Sometimes the best creativity comes with some boundaries. When you join one of the many local Community Support Agriculture (CSA) programs, you get a large amount of vegetables, often ones that are not part your staple. Radishes?! What the hell am I going to make out of these!
For Amanda White, who is a member the CSA at Silver Lake Farms, the answer was easy after weeks of trying to figure out what to do. "It's a challenge to cook so much and I've consumed lots of carrot soup over the past few weeks," she wrote in the comments section of a LAist post about CSA cooking classes. "It forces you to thumb through cookbook indices for new ideas which is really fun." And to catalog what she's done, she started a blog, Farm to Food. From the first entry:
Three short weeks ago we received our first batch of veggies from the Silver Lake Farms CSA which provides produce from a family-run grower called Sweredoski Farms located about 15 miles away. I’m using this blog to keep track of the different recipes we come up with (successes and failures), using the amazing array of organic produce we pick up each Friday. I’ll also try to post some stuff we made the first couple weeks too.
That was written on January 27th and the blog has been quite prolific since, sharing recipes of a more intense nature like Negi Cakes with Ginger Orange Glazed Carrots and Mizuna Salad to the throw-what-you-have-into-this-dish recipes like Baked Penne with Random Vegetables.
All all in all, White is a great inspiration to all who want to start buying from farmers.
