Adventures in vegetation: A foray into a summer CSA...

So, I've been thinking about food a lot lately. ;-) I've been enjoying the foray I mentioned last week of moving into menu planning, and trying to get my kids to expand their palate into actual healthy food. A few years ago, my sister gifted me this book that first got me thinking about this issue:

I really enjoyed it. I love memoir/slice of life stories such as these. And back then, I started trying to incorporate more whole, unprocessed foods into our routine and refrigerator. I would definitely say that it had a lasting impact, albeit a small one. A large impact necessitates more action on the part of the main dinner supplier (me), and I was still a bit too chicken to puree up some Brussels sprouts and tell my kids that they had to try it. I was content that they started to occasionally try different foods and grow to like a few of them. We had actual nibbles of guacamole, and consumption of corn on the cob. Baby steps, right?

True, but at this glacial pace the kids would barely have moved on to an actual bean before college. I thought of the book again recently, and re-downloaded it from my Kindle Cloud to read again. It re-motivated me. Then Shauna'h introduced me to Prep Dish, and then I found out about this new CSA that would deliver right to my office.

CSA's have always fascinated me. For the longest time, people around here would mention them, and I would wonder what that vegetable share acronym stood for (Community Supported Agriculture). I just knew it sounded like a really wonderful concept. Seasonal, weekly fruit and vegetables, all locally grown and harvested. If only my family would eat vegetables.

😱

I like most vegetables. Mike definitely likes them less than I do, but he always eats them. The kids? Well, they consider it torture to eat vegetables. They're pretty good about fruit, though Henry still requires a bit of prodding. Unless it's watermelon. Watermelon is the guy EVERYBODY wants to hang out with at the party.

I figured it just wouldn't be worth the money for me to sign up for one. There are lots of CSA's where I live in WNY. Tons of farms around here. And the ones I'd been familiar with required you to sign up and pay for the entire season up front. This new one I found out about is week-by-week, with no minimum number of weeks that you must claim. You pay a small registration fee ($15), and then from week to week decide whether or not to claim the produce. You find out on Fridays what will be in the boxes for the following week. If you don't want it, or will be out of town or what have you, you just put a hold on your delivery, and you don't pay for it. I decided to take a chance and sign up. I chose the smallest share, which is $16 per week if you choose to get that box.

Last week we got an English cucumber, 2 Hothouse tomatoes, a bunch of radishes, romaine lettuce, kale (yes, yes, I know, more to come on this ;-)), and a pint of strawberries. This week we're getting more strawberries and cucumbers, but also Boston Bibb lettuce, spinach, sweet potatoes, and a pint of yellow onions. Because Prep Dish always uses seasonal ingredients, there is inevitably overlap with what I'm getting in the CSA. Next week, the sweet potatoes, onions and spinach are going right into recipes from Prep Dish. The strawberries are always gone within a single day, regardless. Everybody in the house loves freshly picked strawberries. Mike and I both use lettuce constantly for salads at lunch. So it's been working out really well.

It's still early days, but so far so good. The kids are skeptical, there is no doubt about that. But let the record reflect that Anne ate baked Kale Chips yesterday and declared them good. I'm go claim my Mother of the Month medal right over here. ;-)

It doesn't always go so well. There was the Great Pineapple Salsa Incident of 2017. It had cilantro in it. Cilantro is green. Hence, it is met with utmost suspicion and disdain. The result of this little mutiny at the dinner table had unfortunate results for the entire family. But we made it through. Henry, in particular, looks particularly pained when he looks at the magnetic menu board I have stuck up on the refrigerator. His eating habits are much more ingrained than Anne's. But we're getting there, we are. He loved the lemon blueberry muffins that I made yesterday for breakfast.

I've been enjoying the heck out of finding out what my CSA box will have in it each week, and exploring the new recipes from Prep Dish. Summer isn't my favorite season, as you well know. I don't like hot weather. But I do love that it's dance performance season. And I am truly loving this foray into belonging to a CSA and really savoring seasonal food. I'm hoping this inspiration lasts through the fall harvest and beyond!

Any other CSA members out there? I'd love to hear about your experiences!

Feeling inspired with meal planning...

If your experience is anything like mine, your children have developed some eating habits that are, let's delicately say, less than ideal. Before I had my first baby, I didn't really think about this issue at all. I figured I would breastfeed for a year, and then my child would eat nothing but homemade applesauce and exotic gourmet meals that I would suddenly find time to make.

*hope springs eternal* 😇

Well.

The breastfeeding part worked out, but the rest went into the Giant Fanciful Idea Receptacle In The Sky. My toddlers ate exactly what I swore would never happen: vast amounts of Goldfish crackers, those weird little puff things, an obscene amount of macaroni and cheese, and a proclaimed love for pepperoni pizza. The most "exotic" thing they ate was french fries. Now, my kids are 6 and 11. While they no longer eat puffs, they are still quite reluctant to try new foods. They do like fresh fruit, but the "v word" makes their faces pinch up like someone has very indelicately relieved a gas situation.

I've tried for many years now to get them to be more adventurous in their eating. It's a slow process, to be sure. But Anne now likes shrimp and Henry has tried Roast Beef on Weck (it's a Buffalo thing).

#VictoryisMine

We're getting there. But the only way they try new things is if they have no choice via what I make for dinner. And making something healthy and exotic for dinner means that I have to plan it. I need to make the menu over the weekend, procure all necessary groceries, and have things ready to go for the week. This does happen, but not always. It can be exhausting. :0

While I was visiting my sister over Memorial Day weekend, she introduced me to Prep Dish.

This is a subscription website whereby you get a menu for the week of 4 dinners, a salad, a breakfast, a snack and a dessert. The other days, of course, you can have leftovers and other stand by's, go out to eat, etc. You get a big grocery list for the week, broken down into categories (Dairy, Fruit, etc). Then, you have a "prep day" in which you are guided through preparing each of these meals, and storing the prepared ingredients away into your refrigerator. As you move through the week, you pull out the necessary prepped items, and have only a few steps to complete the meal. This is very handy during the work and school week, as you can imagine. The food is based on either a gluten free approach or Paleo. We as a family do not need to use either of these restrictions, so I simply use the gluten free menu and just include an ingredient we would normally use rather than it's recommended gluten free counterpart. The meals are mainly based upon a whole food and fresh ingredient approach, which is of course universal. And it's delicious, truly.

This isn't an affiliate post, I'm gettin' nothin' for writing this. :0 I just signed up for the free trial, and I have to say that I love it. The grocery list is THE BOMB. The categorization made it infinitely easier to find things at the grocery store. It's fun trying new things, and the food tastes wonderful. Monday we had a citrus marinated chicken with pineapple salsa, and tonight we're having a ginger/soy sauce stir fry with beef and bell peppers. Friday is an egg fritatta with mushrooms and kalamata olives. I brought in the snack with me to work today, which is a yogurt dill sauce for dipping fresh carrots and zucchini.

I'm enjoying having someone else do the planning for me. Has anyone else tried a menu planning subscription like this? I'd love to hear about it!