I finally got around to joining a community-supported agriculture (CSA) deal. You pay for a share of a farmer’s, or group of farmers’ in my case, output for a season. You take on some risk the produce doesn’t come out well, but you pay less and get fresh produce. In my case they deliver it to my door.

I’m cooking a lot, and a lot more from vegetable, so I decided to risk getting overloaded with vegetables. Mostly I’m getting the vegetables everyone knows, like broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and carrots, and I mainly cook them by frying them in olive oil, garlic, and onions to go into sauces. With a CSA, you don’t know what you’ll get until it arrives. So it will push me. Toward healthiness and creativity.

They emailed me yesterday to expect:

They don’t have the staff to substitute plants for the eggs, which I won’t eat, so I gave them to my doorman.

Here’s the rest, not counting a giant pile of some green leafy vegetable I don’t know what it is, but it took me a while to put it into a bag and into my fridge, so it was too much work to take it back out again. Actually, the green leafy vegetable in the fridge might comprise several species, and it adds about a quarter to a third more than what you see below.

Also, I ate one radish. And the four apples are in my fruit bowl. So there’s more. Plus the eggs. I don’t know how to cook most of it. I don’t know what several things are, like the giant purple bulb (a beet?) and the large yellow-white ball (a melon? a squash?). I can’t tell if I should eat the small green tomatoes or let them turn red. Can I eat the stalk the Brussels sprouts grow on? Which one is napa? I’ll have to look up kohlrabi. Why do they spell bok choi with a ‘p’?

All I know is that this is just the adventure I was looking for. I’ll probably bring some to my mom’s for Thanksgiving and let her figure it out.

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