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.)

Cook it up

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.

Cozy meals

Dear John,

We skipped produce pickups while we were out of town. We ate radishes and peppers and carrots dipped in ranch fun dip on the road. We took squash and sweet potatoes and parsley and peppers to family and friends. But sick weeks followed by travel weeks meant we ended up with some very sad foods in the fridge. Some got tossed in the compost (applesauce that molded weirdly quickly), some got sauced (lettuce into a cream dip), some is destined for soup (chard once the Royal Coronas finish cooking).

The chill is finally in the air. I want to curl around casserole dishes and soup bowls. I also want to be able to eat soon after coming in the door and not after the oven has preheated and the casserole has baked for an hour. So, um, things to consider.

Cozy meals