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In this week's share: lettuce, cucumbers, strawberries, carrots, fiddlehead ferns, kale, tomatoes, and apples. To try Anastatia's recipe for carrot and lettuce salad with walnuts and feta cheese, click here.
May 20 marked the end of our winter CSA. Unsurprisingly, given the season, the offerings were sort of a jumble: fiddleheads, lettuce, strawberries, and cucumber spoke of the spring, while carrots and kale looked like the last vestiges of winter. As for the apples, I'm pretty sure someone had picked them last fall, but they were crisp and delicious.
It's turned hot in Cambridge, and neither Maggie nor I felt like cooking anything, but a substantial salad, composed of grated carrots and lettuce and a handful each of walnuts and feta cheese, made a meal that bridged winter and spring vegetables in a very satisfying manner.
As we ate, we discussed the virtues and drawbacks of our winter share. I have never been particularly good at household accounting, so while I'd done the initial calculations when we signed up, I hadn't thought much about how much we were getting, relative to our investment, throughout the winter. We'd had the share for 23 weeks, and paid $700 for it, which worked out to about $30 a week. Since we'd split it, we were each putting in $15 on vegetables each week. Both of us had had to supplement—half a 10-pound box of vegetables, it turns out, is not enough to feed one person for a week—but I certainly usually spend more than $15 each week on vegetables, so I felt we'd made a decent investment. In the weeks when Maggie was out of town, the box of vegetables had been more than sufficient for me. Lessons learned: 10 pounds of vegetables would feed me for a week, and this particular CSA was actually a pretty good deal, especially when compared to my usual vegetable-buying habits, which are somewhat profligate.