Dear John,
It’s been approximately a month since we picked up our last produce box of 2025. Tomorrow, we pick up our first box of 2026. For the next bit, we’ll just have the community produce box. Approximately every other week, but maybe a little bit less.
The CSA we’ve done for the past several years offers a winter box. We decided to take some time off to catch up on using what we have. (Knowing that we’d be getting the community produce. And that we can go to the grocery store. And that we could even sign up mid-season if we change our minds.)
It is a bit of a relief to not be deciding how best to consume ALL the produce each week. Instead puzzling through how to use up bits and pieces of the odds and ends. This week collard stems got chopped, sauteed, and mixed into a pasta bake. The vegetable scrap bag was made into stock–only for me to decide that, no, I wasn’t make sweet potato soup; it was chili. The bean liquor quickly becoming the liquid for rice and the base for another soup. (The stock is still waiting to be used.)
Your mom made a comment that our way of cooking is harder. It’s true that there are times I’m jealous of the auto populating meal plan routines/calendars–like the pizza, spaghetti, and hot dogs that I knew to expect most weekends of my childhood. When I wish we could have the quick and easy dinner ready to go without the guilty background concern about whether the lettuce or tomatoes or whatever will still be good when we get to a day with enough ease to prepare them.
But there is also an ease to not needing to think about what’s in season, because it’s already in front of us. The fun of figuring out how to use a less familiar ingredient (or alternatively, an excessively familiar ingredient). I’m not making decisions about what to buy at the farmers market. I’m making decisions about how to use what we already bought.
With that said, here’s some things we’ve already bought.
Community Produce
- Coming tomorrow!
Lingering Produce
- Leek
- Red cabbage
- Pumpkin
- Honeynut squash
- Potatoes
- Onions
- Beets
- Daikon radish
- Carrots
- Sunchoke
Freezer Items in Focus
- Corn stock
- Fennel pesto
- Beet puree
- Chopped celery
- Chopped green peppers
- Roasted jalapeños
- Hot peppers
- Homemade gnocci
- Frozen beans
- Cooked collards for grilled cheese sandwich
- Summer stock bag
- Frozen fruit for pies
Garden
- Sleeping
- Though we do have some sunchokes to dig out when the weather allows.
Open Preserves
- Fridge still organized!
- Fridge still not inventoried!
- Fig jam
- Preserved eggplant
- Pickled banana peppers
- Pickled fennel
- Pickled peach
- Curdito
- Fermenting green cherry tomatoes
Pantry Beans
- Yellow Split Pea
- Split Red Lentil
- Black Caviar Lentil
- Garbanzo Bean
- Buckeye Bean
- Pinto Bean
- Christmas Lima
- California Corona
- And maybe one more on the shelf?
Cozy meals
- I’ve been trying out having a rotating cookbook on the table to thumb through at breakfast. That’s actually where I got the recipe for bean liquor and roasted sweet potato soup. And the idea for crepes with marscapone and fruit. (Thank you for Grist.) Sohla has a note of a recipe of a squash and miso soup that I want to make soon.
- Okonomiyaki (use the sweet potato skins left in the fridge)
- Red curry with squash
Love,
Sarah
PS If the swap box has cabbage, take it so we can make cran-kin-kraut!
Planning Inside The Box 