CSA Week #4: How to Eeet Beets

It's Pesach in May!  Not one but TWO heads of romaine lettuce this week.  Not to harp too much on one thing but dudes, if you think checking romaine lettuce is hard, then you're a lettuce pansy.  Red leaf is darker and curlier.  Romaine is practically flat!  But it's all green and yummy.

You know how when you were taught to check strawberries for bugs (which, FTR, was not a thing that I heard of until I was at least bat mitzvah), you were told that if you cut off the top and there's a hole down the middle, you have to cut the berry in half?  It makes your chocolate-covered ones rather less attractive.  Well, with local-grown in-season berries, that won't be a a problem:

How Crunchy is Crunchy Enough?

Sometimes being crunchy can be exhausting.  I mean mentally, not physically.  If you ever got a look at me, you'd know I was built to toil in the fields, I could use some more physical exhaustion of the crunchy sort.  But navigating the road to crunchiness (or maybe that should be the road of crunchiness?) can be a real pain in the butt.

Even when you pick your battles, or fight them one at a time, I constantly worry "is this enough?"  You saw my post about local vs. organic milk, and there are all kinds of ways of determining which foods are healthiest, but my biggest internal dilemmas seem to involve bath and body products.  I buy shampoo for my kids that's free of parabens, phthalates, and sulfates, but should I be aiming to make my own out of grass clippings and hand-rendered shmaltz*?  My deodorant is aluminum-free and naturally scented, but would I be better off scrubbing my underarms with a chunk of Himalayan rock salt?  

CSA Week 3: More Salad

In this week's box:

• Arugula
• Spinach
• Green leaf lettuce
• Boston lettuce
• Radishes
• Beets
• Scallions
• Chives
• Tomato
• A cilantro plant

Are you intimidated by all the leafy greens yet?  It definitely takes some work, but there are a bunch of reasons why it's worthwhile.

CSA Week 2: Saladocious

I've been boring lately, I know.  I'm just embarking on a new crunchy venture though, so there will be something more interesting in a few weeks.  I think.

Anyway, my second CSA arrived just hours before Shavuos, which meant I was frantically washing greens and putting things away and didn't have a chance to post.  And then I was just lazy all day Friday and didn't bother.  And then I was waiting to try something out but didn't get around to it yet.  This week was a pretty typical early-season box, with lots of yummy salad fixins.

• Arugula
• Spinach
• Red leaf lettuce
• Radishes
• Asparagus
• Chives
• Scallions
• Curly parsley
• Basil plant
• Farm fresh eggs! 

First CSA of the Year!

 'Tis the season folks!  I got my first box o' veg from Alstede Farms yesterday, and it was definitely a good start.  It's sorta hard to tell from the picture, but it contained:

• 3 enormous leeks
• 1 enormous head of red leaf lettuce
• A bunch of radishes
• A bunch of asparagus
• A bunch of scallions
• A bunch of cilantro
• A mint plant in a pot
• A greenhouse tomato

And, best of all,

• A jar of raw local honey!

Ranting About the Issues: Circumcision and Intactivists

One of the biggest issues that comes between Jewish crunchies and the rest of the crunchy universe is circumcision.  Intactivism is a pet cause for a lot of eco-hippie minded people (and others, to be sure), and perhaps more than any other issue, it induces mouth-foaming rage.  I know people who have dropped off of crunchy discussion boards and even lost friends over this one issue.

They say it's mutilation.  They say it's wrong to do it on an unconsenting child.  There have been movements to ban it altogether, and people have been arrested and prosecuted for it in some places.  Luckily none of those efforts have born real fruit yet, but let's not kid ourselves: if it happened to shechita in Switzerland, it can happen to bris milah elsewhere.  Aaaah, galus.

On Milk and Honey (well, sugar)

There's some debate in the crunchy community about the relative benefits of local food vs. organic.  It can be argued that local is better for the environment while organic is better for the body.  Local food should be fresher, and buying it supports the local economy (and often small farmers and other businesses as opposed to megacorporations) while organic items are guaranteed to be "cleaner" from pesticides, artificial hormones, and so on.  Check out some articles that discuss it here and here.

This debate came to a head for me this week as I discovered that a neighborhood supermarket carries "local" milk - it's produced within 275 miles of where it's sold.