This year I have been given the good fortune of being the CSA site coordinator for Red Fire Farm. Every Wednesday I spend several blissful hours in the parking lot next to the Harvest Co-op in Cambridge, making sure 150 or so people get their weekly share of veggies from the farm. I am outside. I am around beautiful fruits and veggies, most of which was harvested within a 24-hour window of delivery. And, maybe most importantly, I am not at a desk staring at a computer screen.
Actually, the most important thing has been the interactions I’ve had with both the members of the farm and the folks wandering past our distribution, who sometimes mistake it for a farmers market — sometimes to the extent that they’ve collected a bunch of items and are trying to give me money for them — and very often express genuine interest and curiosity in what a CSA is. But more on that in another post.
It’s been very cool talking with other CSA members about their relationship with the food they’re taking home each week. What they’ve done with it, what they’ve discovered about themselves (they like fennel, hate radicchio) and about time spent working with real food. There’s lots of generosity with recipes. Complicated ones. Simple ones too.
Here is a simple one that we have been enjoying: Tea made with the tops of carrots. So yeah, just chop them off, rinse and pour boiling water over them. We let our tea steep for 20 minutes or so, took the tops off and put it in the fridge in a ball jar.
It is a little sweet and it has the flavor of carrot juice except it is about a million times lighter. It’s been incredibly refreshing in the heat. It’s also a mild diuretic with curative properties. Apparently it is an antiseptic than can purge toxins. According to someone else on the innernets who is crazy about the stuff and its healing value.
In our weekly email from Red Fire Farm, we were encouraged to make a tea with the tops of fennel (ahem, The Fronds). We haven’t tried this yet, but we have stored a bunch of fronds in the freezer for future brewing.
Funny that you say a lot of people didn’t like radicchio. A friend asked me to cook up his Red Fire farm share this week and I also found the radicchio to be too bitter for my taste. I ended up grilling it and tossing it with balsamic…
This is pure genius!! I always wanted to know what to do with the tops! i heard you could sauté them, but this sounds much better! thanks for the constant inspiration!