Community Supported Agriculture

Recipe: Fast and fresh Cumin Scallops

~ The Greek-o-Rican ~ 2 Comments

We recently signed up for yet another locally-sourced subscription food service providing awesomely fresh foods from the immediate area — in this case, a community-supported fishery, which is basically exactly what it sounds like, that is, a CSA with fish instead of produce. We get about a pound each of two different seafood products every week. This week we picked up shrimp and sea scallops. Tonight we needed a quick dinner, so we decided to try out one of the recipes suggested in the CSF newsletter: cumin scallops.

Cumin scallops

The recipe that the CSF folks shared came from my acquaintance Chef Shirlé, who, unlike me, is a proper (and super-talented) professional chef. Also, top-notch vocalist for rockers Free Electric State (currently) and countless other bands (formerly). Anyway, her recipe for cumin scallops is really just a riff on sautéed scallops, but the results are outstanding — and fast! Full disclosure: I played fast and loose with Shirlé’s recipe, so if you want to do this recipe up proper, this may not be the best model. Though it turned out okay for me.

Read on for lightning-fast scallop deliciousness

CSA Box Breakdown – Weeks 2 and 3

~ The Greek-o-Rican ~ 2 Comments

We’ve been busy here at Greek-o-Rican world headquarters, so I apologize for not having any exciting recipes to show of late. We were out of town last weekend, and I had a friend pick up the CSA box for us, so today I’ll give you a quick update on two weeks’ worth of CSA goodies.

No meat in the last two boxes–meat only comes once a month. We got eggs on weeks 2 and 3, but we gave eggs #2 to our friend for picking up our veggies. Eggs #3 are their usual selves — a dozen high quality eggs from pasture-raised chickens — so I decided that it didn’t make for a particularly exciting photo.

Anyway, here’s what we got over the past two weeks. Still mostly greens, but we’re starting to get some of the exciting stuff!

Read on for two weeks’ worth of highly nutritious local produce

CSA Box Breakdown: Week 1

~ The Greek-o-Rican ~ Leave a comment

I live in a pretty great town for food-related endeavors. There’s an excellent cooperative grocery store about half a mile away, a strong local food movement in the area, and two great farmer’s markets within easily accessible distance. This last point means that I had my choice of CSA subscriptions to purchase for the summer.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of a CSA — for “community supported agriculture” — it’s a business model whereby a farmer sells “subscriptions” to the produce from his or her farm for a season. Every week, the purchaser of the CSA share picks up a box of produce at a designated spot (often a booth at a farmer’s market) and gets a smorgasbord of groceries for the week. (CSA boxes are usually “farmer’s choice,” that is, the producer picks what goes into them each week — the farmer wants all the boxes to have the same contents and value, and needs to choose produce where there’s enough to go around.) The typical CSA runs 20 or 25 weeks and runs from mid-spring until autumn.

Read on to learn more about CSAs and the spoils from our latest CSA box