Category: CSA

We’ve been enjoying our CSA haul again, especially since the bag arrived for a Brown dinner at our place and we got to spend time contemplating it with friends. The oddest inclusion was a bag of fava beans. They’re enormous. The pods are 4-6″ long, and you have to peel off a fibrous shell to get to the beans themselves. Everyone else knew that these should be served with a nice chianti, and we were gernerally creeped. Here I am, mid-peeling:

Then you boil them for a few minutes and strip off the heavy membranes around them, a tiny sprinkling of salt, then you eat. Turns out that they’re yummy. I’m a huge fan.

My Grandparents sent us a first anniversary gift – a lovely, handpainted fruitbowl, decorated with hyacinths.

The bottom is lovely, too.

I was thinking that it looked so familiar when we unwrapped it – it turns out that the artist is a friend of my grandparents, and my mom has had a similar fruit bowl from her since forever. It came with instructions (we both found it surprisingly touching that they’re typewritten – not something we see much).

The bowl arrive the day before our first CSA bag arrived, and we quickly tried it out on the apriums (tiny apricot/plum hybrids). They looked gorgeous against the blue bowl and kept well. This will clearly be a new favourite kitchen standby.