A lot of the people I follow on Twitter are foodies, and many of them belong to a CSA. (CSA is short for Community Supported Agriculture; you buy, basically, a share of a farm's harvest, and then each week you pick up whatever the farmer is providing).

Each week, they wax eloquent about the abundance they've received. And abundant it is. But what they don't talk about (and I acknowledge that it's difficult to discuss in 140 characters) is the flip side of that abundance. When you get your vegetables from a CSA, you don't cook what you chose. You cook what you've got. Whether it's what you feel like eating or not.

Even if you like it, it can be a problem. Red Jacket Orchards, which provides the fruit for my CSA, has recently been blessing us - positively overwhelming us - with apricots. Two quarts a week for the past two weeks, and another quart coming this week, along with plums. I adore apricots - but how on earth to use up four quarts of them? Especially as raw apricots aren't really appealing - it takes cooking to bring out the flavor.

Well, I have almost done it. Thanks to an apricot tart, apricot and orange ice-cream, and a serendipitous (because the same week that we got apricots, we also got fennel) recipe I found for fennel and apricot chutney, I have used up two and a half quarts. And last week, at - of all places - a beer fest, I met a guy from Red Jacket and posed my apricot dilemma to him He insisted that if I let the apricots ripen almost to the point of decay, they'd be delicious raw, and to my surprise, he was right. So that's another pint or so. I have one quart left, and today I found a recipe for spiced apricots that's supposed to be delicious with the Christmas bird. (Of course there's another quart coming, but I'll worry about that when I get it.)

More difficult than apricots are some of the vegetables we have been getting, like carrots, cabbage and turnips. Those may indeed be early summer vegetables, but unfortunately, they are also - for someone living in the Northeast - among the few local vegetables available all winter. By June I am, to put it bluntly, sick to death of them. I have now made two different kinds of cole slaw (not my favorite salad), and have also put some of the cabbage, as well as the leaves from the kohlrabi we got three weeks running. and a few other winter oddments, into a batch of kimchee. It's pretty good, though by the time it fermented enough to soften the kohlrabi leaves, the cabbage tasted almost cooked.

But this is exactly what makes a CSA worth doing, at least for me. Yes, it's a way of supporting a local farmer, and yes, it is, at least some of the time, a taste of summer's abundance. But more deeply, it is a way of cooking that - until the arrival of the deep freeze, the supermarket, and refrigerated shipping - was universal: doing the best you could with what you had. Which I find both an intoxicating challenge and in some way a spiritual discipline.

We are so accustomed, we Americans, to a hyper-abundance of choice. We import whatever we want from wherever it grows. Wandering the frigid aisles of a supermarket produce section is in many ways like wandering the air-conditioned corridors of an airport. We could be anywhere. The vegetables, clean and glistening in their waxed piles, look picture perfect, as though dirt never had anything to do with them. It's an eerily disconnected experience.

Which is not to say that I don't - CSA or not - take advantage of the choice available to me. Raspberries and red currants are in season right now, and since Red Jacket hasn't provided us with either, I bought some this weekend to make summer pudding, in my opinion one of the great desserts of all time, and not to be missed no matter what the CSA gives me.

But I don't buy too much, because at the back of my mind, always, is that refrigerator drawer stuffed so full of vegetables that they spill over onto the shelves: potatoes, turnips, carrots, half a cabbage, some fresh onions, several different kinds of green peppers. And always there's the question: now, how can I make them - not the corn or tomatoes that I'd rather be dealing with - into something we'll enjoy? Tonight it was peppers, grilled, then briefly sauteed with chili powder, doused with leftover sour cream mixed with leftover ricotta salata and rolled in flour tortillas. It was delicious.

But I am really looking forward to the corn and tomatoes we've been promised at tomorrow's pickup.

Labels: cooking, CSA, local food, seasonal food

I do almost all my cooking from English recipes. Partly it's because I really like English food. This astonishes many. And I have to admit English food really earned its bad rep. When I first went to the UK in the 60s, I thought the title of Arnold Wesker's Chips with Everything was a joke - until I walked into a cheap cafe in London and saw the menu. Sausage with chips, ham with chips, bacon with chips....spaghetti with chips?

Even in the 80s, the food in your average pub was abysmal. On one long car trip, my husband and I beguiled the hours planning a catering company that would supply good food to pubs.

Now, though, even the pub food is good. And English cooks are at the top of the heap when it comes to a profound appreciation of seasonal ingredients. I regularly clip recipes from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in the Guardian and Rowley Leigh in the Financial Times, and they're always written with an intense awareness of what tastes best right now (Of course, that's right now in England, which can be frustrating. Recently both have raved over purple sprouting broccoli, a vegetable I've never even seen, let alone tasted).

But there's another reason I prefer English recipes: they don't use cup measures. They use weights. And boy, does that make cooking, and shopping, easier.

Yesterday, trolling the web for a recipe to use up a half a pound of really bland cheddar I'd ordered from my raw milk supplier (if you want good cheese, I now know, don't buy it from a dairy farmer, buy it from a cheesemaker), I came upon one for macaroni and cheese with leeks. It called for a pound of sharp cheddar, and I figured if I bought half a pound of the sharpest cheddar I could find, and mixed the two, it would work. And it did.

But it also called for 5 cups of chopped leeks. Well, just how many leeks is that? Two? Three? Four? Five? Small leeks? Big leeks?

I made a wild guess and bought three pounds of large leeks. It turned out to be one too many, but that's OK - I can always use a spare leek. But had the recipe called for 2 1/2 pounds of leeks - or even for 500 grams (roughly a pound) of chopped leeks, figuring out how much to buy would have been a lot easier.

Or take peppers. A few years ago I made a dish that called for a cup of peppers sliced lengthwise. I don't know what kind of measuring cup the writer was using, but mine was a good inch and a half shorter than the pepper slices, and I was left struggling to read the writer's mind. Come on, I kept saying - just tell me how much it weighs.

American chefs' terror of the scale bewilders me. A scale is neither high-tech (mine has two buttons), nor rare (every cooking supply store sells them) nor expensive (Amazon sells the one I've got for $25). And it makes life easier in countless ways. You can set it for ounces or grams. You can re-set it to zero over and over again, making it magically simple to measure multiple ingredients directly into a bowl without using (or having to wash) every measuring cup in the house.

In a pinch, you can even weigh packages with it.

Lee Gomes, writing last summer in the Wall Street Journal, says it's not the cookbook writers' fault - most of them use scales themselves. The problem, he says, is that cookbook publishers think weights in a recipe will scare readers off.

Come on. Do they really think someone who can figure out a TV remote will be scared off by a two-button scale?

Labels: cookbooks, cooking, local food, pubs