FitFool

Three years ago, I posted a list of Boston-area CSAs that I had been researching when looking for one to join. I eventually signed up with Chestnut Farms and Busa Farm and was very happy with both.

CSA stands for Community-Supported Agriculture. Members pay a set fee (usually in advance) for a share of the season's harvest. Typically, for vegetable CSAs, members then pick up a box of veggies each week of the harvest season. For the meat CSA, we pick up a monthly batch of frozen meat.

Looks like people still look at that old post but the prices were out of date and websites had moved. Time for an update! Looking around, I was excited to see there were a lot more CSA options available now. There's even a fish CSA! While some are sold out for 2011 already, looks like some are still accepting new members.

If you don't want to commit to a weekly or monthly share, don't forget that most of these farms also sell at the Farmer's Markets. You'll get more for your money if you sign up with a CSA but if you don't cook often or if you go out of town a lot, you may find yourself with more vegetables than you know what to do with.
(www.massfarmersmarkets.org

Some of the pickups are at other businesses like restaurants, bakeries, and farmer's markets. I'm glad they provide a place for the csa share pickups. It's also a smart business on their part since I can't resist sampling their wares too. For example, many years ago, my Meat CSA pickup was on the same day as the Arlington Farmers Market. Worrying that the meat pickup would cause more traffic, the farmers market asked the farm to move the pickups to a different night. I don't know if it solved their traffic problems, but the end result for me is that I've never shopped at the Arlington Farmer's Market again since I wasn't going to make a separate trip there when there were other Farmer's Markets nearer to me.

Interested in looking for a CSA but you don't live around Boston?
Try searching http://www.localharvest.org/ for nearby farms and CSA options. You should probably look at that link anyhow since I'm probably not going to update this list again for a few more years and I probably missed a few places this time around anyhow.

Please share any reviews and comments you might have for these places!

( Click to see my notes on various sources for local meat and vegetables around Boston )

It sounds silly but I'm really looking forward to trying the 2 cans of Spam my sister gave me for Christmas. She looked over my list of the Omnivore's 100 Meme and gave me two bottles of fruit wine (cherry wine and blueberry wine) and 2 cans of Spam (regular and lite). I'm pretty sure I'll be drinking the wines with lamb and chocolates but not sure of what to do with the Spam. I've been browsing recipes online. So far, the spam and egg on English muffins sounds good to me. Same for the spam-burger but I forgot to buy burger topping ingredients this weekend.

Got any favorite Spam recipes? How about handling tips? When I open the can, do I have to eat it all right away? Can I put some of it in tupperware in the fridge to cook up later? How much later? I've never had Spam before...I'm both curious and disgusted by the thought of canned meat but I have to admit that some of the photos accompanying the recipes look pretty good. I'm trying to think of spam as a variation on tofu. What is spam anyhow?

Y'all can blame zarq for this one. He posted a link to Man Bites Insect (an article in the NY Times). Ever since I was a kid, I've wanted to try chocolate-covered ants and deep-fried crispy crickets. I don't know where I heard of these things but the idea has stayed in the back of my mind. I once saw some lollipops in one of the Smithsonian museums. They looked like regular lollipops except there was an edible insect in the middle so that it looked like a bug trapped in petrified amber. I thought it looked so cool. But it was expensive (for my kid budget) and besides, I was squeamish about the idea of actually eating the bug.

I had always been a timid eater when I was a kid. On one trip back to Taiwan, my sister and I insisted on asking for peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for our meals. We begged for PB&J even in restaurants, much to our parents' embarrassment. At least they got to laugh at us when we asked for the fortune cookies at the end. Turns out restaurants in Taiwan don't carry peanut butter and jelly or fortune cookies. ("That's a U.S. thing!" they chortled.)

Fast forward a few decades and now I'll try just about anything. Spicy Salty shrimp with head and shell still on? It's one of my favorite dishes. Black pudding in an Irish breakfast? um...disgusting to think about but ended up being bland to the taste. Gelatinous flesh of a yellow dragon fish head? Weird texture but tastes pretty good. Crispy pork intestine? Shockingly delicious. (but eat it while it's still hot...it's not as amazing once it's cooled down. While it's hot, you've got the crispy skin on the outside circling fatty tissue that just melts in your mouth.)

What changed? Some time in elementary school, I went to a Bible Camp one summer (that's right, Bible Camp...and I had fun too!). I deeply admired one of the women there who had been a missionary somewhere in Africa. She was strong, funny, beautiful, and really nice. I wanted to be just like her. One night she told a story where the local villagers were serving up a feast with the missionaries as their honored guests. At that feast, she was served monkey. She was shocked but she ate it to be polite. My parents had served up some weird foods but they had never served up monkey. So I figured if the missionary lady could eat monkey and still be here, nothing my parents dished up would ever be that bad in comparison.

And slowly, I shifted my eating habits until now I'm more adventurous with eating than I've ever been. So now I'm ready. The guy in the article above, David Gracer, isn't very far from Boston. I called him up and learned he's giving a Edible Insect Talk and Tasting next Thursday, April 17 at the Braintree Public Library. But I don't think I'm going to be able to drive down there in time for that. So...I asked if he'd be willing to come up for another demo some time. That photo above is from his website. It looks kind of like cockroaches but they're actually giant water bugs.

After I hung up with him, I called my boyfriend. I expected him to be excited since he's always looking for unusual dishes to try at restaurants.

"Hey! I found a guy online who says he'll come up and do an Edible Insects Tasting if we can get about a dozen people together!"

silence

"Oh...you don't want to eat bugs?"

"I don't want to eat insects from some random guy you found online...where does he get his insects? Is he capturing the bugs in the wild? You don't want wild bugs...they've probably been sprayed with all kinds of pesticides!"

"I think he's getting his crickets from pet stores. Those crickets have probably been raised in cleaner conditions than most of the meat we've eaten. And sometimes he finds ant pupae and giant waterbugs in some ethnic groceries. Then again, he did mention being excited about an upcoming expected cicada infestation on Cape Cod..." (Plus it occurs to me now that most of our vegetables and fruit have also been sprayed with pesticides.)

"Look, I'll happily eat bugs with you -- but in a restaurant. In a restaurant where they're bound by health code regulations and where we can read reviews about whether or not they've made their patrons sick. Search in New York...I'm sure there's some place there we could go to."

So I'll just have to have the party without him. Because I still want to try this. Anyone out there in the Boston area feel like exploring this with me? Surfing around the web, I find that insects are still eaten in many parts of the world. They're rich in protein and iron and are low in cholesterol. From the environmental angle, they use far fewer of the planet's resources to provide us with food. And talk about bragging rights for unusual foods you've tried!

I did track down one restaurant in Boston. Tu Y Yo has Tacos de Chapulines (deep fried mini tacos stuffed w/grasshoppers, served w/avocado sauce). Do you know of any other restaurants serving insects? This was surprisingly difficult to search for since I kept getting hits for "How to get rid of insects in your restaurant" or "We were disgusted to see an insect in our food" or reports of various health code violations.

So stay tuned. I can't wait until I get a chance to try the grasshopper tacos. Have any of you tried eating insects? If so, what was it like? Tell me all about it. I'm excited to try it but I'm nervous at the same time.

Edited to add: Part 2

( More links for my reference collected here )

This is a follow-up to my post exploring the options for buying humanely raised meat and then locally produced vegetables via CSAs.

CSA stands for Community-Supported Agriculture. Members pay up front to join the club for the growing season. Then from late spring through early fall, you get a box of vegetables each week in an Iron Chef challenge that often includes unfamiliar vegetables. From what I've heard, it can be hard to chow through everything each week. Typically, you get more than enough vegetables for your money. To retrieve your vegetables, you either meet up at a specified drop-off point or pick up at the farm and in one case, they even delivered right to you. For meat, it seems to come in frozen cuts once a month (also at pick-up points).

To my surprise, a lot of the popular ones are already sold out. I'm looking to feed just 2 adults but not all of the farms had a small or half-share option. For vegetables, prices ranged from $250 to $600 for the season. Meat was about $7 per pound.

I'm probably going to go with Busa Farms because they allow me more control over what I'll get and how much at a time. So I can load up on zucchini if I want or skip buying any vegetables on a week when I'll be out of town. Plus they were the cheapest option and I'm not entirely sure how this is going to work for me. They also let you go to the farm and pick your own for some crops so I'm really looking forward to picking corn again. I used to have a backyard garden and I really miss that flavor.

I've started buying meat from Whole Foods but reading Michael Pollan's book, Omnivore's Dilemma makes me unsure whether or not the animals are really truly out and about doing their animal thing. For meat, it'll likely be Chestnut Farms and that's just because they're probably going to be the first one to take me off their waitlist. (I could've bought from Pete and Jen's but I didn't get my order in fast enough.) The limiting factor for the meat farmers seems to be getting access to a slaughterhouse. A local slaughterhouses had burned to the ground and now she said she's been driving the animals out to NH and NY to have them slaughtered and processed.

I collected my notes and am posting them in case anyone else is looking for this kind of information.

( Click to see my notes on various sources for local meat and vegetables around Boston )

Several years ago, on one of her visits, my mom left me with a bag of fresh pea pod stems. "What am I supposed to do with this?" I wondered. She said it was very simple (everything in the kitchen is very simple to her it seems). "Just stir-fry some garlic, then the leaves and some salt. That's it!" I was doubtful since really I thought the joy is in the pea pods, not the stems. But I hate wasting food so I cooked it up and was surprised to find that it tasted really good. I forgot about it after that. The leaves had come from my mom's garden and I had assumed it was a dish that she came up with to make use of as much of the plant as possible. It didn't occur to me that I could get this at a restaurant.

Fast-forward several years and I'm browsing chowhound.com and noticing lots of posts extolling the tastiness of pea pod stems. So I went to a Chinese restaurant, saw it on the menu and was happy to find that yes, it was the same thing and they cooked it even better than my first attempt. More good news is on the way. It turns out that you can buy fresh pea pod stems in Asian grocery stores. Good thing...in the restaurant, the dish seems to range from $10-12. At the grocery store, the leaves were $5 per pound so a medium to big bag of it was about $3.50. Simple and quick to prepare. The tender leaves shrink down pretty quickly so be careful not to overcook them. After several attempts, I think I've finally got it down. The trickiest part for me was salting...I kept under-salting.

If you order it at a restaurant, ask for chao3 dou4 miao2 (I think that's how you write it in pinyin). It's pronounced kinda like 'chow dough meow'. Really yummy and good for you too!


( Click for recipe and bigger photos )

Yes I know that most of the meat I buy in the grocery store comes from animals that lived miserable lives. I've heard the stories of egg-laying chickens crammed into cages, barely able to take even a few steps their entire lives. Ditto for the tales of pigs in overcrowded pens biting each other's tails off. The environmental devastation from pig shit was new to me. (Gee, thanks _53 for posting a link to that. You nearly ruined my boyfriend's appetite for the bacon-wrapped pork chops I was serving up!)

There's no way I'm going vegetarian. Humans are omnivores and I accept that we kill to get our meat. Besides, I could never give up bacon. So I went to farmer's markets, thinking that I'd get my meat from small farms where the cows grazed in open fields, the chickens scratched about in the dirt, and the pigs wallowed in mud. But that meat cost 2 to 5 times as much as the cheap meat on sale at the grocery store. The whole chicken I could get for as little as 79 cents/pound? Try $5/lb! Reeling from sticker shock, I shrugged and said, "Those reports are from nutso PETA extremists anyhow. They're exaggerating." And how seriously am I supposed to take a group that says keeping pets is another form of animal exploitation? Spittle-spewing zealots. But I also told myself that when I wasn't so strapped for cash, I would revisit the issue.

( Click to revisit the issue with me... )

my overall grocery bill might be cheaper when I commit to buying the expensive stuff. That would be really weird.

Edited to add: Follow-up post with list of Boston-area CSAs