see that the green beans seemed to be spent, but lo and behold, the farmer had planted a later-harvest set elsewhere in the garden. Maybe the annoyance of trimming green beans was overshadowed by the misery of picking them. I picked almost everything on Elba, except the cabbage, which I was not allowed to touch, because you had to use a machete to chop it off, and that fell under the professor's idea of Man's Work--along with taking out the garbage and refilling the giant water jugs. I had to get one of the boys to pick the cabbage. Green beans, however, were Women's Work, or at least acceptably so.)
tomatoes! tomatoes! tomatoes!
We actually got our first tomatoes last week, but there were only a few. This week there's a whole bagful. Tomatoes with mozzarella! Tomatoes for my favorite tomato-onion spaghetti! Tomatoes to drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and eat on toasted sour dough!
Tonight, in a scenario out of every CSA-subscriber's dream, we will be having spaghetti with fresh tomatoes and new garlic and basil, all from the CSA, and local olive oil.
Also in our box this week: new potatoes, what look like doughnut peaches, carrots, pattypan squash, green beans, and oddly, Valencia oranges.
(Green beans take FOREVER to trim and cut. I have no idea where I got the energy to do this for ten people on Elba; I want to scream halfway through doing enough for two. Of course, I do remember swearing to myself that I was never going to pick beans again during that summer, because picking enough for ten or more people just made me dizzy; I'd sit between two rows in the kitchen garden and probably pick half a pound without having to move, but I never wanted to see another green bean again. Mid-July I was thrilled to see that the green beans seemed to be spent, but lo and behold, the farmer had planted a later-harvest set elsewhere in the garden. Maybe the annoyance of trimming green beans was overshadowed by the misery of picking them. I picked almost everything on Elba, except the cabbage, which I was not allowed to touch, because you had to use a machete to chop it off, and that fell under the professor's idea of Man's Work--along with taking out the garbage and refilling the giant water jugs. I had to get one of the boys to pick the cabbage. Green beans, however, were Women's Work, or at least acceptably so.)