January 2015 Box No. 2: First Farm Box!

I got back to LA from NY on a Sunday with my new Farm Box LA CSA box on the horizon.  It was scheduled to be delivered that Friday.  The last box from Silver Lake Farms CSA was a tough act to follow.  It had some pretty amazing stuff in it… purple cauliflower, guava.  The new box arrived and I’ll be honest, I was a little disappointed.  All the items were pretty run of the mill.  Nothing exotic or new in here… apples, potatoes, an onion, oranges, grapefruit, carrots, lettuce, chard, fennel, a kobocha squash and halibut.  Ok, maybe some of these things are exotic to some people.  It is very possible that I’m just spoiled.  I did, however, appreciate that they put things in the box that could create a complete meal so I really didn’t have to go out and buy any extra ingredients.  In this way, it might be more functional than the Silver Lake Farms CSA so extra points there.

The apples weren’t in the best shape so I wasn’t really going to be eating them raw.  I still had apple butter left so I needed to come up with something new to do with them.  I thought of pickling them and then I came across a recipe for chutney.  It would last for a while in the fridge and be something fun to pull out and put on a cheese platter when I had friends over.  That sort of shit always impresses people.  Plus, I love the idea of having a stocked pantry of things I have made over the course of the year from seasonal produce.  They’re like my little babies.  Look what I made!

Fish always gets cooked immediately so I called up a friend and made dinner plans.  I decided to serve it with lemon butter and potatoes with a simple side salad using the lettuce.

The carrots and fennel were turned into soup and the kobocha squash was the star of a spicy curry.  The grapefruit and oranges were peeled and mixed with agave syrup and poured over vanilla Greek yogurt which tasted like a dreamsicle!  Genius!  I’m sorry to say that the poor chard went into the compost.  This is the first time in MONTHS that I’ve thrown something into the compost so I’m pretty happy with myself.

Ok, Farm Box, so far so good.  I’m excited to see what’s next!