This Week's CSA – I'm Living A Dream

Basil, dill, parsley, red leaf lettuce, beets & greens, collards, kohlrabi, fresh peas, red potatoes, kale, summer onions, fava beans, yellow squash, and garlic. Garlic that my toddler took a bite out of with a great big smile and said “that’s good gahlic.”

Picking up our CSA share every week really is exciting. By Monday my toddler is asking if we can “go to the fahm?” I, myself, can’t wait to see what will show up in “the box” this week. I am teased on Tuesday with a newsletter that shows up in my inbox. I’m given an idea of what we’ll receive this week and the anticipation builds. I realize that may not be normal, but I’m living a dream.

You see ever since I graduated from college I dreamed of traveling Italy and studying the traditional cuisine of the Italian grandmothers. I’d read extensively of their food culture and longed for that same sense of respect for simple slow foods in our own country. I wanted a kitchen garden just outside of my window where the smells of lavender, basil and thyme would waft in, enticing me to add them to my latest creation. I wanted to pick berries in the warm evening and serve them to my guests as a dessert, just moments later.

It occurs to me that I am now living that dream, on my home continent, with a table full of guests – big and small – every night. I pick thyme from my herb pots and add it to the fava beans that have been shelled, blanched, shocked and shelled again. With a knob of grass-fed butter and a sprinkle of sea salt I suspect that some Italian grandmother somewhere is serving her family this exact same dish. And I, as she, can feed her family knowing where the food came from. And for a few moments their is quiet while pudgy little fingers struggle to get those delicious little tastes of Italian summer into their final resting place.

But at the end of the meal it is not me who picks the berries. A little man, not 3 years old, who looks like the man I married comes running towards my bare feet and says “I picked bewwies! You wanna’ have a big great bunch of them?” Wild black raspberries from our own backyard and your little fingers with mine in that little bowl? Yes. Yes, I want a big great bunch of them.

This post is a contribution to fight back Friday and frugal Friday.