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 the farm—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.
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.
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.
I double the batch to use up more carrots, which makes for a huge bowl of chunky batter that’s so hard to stir, I’m sweating. After my right arm is too exhausted to go on and my left is too weak to pick up any slack, I pop everything into the oven. The result is 48 tasty mini-muffins, two-thirds of which will probably end up in my husband’s office break room as the healthier “alternative” treat no one actually wants. Begone carrots.
DAY 5: THE IN-LAWS
I’m supposed to bring hors d’oeuvres and a dessert to a family dinner tonight, but none of our farm produce fits the bill. Which is a bummer, because I was really looking forward to smugly informing my in-laws that I had prepared their food with CSA stuff. I climb off my locally sourced independent organic high horse for a night.
DAY 6: ANOTHER DELIVERY BECKONS
At the risk of sounding ungrateful for the privilege of having fresh organic produce from a farm hand delivered every week... I’m starting to resent the CSA. I don’t get to decide what food is delivered. Nameless, faceless farmers effectively plan my meals. (Oh, and here’s how that plan works: Every day I look at the clock, realize I forgot to figure out dinner and curse at myself for not getting started an hour ago.)
The faceless farmers—I imagine they have names like Cole and Noah—keep giving me potatoes. Right now, I have 13 potatoes that I have to use in two days, before I get even more potatoes. I’ll roast a couple of them along with the seven remaining purple carrots. Cole and Noah are probably eating Chinese take-out right now, laughing at the city suckers who are eating their excess potatoes.
DAY 7: IT WAS MADE LOCALLY, IN MY MICROWAVE
Please, all I want is some frozen pizza.
DAY 8: PURPLE HANDED CARROT EATERS
The new CSA box is here. It's obscenely large and includes honeycrisp apples and navel oranges. I’m relatively certain the oranges didn’t come from a farm from the Chicagoland area in the dead of winter, but I’m not complaining. That said, I’m still working through my last delivery, so maybe I am.
I bought some rainbow chard from the supermarket. Compared to all of the carrots and potatoes I’ve been eating, the chard stands out like a Lisa Frank notebook. I sauté it and use it as a way to sneak in purple carrots. I've really come to respect these carrots—foreign to me before this CSA stuff started—for their tremendous staining power. They wreak havoc on a great many things: my skin, my clothes, my quartz countertops. And the food, too. While purple carrots are delicious and sweet, you can't cook them with anything else, unless you want that dish to come out looking like mud. Tasty mud, sure, but nothing you’d serve to anyone other than your partner, who’s lucky you cooked anything at all. I eat dinner with my eyes shut.
On the bright side, my husband snacked on a raw purple carrot while I was putting dinner together, so that’s one less stain.
DAY 9: OOH, YOU FANCY HUH
Time for a fancy dinner. I’d like to say my motivation is romantic or in honor of some sort of noteworthy event, but really I’m just thinking about how much more CSA produce we’d plow through under the guise of a “special” meal.
We split a medium-sized rib eye. (We don’t eat a lot of meat, and even this small amount will eventually give us the 2 a.m. meat sweats.) The sensible choice will be to serve our carnivorous bounty with red wine pan sauce. This lets us open a bottle of wine even earlier than normal. Because gender stereotypes are alive and well in our kitchen, I hand steak duty over to my husband.
My fridge looks like one of those kiddie ball pits, only with root vegetables. I’ve got potatoes, parsnips, and a celery root—excuse me, celeriac. My hand is forced. I have no choice but to make this insanely decadent gratin. I don't have the rutabaga (damn you, CSA!) but I add gruyere, because two cheeses are better than one.
The celeriac is an ugly brute that needs to be finely sliced. Perfect excuse to use my Cuisinart, which is the size of a baby elephant and came with so many sharp and scary accessories that we had to buy a special box just to store them safely. (I love kitchen crap that necessitates the purchase of even more kitchen crap.) I barely know how to use the thing and am only beginning to understand its dark magic, so I go slowly with the 100-page manual at my side.
I serve it all with a wilted spinach salad. A three-dish meal that came out really well—it’s like I cooked a unicorn.
DAY 10: STEW IT GOOD
After the major effort that went into last night’s culinary orgy, I’m spent. Biology couldn’t care less, however. We need to eat. I’m making an easy stew. There's a recipe on the back of this 12-bean mix that, in a rare stroke of foresight, I started soaking the night before. I start cooking like a witch, adding some turkey stock, celery, rosemary, thyme, something herby and powdered, and a delicious ham hock that ensures that this will taste good no matter what. I throw in a bunch of carrots—orange, lest the remaining purple demons leave their mark on my nice stockpot—and a giant onion. Served it up with a whole wheat baguette and reveled in the joy of a wintertime cliché.
DAY 11: "CHICKEN A/LA SOMETHING SOMETHING" AND A SALAD
Here is one of my favorite recipes. I'd like to call it "Chicken a la Something Something." Take a pre-cooked rotisserie chicken out of the fridge. (No matter how much progress I make in the kitchen, I’ll never shake my "why cook if someone else will do it for you" instinct.) Throw it on a skillet and warm it up with some cream of chicken soup. Grab a handful of CSA mushrooms and toss them into your poor man's sauté, just to class up the joint. Once the liquid is mostly reduced, mix in some pre-cooked brown rice for bulk and voilà. Dinner. If you need some greens, grab more CSA mushrooms and toss them with some spinach, olive oil and balsamic. Done and done.
DAY 12: SLOOOOOW COOOOOOKER
We had stew two days ago and have since learned an important lesson. There is such a thing as too much fiber.
I’ve still got mushrooms and they won’t keep as long as the other stuff—I need to unload them ASAP. For variety’s sake, I use the slow cooker, which I don’t totally trust because it’s too simple. We use pasta and wing it from there: tomatoes, mushrooms and some spicy sausage, a minimalist version of this. The sausage is pre-cooked which makes things even easier, and in an act of defiance, I don’t even boil the pasta before I throw it in the cooker. I’m breaking all the rules.
DAY 13: EVERYTHING MUST GO!
For the entrée, we're cooking fish in parchment paper, something I’ve always wanted to try because it looks fast and involves minimal clean up. For flavor I add lemon, a drizzle of walnut oil and some savory sprigs that I don’t remember buying. (I have been known to go into a fugue state during Whole Foods expeditions, which explains the doomsday prepper's worth of cod we had in the freezer.) I roll everything up into packets. It goes in looking like a couple of sloppy paper burritos and comes out moist and tender and all kinds of awesome. This method is my new best friend.
After two weeks of CSA madness, I have nothing but root vegetables left. (Perhaps that’s because the CSA only delivers root vegetables?) Easiest option is to cut everything up—all of it—and roast it. For the last two weeks, we finally ate better than the garbage disposal did.
Jessica Coen is a contributing editor at Marie Claire and editor-at-large of Jezebel.
