This week was surprisingly lucrative at the market! I’m always surprised to see greens again when Fall comes along. Every year, I forget that they come back!
In this very green picture I’ve got eggs (1 dozen small and 1 dozen large), cucumbers, acorn squash, mustard greens, and lettuce.
I also picked up lots more tomatoes, potatoes, a small bag of mixed greens, and four mini loaves of double chocolate bread.
Lots of delicious things and I’m looking forward to getting to use them all.
About a month after meeting the Zekiah Farm animals, we were able to pick up our meat from the farm. The lamb isn’t ready yet, which is probably a good thing, since our freezers are VERY full with what we picked up today. We picked up 1⁄2 cow and 1⁄2 pig this time.
Art and I headed to the farm and chatted with other farm friends while everything got staged and customers were rung up in the register. Picking up meat is never a quick trip since we enjoy the camaraderie quite a bit as well! We filled our car with nine boxes of meat – seven of cow and two of pig.
This first picture isn’t actually from our bulk order, I just needed two packs of hot dogs and we ordered a pork belly from another pig to replace the one we never got to use due to The Great Freezer Disaster of ’11. The plan is to cut it in thirds and go from there. I have this desire to make the perfect BLT with home smoked pork belly and local tomatoes. We’ll see if the tomatoes are in compliance at the market this weekend.
This picture shows three packs of short ribs, three soup bones, and five marrow bones. I’m not sure what will be happening with any of these things, but I know it will be spectacular.
The only downside with our cow order, if it can even be called that, is the NY Strip. We had wanted the entire thing in roast form but the butcher (not our farmer) decided that we really wanted steaks. So we got 10 really pretty NY Strip Steaks. We’ll eat them, and enjoy them, so it’s no big deal. Hopefully next time we’ll get the roast whole.
Two more soup bones are here and there are three rib roasts. Rib roasts are very exciting and I’m looking forward to giving them a try!
This is a collection of roasts – top rounds and rump roasts. I think. We got these in 3-5 pound packs, which is a nice size for our family and when we’ve got company. Very manageable!
Here is our beautiful brisket which Art will smoke perfectly, the eye round roast (one of my favorite cuts), and another top round roast.
This picture has flat iron steaks, ranch steaks, the hangar steak, skirt steak, and a few more roasts. It’s hard to tell from the pictures, but all of this meat has amazingly gorgeous marbling.
That huge piece of meat is the filet roast. We’re weird and chose to forgo filet steaks, I can’t wait to roast this into deliciousness. The flank steak and petite tender are also in this picture. I have no idea what a person does with a petite tender, but I’m sure it will be tasty.
And then there’s the ground beef.
120 pounds of ground beef, to be exact. Mostly all from the chuck since chuck meat is primarily good for braising, which is a cooking method Art just Does Not Like. So instead we ended up with a whole lot of ground beef. I predict many tacos in our future. I love tacos.
Then there’s the pig. We opted to get our ground pork as sweet Italian sausage because that’s our favorite way to use pork. We didn’t end up with a lot of bacon from this pig, but I opted to get it in one pound chunks instead of sliced.
This pig gave us two pork loins and three fresh hams.
We also ended up with six shoulder roasts, spare ribs, baby back ribs, and a tenderloin.
Our freezers are almost completely filled with all of this delicious meat and I’m very excited about all of the great meals I’ll be able to make with it all in the year to come! It still weirds me out to buy a year of meat all in one fell swoop – especially when it hits my bank account, but it’s a great experience and I’m so glad we’ve started doing it.
Thank you Zekiah Farms!
August brings us the Charles County Fair and Art and I enjoy going to get our yearly dose of funnel cake. The past two years, we’ve also had the pleasure of getting to meet our future meat. I took a bunch of pictures this year, all with my phone, and we had a great time chatting with our very awesome farmer.
I am so very grateful for the relationship we’ve be able to develop with our fabulous farmers at Zekiah Farms. And I love that we have the ability to visit the animals that will end up feeding us for the year to come!
This was a good week at the market for staples! Potatoes, tomatoes, onions and garlic - the best things in life.
This week we added some green! Delicious mustard greens, in fact. Yum.
Potatoes, tomatoes, onions, mustard greens, double chocolate sugar cookies, local honey, and some local honey candies. I’m so happy that we’re seeing greens other than kale again.
I went a little crazy with tomatoes, I admit. The end of the season is looming so I feel the need to get as many as possible in the meantime!
Another good, but sparse, day at the market. Potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions, and delicious tomatoes!
The market was very sparse this weekend thanks to both the county fair and the ridiculous amounts of rain we’ve been getting. Many of the farmers were at the fair showing off their animals or doing other things to benefit the fair. And, while rain is good, we’ve had so much that vegetables are exploding on the vine due to being waterlogged.
We did come away with some kale, which I will attempt to turn into chips before I completely give up on it, a butternut squash, potatoes, quick breads, little teeny onions, peachy chutney, spiced heirloom tomato preserves, and eggs.
The cat was already ours. She has decided that she loves the cardboard egg crates.
For the first time in I don’t even know how long, I got to go to the market today. YAY! The market is a very important part of my life and I have so missed my weekly outings. While I’m always grateful that Art has the capability to go without me and return with delicious produce, I really enjoy going too! I miss my farmer friends, I miss seeing what’s available, and I just miss everything. Today was a very happy day!
We picked up two dozen eggs, a bunch of potatoes, 6 ears of bi-colour corn, some yellow zucchini, and small loaves of zucchini and chocolate bread.
This picture is also Mia’s introduction to Manger à Trois! Our sweet little cat hasn’t ventured far from the laundry room since she moved in 3 years ago and it is only within the last few weeks that she seems to have become fed up with her self-imposed seclusion. She has been spending more and more time on the table and is slowly losing her skittishness. Today she decided to investigate all the produce as we unpacked and sniffed it all over to ensure it was safe for her humans.
We also picked up some nice tomatoes (most of the tomatoes have gotten too much water in the area, so we haven’t seen many at the market), garlic, a red bell pepper, a white onion, and some jalapenos for Art to stuff and devour.
Mia was interested in the produce on this side of the table as well.
Tomatoes, potatoes, more tomatoes, and yellow zucchini! Pickings were slim at the market today due to both Art’s late arrival and Irene’s earlier arrival. But I have tomatoes, which means life is good.
We got two dozen eggs this week! I was running low in the fridge so it’s nice to have a restock.
Art picked up two HUGE briskets and two skirt steaks, neither were in the CSA. The CSA came with chip steak, a mock tender, and a steak that I can’t read from the picture.
Overall, the CSA has been a fun experience. We’ve gotten to try out lots of new cuts of meat that I wasn’t aware of previously and some of them have been great. It’s been nice to get new things every week and I’m glad we tried it out.
That said, I don’t think we’ll be doing this in the future, at least not with any regularity. We get better prices when buying an entire half cow or pig in bulk, and we have control over the cuts we end up with. Since we have the freezer room, this makes more sense for us.
The CSA was a bit cow-heavy, but that’s just a result of slaughter times I believe. CSAs during other seasons would have more pig if the season coincided with pig slaughtering times.
If I had my choice for the future, I’d want to stick with just chickens and eggs and buy pigs, cows and lambs in bulk. If you’re someone who doesn’t have a lot of freezer space, though, this could be an ideal experience for you!