Box #2: farm-fresh cocktails!

Our haul this time included kohlrabi, red potatoes, broccoli, green garlic, asparagus, lettuce, radishes, spearmint (yeah, I know!) and two pints of strawberries.



Patrick and I bought into this CSA along with our good friends Marcos and Jamie. Each couple gets half the share. (The photo above is a whole share.) At this point in our growing season, we're wishing we could keep all of it. I think when most people hear about CSAs, their first question is: How do you use up all that produce? With four adults (and the farm still recovering from a flood), that has been no problem. If I had to decide about next year right now, I'd put my money down on a whole share for our two-person household.

But it's only June. In August, when we're calling my mom with a canning emergency because we're up to our bellies in tomatoes and zucchini in an apartment with a small fridge and no chest freezer, we'll laugh at the notion of a whole share.

For now, we're being very precious with the produce and making sure every dish we make casts Driftless produce in a starring role, right up until we chew the last leaf.

Thursday and Friday night, that meant cocktails! Fresh mint is one of those things that I eat so seldom, it's always a great surprise when I do. It's a flavor that's so ubiquitously mimicked, it's weird that it really grows out of the dirt. Tasting it is like what I imagine it would be to see the real Elvis after suffering through scores of impersonators.



In the weekly newsletter that came with our box, the farm included a recipe for mojitos, but we didn't have any rum. So we came up with the strawberry mint lemonade you see up top.

For each cocktail, I cored about five small strawberries, put them in the bottom of a glass with a little vodka and mashed them with a fork. Then I added a few torn spearmint leaves, ice and more vodka. I filled the glass with lemonade and created the fussy garnish.



I swear almost every berry in or box was as pornographically perfect as the one I put on my drink. They'd be a shame to mash if they weren't so tasty. Unfortunately, the only vodka we had on hand was strawberry flavored vodka, which was totally unnecessary.

On to dinner. Salad, of course. There's no shortage of lettuce these days, even besides the head we got from the CSA. Marcos, a talented gardener, will probably end up using some of his lettuce as mulch, there's so much. He brought us a gift of "some kind of romaine" that we mixed with Driftless green leaf and some baby greens we short-sightedly bought from the co-op. This time, I cut the radishes thick to provide some crunch. Can you tell I'm being lazy when that passes for a new kind of salad?

Patrick improvised a main course by parboiling and shocking the broccoli, adding the asparagus and roasting it with green garlic and olive oil.



He squeezed a lemon over it, added shredded gruyere and roasted it a little more. So tasty!



One of our main reasons for not buying into a CSA in the past was the fear that we'd spend a month eating nothing but cantaloupe. So far, Driftless has been obsessed with variety, so we're very pleased.