More than 13 years ago our family entered the wonderful (and sometimes wild) world of Community Supported Agriculture, complete with its weekly ritual farm bag delivery.  Back in 1997, a shipment straight from the farm often meant searching for new and different ways to use broccoli (as an example) for weeks on end during the season and without the Internet to boot.  These days we’re lucky to enjoy a variety of just harvested produce from Freshness Farms, thanks to Blue Heron and Martinez Family Farms as well as other local growers in the Watsonville area.  Last week we received carrots, spinach, strawberries, heirloom tomatoes, dill, mushrooms and celery.  This week a whole different collection of seasonal treasures awaits us.

After so many years of CSA membership, in this household we’ve almost forgotten how to cook on our own without the weekly bounty as our inspiration.  At the same time, I vividly remember those first months long ago, shifting to a predetermined vegetable inventory, completely out of my control.  So when friends ask me how to go about using the farm bag, I can relate to the challenge:  how to concoct meals that fully utilize the diverse (and sometimes unusual) wealth of vegetables so they don’t end up relegated to a far corner of the fridge, forgotten until they reach an over-ripe science experiment stage or become refrigerator compost.

What I’ve found, in my very nonscientific research, when I ask friends how they decide what to cook, is that most everyone approaches the problem in the same way.  The process involves fielding requests for favorite foods as well as expectations for dishes to be served on a regular basis. Sometimes there’s a cooking show or a magazine that inspires, or simply a craving.  In each of these cases, the starting point for meal planning is the same – a dish.  This dish, in turn, requiring specific ingredients.  Ingredients that may, or more likely, may not have been delivered in the weekly veggie bag.  The plain truth is, in order to successfully cook from a veggie bag we have to turn the typical meal planning process on its head.  We need to look at the ingredients as inspiration, rather than starting with a dish.

The good news in being farm bag (ingredient) driven, is that we end up eating produce that’s truly at its peak – what’s locally in season will undoubtedly have the best flavor and nutritional value.  Someone’s hankering for spaghetti with marinara has no particular connection to what’s ripe on the vine down on the farm.  In fact this dish-driven cooking often offers the least opportunity for fresh, local, seasonal eating.  A craving for strawberry shortcake in January or pomegranate seeds in June requires produce that has taken a plane from somewhere far away and which has been, as a result, necessarily harvested long before it has reached its optimal quality and taste – not to mention the environmental impact of “long distance” ingredients, another complete topic by itself.

You may already be thinking, “oh no – this crazy lady is gonna to tell me we have to give up our favorite home-cooked meals”.  Let me be clear, I mean nothing of the sort.  This family would have politely passed on the CSA movement years ago if we couldn’t also satisfy our food cravings and cook our most cherished dishes.  I will admit, however, that cooking from a farm bag does require flexibility – on everyone’s parts.  In our house the girls have learned to request categories or countries when it comes to dinner.  For instance – instead of spaghetti with marinara, they ask for pasta or Italian food.  I have found this “generalizing” of expectations has been quietly accepted without complaint.  If one of us has a real hankering for something specific like broccoli cheddar soup, we make a note of it on a Post-it, stick it on the fridge and then prepare that dish as soon as broccoli appears in our box (or sooner, by hitting the farmer’s market, if it’s a craving that can’t wait).  Looks like we hit the jackpot this week for a favorite soup!

Another trick that works in our kitchen is the “favorites” list – sort of the greatest hits among the dishes we love to eat.  Years ago as I was in the middle of a meltdown over what to cook one night, my husband, in his usual rational and level headed way, suggested we write down our favorite home-cooked dishes, and post them on the fridge for quick reference to avert future meltdown moments.  We often refer to this list when we get our bag, and it reminds us that while we might not have the ingredients to cook Roasted Green Beans with Lemon this week, we do have a bounty of tomatoes for some fabulous Tomato and Basil Bruschetta topping.

No question we can thank our local farm friends and the weekly CSA delivery for the variety and breadth of new foods that we’ve tried over the years.  Foodie that I am, I would never have cooked with fennel or done much with beets or even my now beloved leafy greens had it not been for our trusty Wednesday cache of veggies.  I’m grateful for the nudge we’ve gotten as a family to broaden our culinary horizons and educate our palates.

By now you may be getting impatient with me, wanting to ask, “okay, but how do I figure out what to cook if I don’t have a ‘favorites’ list and no one has suggested a country or category?”  Well, as I mentioned before, lucky we are considering this question in the Internet age.  How I ever figured it all out years ago is a distant and somewhat repressed memory – I think I was probably a lot more creative and certainly more energetic.  Now we just open the bag, take out the produce, and make some piles of things that go together:  tomatoes/dill, carrots/celery, strawberries/spinach.  At this point I grab some cookbooks and the laptop and get to work.  First I might browse by ingredient through the index in a few cookbooks – see what looks interesting.  Often at this point, a seed is planted – dill/tomatoes with the addition of potatoes from our pantry becomes French Potato Salad.  Bingo, inspiration hits!