5 a day the Harvest Share way

An old friend of mine, in asking how to feed his family better food, told me that some days it would be 5:00 before he and his wife would look at each other out of the haggard chaos of family life blankly and ask, “dinner?”  My aunt spoke of the same thing. “It’s not the cooking that’s the problem,” she laments, “it’s the figuring out what to cook!”  This winter I realized that I understand this problem.  Being bad at food preservation (or not bad at it, per se, but bad at accomplishing it at all), we, too, struggle to decide what to eat in the winter.  After the hard freeze that finished off even the hardiest kale in the garden, we suddenly had to think about what to eat “from scratch.”  What I mean is this: during the growing season, our menus are dictated by what’s coming in from the fields.  So the thinking about “what’s for dinner” begins there: with the ingredients.  Then it’s only a matter of looking for a recipe containing those ingredients.  Easy.  Sometimes the sight of the veggies themselves will spark a memory of a tasty recipe.  Or there are lots of websites, including ours, that allow you to search for recipes by ingredients. Or sometimes the ingredients do just fine by themselves (sungolds anyone?) And if you become a Tumbling Shoals Farm CSA member, we also provide all our favorite seasonal recipes.

So this is one of the many benefits of a CSA (which is what I recommended to my friend as a way to feed his family better).  They are the building blocks of your meal planning.  Another is this: you have all the freshest vegetables in season already there in your refrigerator each week so you’ll automatically be eating more fresh fruits and veggies than you probably would have otherwise.  The other day I read in a fitness magazine a recommendation to "purchase in advance" because if you've already spent the money, you're more likely to do it!  It was referring to gym memberships, but I think the same thing applies to eating more veggies.  According to all the research, this is precisely what all of us need right? So paying in advance for your veggies makes you more likely to eat more of them!  For more details on our CSA, click here.