Crazy-Sexy Agriculture = CSA

by Nicole Kimberling

Thu 29 Dec 2022 - Filed under: Free Stuff to Read

This is LCRW Cooking Columnist Nicole Kimberling’s fifth column for LCRW and was originally published in LCRW 31. 

Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 31 coverI think whoever invented the idea of paying a local farmer for a whole season of vegetables in advance, must have been some sort of subversive genius.

The weekly delivery of the CSA (community supported agriculture) box flies in the face of modern thinking about choice—which is that you should have it, always. Contemporary cooks are accustomed to asking the question, “What would I like to make?” and then expecting to be able to go and realize their dreams of out-of-season produce from far-flung lands at any major supermarket. The CSA puts food in front of you and says, “This is dinner. Make the most of it.”

Weekly infusions of surprise vegetables provide the ability to imagine yourself competing on some TV cooking program—or living as a subsistence farmer—whichever inspires you most. But often these same deliveries of unexpected foliage result in a sand-strewn refrigerator filled with baffling, wilted produce that you simply end up feeling guilty for not having the creative capacity to maximize.

In this way the CSA is not only a test of ingenuity but also a test of one’s ability to submit to the restrictions of local geography and abide by the planting choices of the farmer whose produce you’ve decided to eat. The question is: are you the sort of person who can enjoy that? Can you find pleasure in all that fennel?

Of course you can. Fennel is one of the sexiest vegetables around. It’s one of the rare produce items that can be successfully fielded as part of a floral arrangement by people who choose not to masticate it.

So that is the first question with fennel—will you eat it or will you put it in a vase with some flowers? Before I make any decision, I usually take the opportunity to perform a fan dance with it in order to send the fragrance wafting through the air. Even people who don’t enjoy the taste of licorice usually enjoy the smell. If you are one of those people who hates fennel, I encourage you to not eat it at all. Just stop by a farm stand and purchase a bouquet of flowers and jam the fennel fronds in around it. Or use the fan-like shape as a backdrop for a fragrant herb and flower arrangement of your own. Pretend you are a perfumer creating scent from whole plants. In this way your vegetable will not go to waste.

Following the completion (and my dance routine) I normally decide to eat the fennel after all. After that, I take stock of the weather. I ask myself, do I want to prepare it hot or cold? For the purposes of this column, I’ll do one of each.

To use fennel cold, cut away everything but the white bulb at the bottom. From that, remove the solid core. Then slice the bulb very thinly against the grain.

The simplest way to use fennel is to combine it with orange or tangerine segments, olive oil and salt and serve it alongside any piece of fish or any kind of teriyaki or British-style vindaloo. It can also replace celery in tuna salad or coleslaw. If you like you can finely chop some of the tender fronds at the end and sprinkle them on substances that you’d like to smell like fennel, such as green salads or fresh-cut tomatoes or that pungent dog who keeps hanging around the farm stand whom no one seems to own.

But let’s say you want to make the kitchen hot by actually cooking your fennel. Here you have many options.

You could cut the whole bulb, including the core, into wedges, roast it with olive oil, salt and pepper, top it with grated parmesan and serve it as a side. Again, taking celery as your model, you could add it to roasted root vegetables, stews. You could include the whole vegetable (including the long green stalks at the top) in vegetarian soup stock. My favorite way to eat fennel hot is cooked with tomatoes to form a sauce for pasta or a base for red beans & rice but it also combines well with carrots or curry (or both).

And what about those long green stalks? If not used in floral arrangements or added to soup stock, or to perfume a stray, what would they be useful for? A unique garnish for a bloody mary springs immediately to mind. Or, you could do what I do—throw them in the compost.

One of the realizations of the CSA is that much waste comes from butchering whole plants for consumption. Patrons of bags of frozen prepared veg at large grocery stores are generally spared the knowledge that most of the bodies of these organisms we call “crops” are either not edible or so unpleasant that they shouldn’t be considered dinner. So, I beg you, throw your carrot tops away (they are poisonous), peel the black spots off your organic potatoes (they are fungus), and pull your kale off its fibrous central stem (not technically harmful, just bitter and nasty). It does you no good to eat or serve vegetables rendered unpleasant by inadequate preparation, I swear.

So let go. Supplicate yourself before the fan-dancing angel of the CSA and find peace in the knowledge that you’ve managed to think inside the box, for once in your life. And above all, eat your vegetables, always.