Week 4 CSA

Bonanza Week! For veggies we got turnip, carrots, potatoes, cucumber, spinach and alfalfa sprouts. Our meat share ( comes every other week) included free range chicken, honey garlic sausages, bacon and ribs. I decided to buy a bouquet of daffodils as an add on. I'm used to buying them every year from the Cancer Society but haven't seen them around. To me they mean spring has sprung!

CSA: Week 3 and we're keeping up with it!

This week we had onions, parsnips, sweet potatoes, beets( help!) and what appears to be a large brain...but is actually cabbage. Off to find beet recipes :)

Taproot Meat Share

Happy Sunday Morning!
As part of our buy local plan, we also bought a meat share (delivered every other week). For our first week we got a free range chicken, pasture fed beef, and apple breakfast sausages (see below, we'll let you know how they taste).

Itttttt's Taproot Tuesday!

Here we are at Taproot Week #2. This week for your viewing pleasure we have a honkin' Hubbard squash, rainbow carrots, fresh spinach, a rutabaga, organic pea shoots and alfalfa sprouts. Going to have the spinach and sprouts for supper tonight.

This is also the first week we got our meat share. I thought it came fresh ( it came frozen!) so we won't be having the free range chicken I planned to have tonight. The rest of the share consisted of apple breakfast sausages and lean ground beef.

Taproot also has a section where you can purchase extras or " add ons", so I bought a spinach mushroom quiche for next week's Meat-Free Monday. This would kill two ummm, food goals with one stone :). Looks like we're having it for supper tonight though as my free range chicken needs to defrost for tomorrow.

Now...what to do with that big honkin,' squash...

And So It Begins...

Welcome to my fun ( hopefully) and indulgent journey into the world of food and nutrition. 

Food is a fuel, part of many social and cultural gatherings and can also be fun to prepare. I admit it... I love all of the culture around food, trying new recipes, cookbooks, and the social aspects of eating and cooking. 

In the past few years I have tried to align this with making food part of a healthy lifestyle. It's going to be a lifelong journey so I decided to start this blog...to keep myself accountable if nothing else. If others find some of this interesting, all the better.

I have also made a commitment since Sept 2012, to participate in Meat Free Mondays. We dabbled in eating at least one meat free meal per week a few times and didn't stick to it. Having it be a particular day helps with planning and so far so good. I won't say we've been perfect, a few times due to rushed days and lack of planning, we agreed to move it to another night and then didn't honour it, but it's now Apr 2013 and for the most part, we stick with it. Want to know more? Check out the website

Meat Free Mondays

Starting this month we also made a commitment to find  most of our foods locally, both to decrease our impact on the environment and support a local farmer. We looked around for a while and finally settled on Taproot Farms out of Port Williams, Nova Scotia. You can check the website and see what they do but it's basically a Community Shared Agriculture ( CSA) venture. What this means basically is we have committed and invested a monthly sum to this farm, and in return we get a box of fresh veggies weekly, and a box of meat twice monthly. More on that as I go but we got our first box this week, and I've even managed to talk two work colleagues into jumping in with us.  Below you can see our first produce: frozen tomatoes, onions, apples, celeriac ( not sure what to do with that yet since I don't like celery!), carrots and potatoes. The choices each week depend on what's being harvested on the farm, and late spring gives us a lot of things that were stored since last year. I'm thinking in the next few months the share will look a lot different.  Very excited about this!

Epicurious as always.....Me

Week One Taproot CSA Share