Norwood CSA Food Co-op: The Best Week by Evan Casper-Futterman

This is a slightly atypical blogpost, because this is a slightly atypical week for us. Katherine and I are getting married on August 27th. After our pickup on the 17th, we had all kinds of mixed feelings and anxiety about how we would minimize waste and make use of the incredible offerings while there were so many other things to attend to beyond recipes and meal planning, which are typically some of our favorite summer activities with the CSA. This blog post doesn’t contain a fun recipe unfortunately, because we simply didn’t have time to make anything fun or interesting with our colorful haul.

Needless to say, that’s a lot of pressure for a box of fruits and vegetables (and dairy) to be under! Some of the fruits seemingly buckled under the pressure. Almost like they knew we needed things to be easy and stress-free, so they decided to give us a bit of a hard time. The small yellow melons were a little crisp. Maybe they weren’t ripe enough? Our peaches were a bit mealy. Good, but not great. The sunflower seeds were incredibly abundant and beautiful and fun to pick off the husk, but they went moldy overnight in the container, so we couldn’t do anything with them.These things happen. We made quick work of the plums and snacked our way quickly through the purple pole beans, but again, no culinary delicacies. With the new and intriguing stuff presenting us with some challenges we relied on the stability of the tried and true nightshades: tomatoes and eggplants.

Both of these were fantastic, made all the better by the fact that we barely did anything to them at all. the tomato I sliced and dusted with maldon salt and cracked pepper. Katherine said it was maybe the best tomato she ever had, top 5 for sure. I agreed! The eggplants likewise got minimal treatment - sliced into rounds and sauteed briefly with olive oil, oregano, salt, and pepper. Tender and delicious. Delicate and flavorful. A pure summer delight.

This was a stressful week - approaching the exciting end of a busy month. But as we try to do in our lives and relationship, we try to roll through the tough times and the frustrations, the unexpected and the disappointing, and try to focus on savoring, all the sweetness we can. Something we have tried to keep in mind for our wedding, and that this week reminded us too - is that simplicity goes great with basically everything. As always, we were grateful for what we had, and happy to be able to share it together and with our neighbors and community.