Produce

For our third week of the meat CSA, we remembered eggs.  We got a dozen for this pickup and a dozen that we’d missed earlier.  We’ll pick up the extra dozen we missed at some point in the future, but right now I’ve got three dozen in my fridge and that is enough! 

This week also brought us two pounds of ground beef, a chuck steak, and another whole chicken.  Some of these whole chickens are going to be smoked or become beer can chickens at some point in July.  Fun and excitement!

(We switched our pickup day to Thursdays, which accounts for the dates on these pickups.)

Here’s the second week of our meat pickup!  Again, we forgot to pick up the eggs.  Oops. 

This week we got smoked pork sausage, a beef rib steak, and a huge container of pulled beef.  I can’t wait to thaw that container for delicious sandwiches in the near future.  (Or when I remember that I have it.)

And, yet again, Art was amazing and went to the market without me.  I can’t believe that I haven’t been to the market yet myself!  Hopefully that will change this weekend and I can’t wait to do my own veggie shopping.  Not that Art doesn’t do a grand job himself, I just miss it. 

This week we ended up with a ton of veggies.  Sugar snaps, broccoli, various summer squashes, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, green onions, and Swiss chard.  What a great haul!

This is the missing week of the farmers market!  It was hiding on a different camera so I had to track it down.  This is another week that Art went to the market without me.  This time it was because of the Attack of the Killer Kidney Stones. 

He did a great job and came home with green onions, strawberries, peach chutney, salad greens, eggs, broccoli, and spinach.  He also got a small loaf of gingerbread and the long things next to the green onions are young garlic.  It was all used and all delicious!

We’ve decided to try something new this summer.  Our local meat farmer, Zekiah Farms, is offering CSAs for produce, meats and eggs.  We decided to give it a go for a season and see how it worked for us.  It seems like a great way to go for people who don’t have lots of freezer space so can’t buy cow and pig in bulk like we have in the past.  We signed up for a half share of meat plus chickens as well as an egg share.  This means we should be getting around 4 pounds of meat a week, a dozen eggs, and a whole chicken every other week. 

For this first week Art forgot to pick up our eggs, so those aren’t shown and we’ll just get two dozen next week.  We ended up with some pork chops, beef cubes, a flank steak, and some ground beef.  We also got a chicken and they gave us two gorgeous cabbages as a bonus.  This will be an exciting test even though I have a feeling we’ll go back to bulk meat purchasing once the season is over since we do happen to have the freezer space for it.

Yet again, Art went to the market without me, this time because I was out of town for the weekend.  He did a great job vegetable hunting and came home with romaine lettuce, zucchini, yellow squash, patty pan squash, green onions and kohlrabi.  Yum!

I seem to be missing a photo for the market on ⁵⁄₂₁, it might be on a different camera and I just need to track it down.  Once I do, I’ll go ahead and get that posted.

Finally the farmers market is back!  It actually started up on the 7th, but I was out of town and went to Pete’s instead.  For various reasons, we have opted not to do a vegetable CSA this year and just to spend all of our money at the market spread out amongst all of the farmers.  Although, we have decided to join a CSA for meat, eggs, and chickens with our local meat farmer, Zekiah Farms.  It’s for 15 weeks and will provide us with a few pounds of meat and a dozen eggs each week.  Then we’ll get a whole chicken every other week.  The meat CSA is just a trial run, we all have the feeling that, since we’ve got the freezer space, sticking with buying pigs and cows by the half will work out better for us in the long run. 

But, back to the market!  Art went without me since I’ve been under the weather.  The only instructions I had given him were “please, please, please get Swiss chard!”  He came home with two bags of mixed salad greens, three bunches of green onions, two red green onions, some baby spinach, a small container of strawberries, and SWISS CHARD!

This picture better shows off the lovely multi-colour stems of the chard. 

It’s still early in the season so there isn’t a lot growing yet, but it’s a start and it’s great to see so much green on the table after a long winter. 

We’ve also picked up some asparagus and strawberries directly from another local farm, but I neglected to take a picture.  The strawberries have already been devoured and the asparagus will be roasted for a meal this week.

Earlier in the week I got an eagerly expected email which read “when can you come pick up your pork belly?”  Woo!  Pork belly!  My fantastic meat farmer, Zekiah Farms, had asked me some time ago if I wanted anything when they took pigs to slaughter and I asked for a pork belly. 

Today, Lance and I went to pick it up and, thanks to a complete lack of impulse control, we came home with quite a bit of meat in addition!  The pork belly is the large, flat package in front.  It’s about 7 pounds and we have grand plans to smoke half of it and I’m not sure what we’ll do with the rest yet. 

We also picked up three packages of bacon, two pounds of ground lamb, three packages of strip steak and another amazing heritage turkey since the first one was so wonderfully delicious.  There’s also a brisket in there somewhere. 

Our farmer is also gearing up to start a meat CSA and, after some discussion, I think we’re going to sign up for a half share of that to see how it goes.  So you can look forward to posts and pictures about our first experience with a meat CSA!

For Thanksgiving this year, we opted to try out a heritage turkey from our local meat farmer.  I’m not entirely sure which breed of turkey we ended up with, but it was a fantastic and delicious bird. 

Although it might be hard to tell from the photograph, the breasts weren’t quite as wide as the turkeys we’ve gotten in the past and, even raw, you could see that the breast meat was a bit darker than the past turkeys.  (The breasts look lumpy here because I’ve wedged some butter underneath the skin.)

You can sort of see that the breast meat is darker here.  The skin cooked up a beautiful colour and Art easily removed all of the meat from the bird with plenty for Thanksgiving dinner, a few plates of leftovers, and Turkey Tetrazzini. 

The flavor was simply fantastic. It just tasted more.. natural.  More flavorful.  I cooked it with my standard High-Heat Roasted Turkey method but, for future heritage birds, I’ll be reducing the cooking times during flipping from 30 minutes to 20 minutes.  Due to the fat distribution, the heritage bird cooked up a bit faster than previous birds. 

Without a doubt, I will be getting a heritage turkey again for next year.  This one was scrumptious!  If you have the option to get one for your own future Thanksgiving dinners, I can’t recommend it enough.

This is the year for local meat.  Earlier in the year, after a bit of research, we ended up with a half cow in our freezer.  Then, by some great stroke of fortune, a local farmer, Zekiah Farms, came to our market and began selling meat.  While we’re pretty much set on cow, we’ve gotten quite a bit of pig from Zekiah.  It has all been wonderful – sausage, bacon, chops, yum. 

After a bit of discussion with each other and communion with the freezer, we decided that we should purchase a half pig from Zekiah the next time they took pigs to butcher.  

Since Art has been enjoying his experimentation with smoking, we opted to get most of the pig in the large cuts shown below.  Our side of pig yielded 2 boneless pork loins, 1 tenderloin, 3 shoulder roasts, 3 fresh ham roasts, baby back ribs and spare ribs. 

The rest of the pig came to us in sweet Italian sausage, bacon, and a few ham hocks as shown below.  Lots and delicious bacon and sausage.  We opted to get the sausage loose because we always end up removing the casings anyway. 

Since it’s a grand thing to know where your food comes from, we were actually able to meet our pig at the Charles County Fair!  Art named him Bacon…

All of the meat is frozen solid, USDA inspected, and vacuum packed.  The bacon is nitrate free.  We ended up with around 100 pounds of meat, 27 of those pounds in sausage and bacon.  It fills the top shelf of the upright freezer plus some space on the door.  I can’t wait for Art to get smoking some of the larger cuts!