Breaking Up is Hard to Do

A few months ago, Mr. Scrimp and I made the decision to break up with our CSA.

I wish we could say "Hey, CSA, it's not you--it's us." But that wouldn't be true. Well, not completely true, anyway.

The CSA model is wonderful, and I still recommend it if you are just beginning with real food/local food as an idea, or if you don't live in an area that is as local-food friendly as ours. I just think that for us... well, we've sort of moved beyond it. We ended up throwing out a lot of food last year because we had too much, or got things we didn't/couldn't eat, and we found new ways to eat locally and seasonably that didn't require a middleman.

And that--cutting out the middleman between my dollar and the farmer who grows my food--is a really important thing to me.

Menu Planning Monday & Free Menu Planner

Every Thursday, we get a big load of food from our CSA. On Saturdays, we go to the farmers market and fill in any gaps that we feel like our CSA didn't fill for the week. Then, it's time to eat!

However, if we don't plan out what we're going to do with all of our delicious produce, I know we're going to lose some of it to rot. Food from a CSA usually doesn't last as long as food from the grocery store, because it is almost always perfectly ripe when picked. So, it's important to have a plan for how we're going to use the delicious bounty of our local harvest without letting any of it go to waste.

I used to plan a menu and then go grocery shopping based on that plan. Now that we eat almost exclusively local, seasonal foods (at least during the harvest months, when the only non-local things we eat are organic canned beans and coconut milk), I have to reverse the process. Someone else picks the food I'm going to get, and I have to be creative to make it all work for us. It's been an exciting adventure trying to figure out how to do that.

Eventually what I did was to come up with a dual-function shopping and menu planning list (as you see above). It works in either way--you can fill in all your available ingredients and then make a menu plan from those, or you can write a menu plan and choose the ingredients you'll need to buy to make it. But it's all there together so you always know exactly what food you have or need, and what you're going to be eating.

I've included my list (a knockoff of the Anthropologie style "What to Eat" and "All Out Of" notepads) at the bottom of this post as a downloadable file so that you can print it out and use it too! It's been formatted to fit a full 81/2 x 11" page so you have plenty of room for writing and can store week-by-week copies in a binder if you want.

Want to see how I do it? Below the cut, I've shared this week's food supply and the menu I made out of it so you can see what I'm talking about.

More Food Pondering

It's been a lovely weekend. Mr. Scrimp and I just celebrated our first wedding anniversary! That's right, we've been married for a whole year, which is next to no time at all to those of you who have been married for a while, and an eternity to those of you who think marriage is terrifying.

All in all, I gotta say I'm pretty happy with the deal I got, by which I mean that Mr. Scrimp is the best and I wouldn't trade being married to him for anything in the world.

I was mulling over things I could talk about on the blog today, and then I drifted into daydreams about our lovely anniversary picnic yesterday (we went to the beach. There was grass! There was sand! There was water! There was a picnic!). So I figured I'd talk to you a bit about food, which you know is a favorite topic of mine.

How much do you spend on food each week?

Recipe(s): Strawberry Rhubarb Dessert

This week's CSA delivery included a pound each of rhubarb stalks and strawberries. Well, every Mrs. Scrimp knows what to do with those two fresh ingredients... make a pie!

I knew I'd be doing it as soon as I picked the food up on Friday, but I also knew that Mr. Scrimp and I would be camping in West Virginia for the weekend (I came home with literally eighteen--eighteen! I counted!--bug bites on my right arm alone, and that's after practically bathing in citronella). So, I washed and dried the rhubarb and put it in the fridge, and I washed, hulled, and halved the strawberries and froze them for the weekend.

On Sunday, we were invited to a barbecue, and I knew it was time for some pie action.  But I had no recipe... so, I made up my own.

CSA

It's cold here in Ohio, so things grow slowly... but, at long last, today is the first delivery for our CSA (community supported agriculture) program! I won't be picking it up till about 4:30 this afternoon--nevertheless, I am so excited!

We got an email with a list of what we'll be receiving, so I'm going to share it with you in the hope that it will inspire you to look into a CSA in your city, too.

CSA

This week, Mr. Scrimp and I did something new--we signed up for a CSA delivery.

The way this works is that for 22 weeks, we will pay a weekly fee and in exchange, we'll get a big box of local produce from area farms, sometimes even including milk, eggs, and meat! The box is not delivered to our house, but to a pickup location about a 30 minute walk (or 5 minute drive) from here on Friday afternoons.

I would like to recommend looking into a CSA if you are trying to eat more fresh produce. We will be paying the same amount we already pay for groceries, but with an added guarantee that everything we get will be fresh, local, and newly harvested, and that our money is going to support farms and small businesses close to our home. Community supported agriculture, people! It's super!

As an additional plus, because you don't choose what gets delivered to you from week to week in your CSA box, you're pretty much guaranteed to eventually get something you don't usually buy, don't like, or have never cooked. This means you're either going to have to get creative and try something new, or be generous and give food away to your friends and neighbors. Either way, I approve. 

Sadly, because of our local climate, 22 weeks a year is the most we can get for our CSA. If you live in a place with a year-round growing season, however, you can probably find a year-round delivery.

If you are in the Cleveland area, our CSA still has spots available. If you aren't, try looking for a CSA in your neighborhood either just by googling it (which is how I found ours) or checking on Local Harvest. If you follow the link, it will take you to a page with a function where you can enter your ZIP code and they'll find local CSAs. Bear in mind, that website did not find the CSA that we ended up deciding to use, so I'd try several search methods.


Image Credit: "First CSA Delivery of the Season" by Flickr User sharynmorrow