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CSA / Winter — 1 Comment
20
Sep 10

Sad but true: Time to get your winter CSA

squasg We had squash for the first time in seven months tonight. Delicata stuffed with sausage, apples, peppers and onions. We gorged in our kitchen, which is already turning frigid for lack of humidity and sunlight, going back for seconds and thirds, because that is what you do when it gets cold.

We intend to keep this behavior up until at least April and encourage you to do the same. Several heroic farms are helping make this possible for us good eaters and you may consider this a gentle reminder that there are winter CSAs to be had and that now is the time to snag one.

Some of the info on our Winter CSA page has been updated, but not all. However, we can say with certainty that the two options we’re most familiar with are open again this season: Shared Harvest CSA (with pickups in Lexington and Canton now) and Red Fire Farm’s Deep Winter CSA.

Last year we spent several frozen Saturdays with Gretta Anderson, our friend, local farmer and food activist, distributing the Shared Harvest CSA at Busa’s Farm Stand. It was _a lot_ of food and a fantastic variety of storage veggies and late-season greens. The stuff we hoarded from our share (as well as some bulk veggies we added on to our share) got us through to April. It is, we think, a very good deal. You can also find some folks to carpool with, to make it an even better deal. Shares are available in two- or three-month distributions and Gretta’s coordinating with local producers/growers to offer some treats as additions to the share, like beans, eggs, cider, etc.

We’ll be in Lexington helping her again this fall. And we’re about to sign up for a share with Red Fire too. This is our third year as Red Fire CSA members (and my first distributing shares for the farm in Cambridge) and we’re pretty enamored with the work they’re doing to transform the food system in New England, including the introduction of this Deep Winter share. About a third of the share is root vegetables; a third greens (including delicate stuff grown in their greenhouse); and a third local products, like grains, pickles and cheese. They’re making egg shares available too, for an extra fee. Pick up is in Somerville again at Metro Pedal Power, but they’re also looking to set up distributions at other locations, too.

Regular CSA members get to claim shares first, but they’ll be opening any extra slots up at the end of the month.

We haven’t checked in with Enterprise Farm yet, but it looks like they’ll be working the East Coast foodshed thing with a year-round CSA again. The oranges that they bring up here from Florida in January or so — they kind of make it possible to keep going. However, I refuse to acknowledge that I am looking forward to them.

Blueberry therapy

jam1

First: an aside. I noticed this week that my fingers are taking on a subtle but certain look of age and overuse. Kind of bending and twisting a bit when they’re at rest. The cumulative effect, probably, of spending half my life before a glowing screen, arms propped awkwardly on a desk, fingers rapidly firing T-O-I-L, basically, over and over again.

Some nights we come home from our day jobs and our commutes and the thought of preparing a meal with all the raw, local ingredients in our kitchen feels like another hour or two wrangling only more T-O-I-L. But lately, even in the heat, or maybe because of it, we have been coming home to this reality with a sense of a relief. Respite. Therapy for my twisted fingers. The silent, methodical rhythms of transforming all of this beautiful produce into simple, delicious stuff. We’re using our hands and ourselves in a more natural way. We’re making a mess, nourishing ourselves and tidying up in a terribly satisfying way. And probably hitting dozens of important acupressure points on our palms in the process.

And now, to the point: We’re already putting things by with a bit of a fury in preparation for the winter, should it ever get cold again. Little bits here and there, when something is suddenly abundant. A couple nights ago we made a giant bowl of pesto and our first batch of blueberry jam. The jam turned out rather miraculously to be our most successful batch yet. Per usual, we winged the recipe.

We’ve learned two important things about jam recently through the Collective Conscience of our Facebook page, a small bit of web research and the contents of this book called Putting Food By. They are: 1) That pectin does nothing for the preserving of fruit. It only affects the texture of a jam, making the “jelliness” of it, in some cases, possible. and 2) sugar changes the acid of a jam. Which is to say, sugar does something for the preserving of fruit. If you remove the sugar entirely, like we have done, you’re at risk unless you put your jam in the fridge or freezer.

Because we think 12 cups of sugar in anything (a standard quantity for jam recipes) is an obscenity, we reduced the amount most sources told us to use. And have opted to refrigerate and/or freeze.

Here’s how we did our blueberries:

2 1/2 pints of blueberries (or 7 1/2 cups)
3 cups of sugar
1/2 t of cinnamon*
1/4 t of ground cloves*

*optional, for spicing

yield: 3 1/2 pints

The morning after, when all was cooled, the jam was surprisingly viscous — jelly-like, really. And delicious. It’s now in our freezer until a dreary day in February, so we can’t be sure the consistency or flavor will stay the same. Here’s hoping.

…Now step away from the computer and go work your hands.

CSA — 3 Comments
19
Jul 10

Carrot top, the tea

carrot-tea

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.

Corn / Rants / Tomatoes — 3 Comments
6
Jul 10

Why is there corn now?

We spent the holiday weekend camping with some pals in the western part of the state. It was a swell time. Last week, as we were exchanging frantic emails with each other to make sure we collectively had our gear and, most importantly our food organized, one of our friends suggested someone grab corn at a farmers’ market, for grilling purposes.

We local eaters smugly replied: it’s a little early for corn.

But as we local eaters drove out Route 2 to Route 112 and on the winding roads to our rural destination, we passed several farms and their farmstands offering, yup, corn!

Now, corn, at least as I conceive of it, is a treat reserved for high summer. I have very fond memories of living in the Pioneer Valley, pedaling through the rocking corn fields of Hadley, Mass. in the stiff and slow heat of August. *August.* I mean, I can’t be sure it was August, but it definitely was not the Fourth of July.

But this scenario is, I think — I am going to say it — may be, a casualty of the popularity of the local foods movement. What I mean to say is, local farmers are growing stuff earlier than they used to (and perhaps earlier than they should be) to accommodate a consumer demand for Those Most Precious and Adored local crops. That is what the “local foods movement” is asking them to do.

A couple weeks back we were having a conversation with a farmer at the Cambridgeport market. (She is young and awesome and well-known in the community.) We got to talking about how, thanks to the swell of local eaters and the demand for a steady, nearly year-round supply of local food, what used to feel like a healthy lull in winter now feels like not much of a break at all. She’s got to work harder, in part because the bureaucracy is bigger, in part because her customer base has grown and also, in part, because she’s got to get stuff to seed … earlier than ever before.

Hmph.

Remember the first or second week of the Copley Square market and how a bunch of different growers had hothouse or greenhouse tomatoes? There’s another treat that, at least as I conceive of it, is reserved for high summer. I don’t even think that last year I saw them so early.

Now obviously there are some incentives for the local farmer if local customers will pay a premium for a local tomato on June 1. And hey, it was great for us to have corn on the cob over a fire this July 4th. Maybe there’s nothing at all to complain about here, but perhaps there is something curious worth noting. But a lot of do this local food thing with integrity and a commitment to eating things when we’re supposed to eat them.

Also, this is a position we take often: The movement has got to be about feeding people. I mean everybody, including the people who think they are too poor (and actually are) to shop at farmers markets and the farmer working her butt off all year to actually enable a transformation of our food system. To make that possible — that = sustainability = I am wondering do we need tomatoes in June?

Updates — 6 Comments
1
Jun 10

Growing Triscuits and ire

A couple of weeks ago, we had a pretty fantastic debate over on Facebook about this community garden project at a church in Somerville. We’ve been thinking a lot about our own anti-corporate position, our own objection to the world’s second-largest food corporation co-sponsoring a local initiative to reconnect communities to fresh veggies and all of the interesting and passionate things our localvore community on the FB had to say about this. (As a side note, I’ve been reading very fascinating stuff about what it means to be a corporation, and the history of such things, in Thom Hartmann’s Unequal Protection. Highly recommend.)

Anyway, I was recently invited to write a column for OtherWords, an op-ed syndicate that is affiliated with my day job. I chose to write about this topic. So, um, here it is.

Community Gardens Don’t Excuse What Kraft Did to American Food
Big Food won’t be absolved by tossing a fraction of its fortunes toward urban plots.

by Kristi Ceccarossi
A few weeks ago, a churchyard near my city apartment was converted into a garden. A group of local volunteers hammered together raised beds, trucked in new soil, and planted berries, tomatoes and greens with the hope of growing fresh food for a local soup kitchen.

It doesn’t get much warmer and fuzzier than that, but I’m pretty repulsed by it.

As someone who advocates for a more localized food system where we can all have a stronger connection to what we’re eating and to the backstory of how it was grown, you’d think I’d support this kind of project. And I would, were it not for the fact that it was built in partnership with Triscuit. Yes, the cracker company, which is owned by Kraft Foods, Inc., the world’s second-largest food corporation.

This spring, to mark what is the start of the growing season for most of us, the marketing machine at Triscuit is breaking ground on more than 50 gardens like this in dozens of cities around the country. According to spokeswoman Allison Goldstein, that’s because Triscuit believes in the simple joys of growing your own food in a local garden, “no matter where you live.” Apparently, Triscuit also believes in emblazoning gardens with its logo and highlighting the joy it yields through organized press events.

It’s hard to find something bad to say about any garden, and even harder to fault one that will feed hungry people. But it’s just as difficult to reconcile what could and should be a genuine community initiative with sponsorship from a corporation with about $50 billion in annual sales.

For one thing, there’s the irony. Food giants like Kraft are largely to blame for the woeful transformation of our food system over the last 50 years, and the lost connection my grandparents’ generation had to what they ate and where it came from. By churning out Cheez Whiz, Cool Whip, Oreos and other highly processed foods, which require immense farms, Kraft and its ilk have allowed us to forget how to cook every day with fresh produce and bury the memory of what it means to grow our own food.

But now, through a confluence of contamination scares, Michael Pollan books, and the obesity crisis, thousands of Americans are questioning whether we should have forgotten how to cook just because we could heat up frozen dinners. We’re taking our money out of the supermarket chains and back to local farmers and independent shops, like our grandparents used to do, and we’re supporting a food system that’s better for the planet, our economy and our health in the process. Clearly Kraft has taken note.

Perhaps Kraft officials think Big Food can be absolved by tossing a fraction of its fortunes towards urban plots that will, realistically, feed very few people. Maybe they hope that we’ll forget the dozens of food recalls it’s been subjected to over the last two years alone, and see this gesture as a step in the right direction–that Kraft is on our side.

I don’t care how many seed packets Kraft stuffs into its Original and Reduced-Fat Triscuit boxes. I don’t trust companies of this scale when they tell me they care about gardening or fresh food or my neighborhood, because everything that preserves their bottom line tells me the opposite.

But more importantly, I don’t need the mammoth corporation that manufactures Velveeta to help me clear a bit of earth and prepare it for cultivation. None of us do. If we want to build community, change our food system or plant a garden, we don’t have to look beyond our neighborhood and its collective resources to do that. And that’s true, no matter where you live.

Milk — 11 Comments
27
Apr 10

Why this raw milk debate matters

In three weeks the state Department of Agriculture will decide whether to pass new language that would further restrict the already-restricted sale of raw milk in Massachusetts. Scott Soares, who heads the department, will make the decision after a single public hearing. If you care about access to real milk or if you care about access to real food at all, it’s important that you pay attention to this issue and even more important that you show up or make a fuss in some way.

The salient point about the raw milk proposal is that it would — and, in fact, already has — bust up or threaten organized raw milk buying clubs that, for a fee, safely shuttle raw milk from farms to consumers. (Read the proposal.)

Before it was even passed, the state sent cease and desist orders to four buying clubs. This month JustDairy, a club that was based on the North Shore, shut down after seven years of doing business. It was delivering (for a fee) raw milk from Massachusetts farms to more than 150 families. Mr. Tarzan, a buying club formed last year in Waltham, also stopped its milk sales. So did a grandmother in the Berkshires who had a local operation.

Winton Pitcoff, director of the Raw Milk Network at NOFA, told me he’s less resistant to the language in this proposal than he is to the intent. The language itself might not pose a threat to the informal groups, like the one we belong to — groups that take turns carpooling to the farm and essentially pick up milk for friends and neighbors. (i.e., Not for a fee.) Winton’s words: “The language doesn’t seem to prohibit small groups.”

Here another thing Winton told me, and this totally blew my mind: Everyone involved in the raw milk market in Massachusetts operates with the understanding that milk cannot legally be purchased anywhere other than the farm. This notion has been reported in the news, been dictated by farmers and buying clubs alike. However, it is not — I repeat NOT — written in law anywhere that raw milk must only be sold on the farm. It was just a suggestion, put down in a letter at some point by a state ag or state health official a few years back, and farmers have respected it all this time.

If farmers and consumers have been politely following this guideline, even though it isn’t codified, why does the state have to intervene suddenly? There has not been a single case of reported illness or mishandling or raw milk by Just Dairy or any casual buying group — ever. And, as Winton pointed out, there are no laws, or even suggested regulations, that prohibit people from buying other products that could pose a much greater public health threat than raw milk. For example, anyone could drive to the Cape and come home with a carload of shellfish. And shellfish, if not properly managed, can contain some pretty scary pathogens. Scarier than anything milk could generate. So why is milk being targeted?

I personally have a few theories. One, of course, is that the milk lobby is very powerful. Although these regulations are issued forth from public health departments and enforced by ag departments, we all know who sets the tone and agenda for public agencies: the businesses that buy and sell our elected leaders.

The industry can do an especially good job of assaulting the real milk market because there is a firmly entrenched and cultural tradition of MISinformation when it comes to milk, and its health benefits. We all take for granted that pasteurization is a good thing. But it was only ever a good thing because the quality of milk in the 19th century, during rapid urbanization and industrialization, was so woeful. Cows living in the city were being fed slop from local distilleries. Conditions were bad and people were getting sick. Sure, pasteurization improved that by killing harmful bacteria in the milk. But killed everything else in the milk too. And then it became instituted in places where the quality of milk was never a problem.

Last night I re-read the raw food chapter in Sandor Ellix Katz really wonderful book “The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved.” Here are some the highlights:

Raw milk contains many enzymes, almost all of which are inactivated by pasteurization. One enzyme, lactase, digests lactose, the milk sugar that so many people can’t digest. That’s right: Pasteurization makes milk indigestible.
Calcium is rendered largely unavailable by pasteurization.
A lot of our pasteurized milk comes from cows that have been fed a growth hormone (rBGH). Even if you think you’re getting hormone-free milk, you might still be. Corporate owners just dump it all together from different cows and farms, don’t you know.
rBGH is banned everywhere in the world except the US, Mexico and Brazil.
Cows that have been fed rBGH often have infected udders, so the milk they produce is often part milk and part pus.

But about this raw milk proposal….

We have a set of public health and ag laws that pertain, exclusively, to the Dairy Industry. Buying clubs, formal and informal alike, make state agencies nervous because they don’t play by the rules. They don’t break the rules, it’s just that consumers of real milk are participating in an entirely different game. The same can be said about any of us who choose to unplug from the corporate industrial food complex. The trouble is, I guess, that our regulators are trying to apply the same rules to us. I am all for a safe and fair and healthy system, but a different game requires different rules.

After talking with Winton, it was clear to me that the most important thing we can do to fight this proposal, which essentially is a fight FOR access to real milk and against a corporate-controlled food industry, is to make an appearance at the May 10 hearing* and help provide a visual example of how many of us are plugged into this issue. You don’t have to stand up and talk. Just be there. And if you can’t be, send a letter to Scott Soares or call your state legislator, and get them involved.

Further reading on raw milk:

A message from NOFA on the proposed regulations
Two posts (One, two) on LocalIsBetter.org
“More Dairies Go Raw” in the Globe, by Darry
Where to buy milk in Alex’s blog, Feed Me Like You Mean It

The hearing is on May 10 at 10 a.m. in Conference Room A on the second floor of 100 Cambridge Street, Boston, MA. Written comments will also be accepted up until May 10, and may be sent to Scott J. Soares, Department of Agricultural Resources, 251 Causeway Street, Boston, MA 02114.

Meat / Poultry — 13 Comments
9
Mar 10

The poultry problem

A couple months ago we had a farmer friend over for dinner and we got to talking about the specifics of what it’s been like for her to raise chickens and turkeys. During the course of our chat she mentioned — in a completely matter of fact way because it is, at this stage of the industrial food complex, a complete matter of fact — that she’s got to order her birds each year from a hatchery. And that these birds are delivered to her through the good ole US Postal Service within a couple of days of their birth.

It was meant to be an unimportant, inoffensive detail within a larger discussion of the cost of organic grain. And I suppose it was a detail that reflected a reality I’d already been made familiar with. But I must have somehow managed to forget it, because when I was reminded of the image of fragile, helpless, utterly disoriented chicks chirping in a box aboard an airplane and, later, in the back of a post office, I was totally distressed.

There’s the obvious animal welfare concern in this scenario, even if these birds are headed to a blissful life on a small farm with yummy, chemical-free grain and soil rife with grubs. (Would you put a newborn puppy in a box and freight it a couple hundred miles?) But what’s more upsetting is the underlying issue that points to a more complex concern that I’m having trouble articulating. Though generally it is something like this: The chickens we eat can no longer have sex and procreate the way nature intended. Even the birds we’re buying from reliable, local farmers.

Oh yeah, that goes for turkey too. Even the heritage breeds.

To be clear, this is not meant to be a criticism of our farmer friend, or any local farmer that continues to raise poultry — especially those farmers who, like our friend, are going to great lengths to give these birds the finest life they can. I’m not sure it’s meant to be a criticism at all. Maybe just a public proclamation that there is something seriously disturbing about the genetic state of poultry and the corresponding cavalier relationship we all — even us self-identified good eaters — have with eating it.

This is, I suppose, a coda to an earlier post, written from a slightly more repulsed perspective after having read the entirety of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals. It’s excellent book, though his argument for vegetarianism is tragically incomplete — he overlooks the fact that welfare issues extend to dairy animals and laying hens. However, he makes several strong points against eating poultry, including:

1. What do any of us know about the hatcheries whence our birds come from? What kind of conditions are their parents living in?
2. Birds aren’t capable of reproducing because their genetics have been so manipulated by the market. “By design they can’t live long enough to reproduce.”

When was the last time you heard someone pass on a piece of breast meat, explaining “I’m sorry, I only eat red meat.”

Never. Which is to say, it’s sort of like chicken isn’t even meat anymore. Or like it doesn’t come with any environmental, health or economic issues worth measuring — at least not compared to beef or pork. Though, when you really think about it, grass-fed beef might be the most actually sustainable kind of meat you can eat. The total inputs are grass and water, compared with shipped in grain for chicken (plus, the life and death of one steer feeds many, many more mouths than the life and death of one chicken).

For no particular reason, Darry and I only eat chicken about three or four times a year. Compared to the 221 pounds (or roughly 37 birds) the average American consumes. I suppose it’s because it’s been harder to find, and more expensive, than ground beef or sausage. When we do buy poultry, we’re purchasing whole birds for an average of $25. Usually they come from Stillman’s. Once from Misty Knoll, though, after not receiving any response to our inquiries for more info on their practices, that will be the last time. It’s worth noting that Pete + Jen’s Backyard Birds seem like a great option, if you can buy before they sell out. Other small producers, like our friend, are great too. Absolutely nothing from the supermarket is acceptable. You’re fooling yourself if you buy that Bell & Evans bullshit.

Because it’s already so minimal, I doubt we’ll be scaling back our chicken purchases at all. But we might be thinking differently about it when we do eat chicken. We’re still formulating those thoughts. Please, weigh in!

Meat — 10 Comments
10
Feb 10

Eating animals

Regularly, with some relish, and for the better part of the last two years — as long as I’ve been dedicated, in earnest, to eating only meat of known origin — I’ve interrogated every vegetarian and vegan that has crossed my path. My line of questioning has been consistent. Roughly as follows:

1. Why did you stop eating meat?
2. What good do you think it is doing?
3. Don’t you think you could do more good by eating meat exclusively from local, sustainable farms?

I am hereby acknowledging that this has been a simplistic and self-righteous act, and I am sorry to all of the veggievores I’ve misunderstood over the years. I still stand by the belief that it is a far far better thing to eat meat, if you choose to eat it at all, only from small and traceable producers. The animals on these farms are living a safer, happier, healthier and (often) longer life and if you are ever in doubt, you could make a daytrip and lay eyes on them yourself.

But, …well… they’re still being raised to die. And although I’m fairly certain the circumstances under which they face death are much less terrifying than their factory-farmed brethren, there is something terrible and universal about the ultimate reckoning. I am suddenly having some trouble making sense of “life as commodity” with my trusty “local = sustainable always” position.

Incidentally, we organized this event with the Jamaica Plain Forum to try to get a bunch of people in a room together to talk through some of these issues, with a couple of experts in the field guiding the discussion. This seems more useful than me watching and re-watching those chicken dinner videos with Jamie Oliver on YouTube (see above). Though they are quite instructive.

I have no plans to stop eating meat. If I were to object on ethical grounds, I think I’d have to throw out all animal products — and a world without cheese is not one I want to live in. It seems a bit defensive to say, but Darry and I have reduced the amount of meat we consume to a responsible once-a-week, mostly the remains of a large ground beef order we got from Stillman’s around Christmas (16 lbs or so). I know this is not practical for a lot of people, but I guess I think they should do it anyway.

Maybe I should have been interrogating local meat-lovers all this time. Because there seems to a sort of worship of obscure and decadent carnivorous fare that excuses one set of ethical problems (the value of life) as long as another (the value of local) is covered.

Meals — 1 Comment
25
Jan 10

Dinner, 24-January

dinner2

We don’t share the mundane details of our personal lives in this space. Not nearly enough. So here it is, a spirited effort to rectify this wrong. We pledge to deliver regular reports and photographic evidence (low-fi and from my iphone) of how and what we eat all of the time. Which is in fact very well and almost entirely regional.

Dinner, 24-Jan: Butternut squash quesadillas with Cabot cheddar, jalapeno and onion on sprouted grain tortillas, dressed with tomatillo salsa and Butterworks Farm yogurt. Also: a red cabbage salad on top of very delicate Red Fire Farm greens.

These things are 99% local. The squash, cabbage and onion hail from our Shared Harvest CSA; the jalapeno was frozen over the summer; likewise, the tomatillo was preserved. You can find the Red Fire greens at the Wayland winter farmer’s market. Those spelt tortillas are the only item of unknown origin. We bought them at the co-op because they have trademarked a passage from the Bible, Ezekial 4:9 –

Take you also to you wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentils, and millet, and fitches, and put them in one vessel, and make you bread thereof, according to the number of the days that you shall lie on your side, three hundred and ninety days shall you eat thereof.

CSA / Preserving+canning — 5 Comments
20
Dec 09

What we put by

I’m not going to lie: we’re feeling a little impressed with ourselves right now. We took the opportunity, on this first and perfect snow day, to assess how much food we have accumulated, frozen and canned over the summer and fall and to try to strategize about how best to make it last until next spring.We succeeded with the first task, but will happily take advice on the second. (Particularly: Rutabagas? We know nothing. Some of our carrots are a little damp. Is this OK? Is it a good thing?)

Here’s the final tally from our fridge, freezer, kitchen shelves and our foyer, which is very cold and very dark and serving as an excellent root cellar. The fruit and veggies herein came largely from our CSA through Red Fire Farm, which ended this week, and our winter CSA from Shared Harvest, which delivered three loads of mostly storage crop once a month, October, November and December. The rest came from assorted farmers’ markets, pick-your-own farms and our fish share through Cape Ann Fresh Catch.

In the fridge/foyer

• 50 lbs of potatoes
• 15 lbs of carrots
• 15 heads of garlic
• 8 rutabagas
• 7 lbs of parsnips
• 5 butternut squash
• 4 celeriac
• 4 turnips
• 3 popcorn cobs
• 2 large red cabbage
• 1 pie pumpkin
• 1 large green cabbage
• 1/2 bushel of onion
• 1/2 bushel of sweet potatoes

What we* preserved

• 12 qts of dilly beans
• 8 qts pickled cukes
• 8 qts of peaches
• 4 qts pickled carrots
• 4 pints of pepper jelly
• 4 qts peach chutney
• 3 qts of tomatilloes
• 3 jam jars of ground cherry jam
• 3 qts of tomatoes
• 3 pints of simple syrup•
• 2 pints of mediterranean chutney
• 2 qts pickled peppers
• 2 qts applesauce
• 1 qt + 2 pints of salsa
• 1 qt of brined tomatoes

In the freezer

• 7 cod fillets
• 7 lbs of beef (the meat is from Stillman’s)
• 6 quarts of strawberries
• 5 quarts of blueberies
• 5 lbs of spinach
• 4 qts applesauce
• 4 quarts of assorted hot peppers
• 1 qt garlic scape pesto
• 1 qt basil pesto
• 2 bags of green beans
• 2 qts of tomato sauce
• 2 pieces of mozzarella (from Fiore di Nonno)
• 2 lbs of cranberries (from Cranberry Hill)
• 1 quart of corn
• 1 qt of cod stock
• 1 chicken
• coupla smelts

Our preserving was rarely a solo act. We had generous support from Team Pickle.