Dear John,
Last Sunday I cooked the last of the winter squash that we had sitting on the buffet. Filled with lentils from the pantry, jalapeno and pecans from the freezer, onion and garlic from the grocery store. Delicious. What a way to finish the 2025 CSA season. In March of 2026. (And ignoring any preserved items.)
Sometime in the next week or two I hope to sign up for our next CSA. I’m hoping to switch to a different farm this year that’s currently signing up past participants. One of the things I like about the new place is their transparency about having CSA members from different incomes. There are signups for full price shares with sliding scale all the way to free shares. It’s a smaller farm, so we might not get in. In which case it’ll be straightforward enough to register with the larger farm coop that we’ve used for five years.
Meanwhile, our first 2026 trip to the garden was a week ago. We poked holes for peas, sprinkled greens on the ground, dusted Johnny jump-ups. I spied a carrot or two. Parsley from last year that looked like it was struggling after the cold. The giant rosemary we inherited with the garden may have been killed by the long cold. (I’m not feeling optimistic about dahlias in our yard that we didn’t dig up last year either. Glad we tackled the project of extracting the tubers from the plot. Next step clean and divide.)
Community Produce
- Apple
- Mango
- Pear
- Pineapple
- Broccoli
- Cabbage
- Cucumber
- Green Pepper
- Potato
Lingering Produce
- Leek
- Beets
- Daikon radish
- Sunchoke
- Cabbage
- Grocery store goods: celery, carrot, onion, potato
Freezer Items in Focus
- Corn stock
- Fennel pesto
- Beet puree
- Roasted jalapeños
- Hot peppers
- Frozen beans
- Shredded carrots
- Cooked collards for grilled cheese sandwich
- Summer stock bag
- Frozen fruit for pies
Garden
- Sunchokes harvested
- Dahlia tubers downstairs too
- Weeds coming soon. Should read up on the nettles in our yard. Pretty sure I’ve spied purple deadnettle
Open Preserves
- Fridge still organized!
- Fridge still not inventoried!
- Fig jam
- Preserved eggplant
- Pickled banana peppers
- Pickled fennel
- Pickled peach
- Curdito
- Cran-kin-kraut
- Fermented green cherry tomatoes
Pantry Beans
- Yellow Split Pea
- Split Red Lentil
- Black Caviar Lentil
- Garbanzo Bean
- Buckeye Bean
- Pinto Bean
- Christmas Lima
- California Corona
- Large White Lima
- Midnight Black Bean
- Rojo De Suelo
- Zipper Cream Field Pea
- And maybe one more on the shelf?
Cook it up
- You twisted the top off the pineapple, per the directions here. We looked at the root buds and have it drying in a jar. Will it become our next houseplant? Probably not. Will it be a cool science demonstration? Heck yeah. Anyway, I chopped up the rest of the fruit for easy snacking. And made a tea with the scraps + orange zest + cinnamon + star anise. We fancy like that.
- I think another household didn’t take their broccoli. I know I was asked if we’d like an extra bag of broccoli and said, sure. Roasted a third of it already. Put some tiny florets in with the remaining cabbage from a prior box for an easy salad in the next few days. I’m thinking of broccoli cheddar soup. I thought that called for potatoes, but no. May toy with the broccoli mashed potatoes in Six Seasons instead.
- Cucumber cream cheese sandwich for me! With an anchovy on top. Cucumber in fun ranch dip for you?
- The last green pepper ended up in chili. Feel like these are also destined for soup. Though, you could also take to work with that ranch dip.
- Which leaves cabbage as the question. My youtube algorithm just suggested a cabbage cooking video. Maybe after months of cabbage salads and fermenting cabbage it’s time to return to favorites. Tomato braised cabbage? Mushroom cabbage pasta?
Love,
Sarah
Planning Inside The Box 