In your Thanksgiving boxes…

onions

potatoes These are Carollas, our favorite yellow potatoes.  They’re creamier than most.   Store out of direct sunlight and in a cool place, such as your garage.  They will actually keep most of the winter this way, as long as you don’t let them freeze.

sweet potatoes We’ve tried several sweet potato varieties over the years and keep coming back to these–Georgia Jet.

pumpkin You can cook these or use them for decoration.

butternut squash These work well in pumpkin pies.

Hakurai Japanese turnips These are great sliced on spinach salad, or just eaten raw.  Very nutritious and high in fiber.  Some of you have asked if the greens are edible–yes, they are, though we’d recommend cooking rather than raw eating.  In the South, turnip greens are a staple.

spinach We think the Spinach might have gotten sweeter this week with the colder weather.

salad mix We’re including a ample amount so you can use for your Thanksgiving meal if you want.  It’s made a regualar appearance at Ben’s family’s Thanksgiving meal for several years.

Down on the Farm

Ben and Gabriel, one of our volunteers, were eating lunch last week and on the table was a box of “Locally Grown Mesclun Mix.”  (Mesclun is a term used for salad mixes.)  The box purchased from the Maple City Market in Goshen, and was given to us.  The thing is, the lettuce was grown in SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA!

Local?  California?  The leaves were flimsy, starting to rot around the edges.  It had obviously been shipped for thousands of miles.  It could have been weeks old.

So Ben decided to call the 800 number on the box to ask them just exactly what “local” meant to the company.  Northern Indiana?  Canada?  Tokyo?

They told him that the label was a mistake–it should have read “California Grown”–that they were sorry and would work right away to change it.  They said they shipped their food to a port it Los Angelos and that from there distributors ship it across the US.

Whether or not the apology was sincere, it was another reminder of  just how thankful we are to have CSA customers like yourselves who appreciate truly local food, food that’s very fresh, full of taste and color,  not just a “local” label.

Recipe of the week

With Thanksgiving coming up, we will be very curious to know how you might food from your CSA boxes.  Send us an email or post them below.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING