After ten years of living in Smurf-sized quarters in New York, I moved and acquired an actual, person-sized kitchen in Chicago. I’ve read enough food blogs written by blissed-out ladies with dewy skin to know that the Right Thing To Do with kitchens like this is to fill it with locally sourced, independent, organic, community-driven produce. Meanwhile, I’ve spent the last decade on a Walgreens-sourced, corporate, synthetic, capitalist-driven Easy Mac diet served in a windowless shoebox. My skin is dull. I look like I've been pulled from a lake. So, yeah, groceries straight from thefarm—sign me right up.
But here's the thing. Every week, a farm sends me enough food to feed the cast of Just the Ten of Us. Right now, I have 17 potatoes, 16 carrots, 11 turnips, two bunches of spinach, two extra-large daikon radishes, and an omega-class destroyer-sized jar of fire-roasted tomatoes from my local CSA, an official farm membership that stands for "community supported agriculture." (Or an ecosystem.) I usually end up tossing out half of this haul.
This has to change.
For the next two weeks, I’m going to use up every scrap.
DAY 1: START WITH SOUP
First, I'm making an oil tanker of soup. Found this hearty turnip and carrot soup recipe, which looks like it'll burn through the produce. Turns out I've got everything except rutabaga, which is upsetting, because after kale, rutabaga is the other thing you get too much of from the CSA. Hell, I even have the leeks, and who in their right mind has leeks sitting around?
I prep, whirling around the kitchen and laughing at my own naïveté. Our CSA really does deliver the goods fresh from the farm, which means lots of dirt. Cleaning off the grime and peeling all this stuff has me moving "stuck behind the snowplow in a blizzard" slow. This is taking foreverrr. I dump everything in a pot and sob with exhaustion while it simmers for an hour. I still don't have soup. I attack it with an immersion blender, but lose patience and end up with something I claim is "rustic.” (Just like how the settlers did it.) It also tastes like wallpaper paste, so I add copious amounts of cumin and nutmeg, a seasoning coup I discovered in the comments section on the recipe. Two hours of cooking later, dinner is served. My kitchen is bursting with rainbows.
DAY 2: THE TROUBLE WITH TURNIPS
I'm developing a Fatal Attraction-style fixation on tubers, constantly looking for interesting ways to get rid of them. I settle on lamb chops with turnip purée and sautéed spinach. It looks both easy and classy—two things that never go together—which feels too good to be true. So I’m running to Google every three minutes, searching for things like “do I really have to peel turnips” and “how many teaspoons in a tablespoon” and "what part of lambs are chop." A half-hour later we’re eating lamb chops that are far too tasty and tender to have been cooked by me. Maybe I blacked out and magic meat elves rushed in to finish the job. Love those meat elves.
Lamb Chops and Spinach and Turnip Purée
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DAY 3: THE EFF YOU RAGU
After just two days, I'm sick of root vegetables—I don’t care how many carrots and potatoes are still sitting around. In an act of defiance, I boil some penne and make a ragu sauce with a meat substitute I’ve been wanting to try. (Said nobody ever.) I even throw in some eggplant from the supermarket! Later, as I’m gloating to my husband about how I gave our CSA food the finger, he points out that I used half a jar of the farm’s fire roasted tomatoes to make the sauce. I did? I had no idea.
Classic Ragu Bolognese
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DAY 4: CARROT OAT RAISIN RIGAMAROLE
There are a dozen carrots in my fridge. My husband loves raw carrots so I suggest that he take a bunch to work for snacking, but he’s too busy fantasizing about brownies in the break room. How can I make carrots not carrots? Like manna from heaven, I find these healthy carrot oat raisin thingies—basically some kind of carrot muffin rigamarole minus the sugary stuff—and they are perfect.
