Why I Don’t Get a CSA Box

Kale and Dumpling Soup

Everyone I know in the Bay Area gets something called a CSA box. This is not, as it first appears, something you must check on a tax form, but rather a box of vegetables delivered to you weekly from a local farm. The acronym stands for Community Supported Agriculture, as opposed to the more common Ill-Conceived and Outdated Subsidy-Supported Agriculture. You never know what you’ll find inside your CSA box, because the farmer determines the contents. It’s like Vegetable Christmas.

If you don’t yet see what’s wrong with CSA boxes, let me repeat that for you. Vegetable Christmas. Remember reading the Christmas chapter in Little House on the Prairie — you know, the one wherein Laura is excited to find a penny and an orange in her stocking — and thinking, “Wow, the past was pathetic”? Well, this isn’t even a Fruit and Penny Christmas. It’s a Vegetable Christmas.

Now, CSA boxes do have some redeeming features. They support small farms. The produce is fresh, seasonal, and possesses the dubious virtue of local provenance.* I guess it could be fun to be surprised every week if you’re the sort of person who likes uncertainty and disruptions to your routine.

The problem is that CSA boxes, like most Californian social experiments, work best in California. If you lived in, say, Nunavut (née Northwest Territories East), your experience would be somewhat different. “Ooh, let’s see what’s in our CSA box this week!” “Oh. Seal. Again.”** Even in California, winter is a little sparse, judging by Facebook posts like “Anyone have a good recipe that calls for celeriac, and just celeriac?” (They’re better sports than I. If I received a box of celeriac, Dr. Unexploited and I would probably stage a celeriac fight. At the local farm.)

Still, we don’t have the excuse of living in a cold climate; given our current proximity to the Mexican border states, we could probably get a pretty good assortment of produce year-round. “Tomatoes! Chili peppers! … Cocaine?” (Kidding, of course. Cocaine would never come in the same CSA box as tomatoes and chili peppers. It’s a cool-season crop.) The real reason that I refuse to sign up for a CSA program, aside from the cost, is that when faced with the all-important choice between broccoli and kale, the organic elf stuffing my stocking could make the wrong choice. And there is a wrong choice. The famous saying “De gustibus non disuputandum” has a little-known coda: “Except when it comes to broccoli.”

As you may know, broccoli, kale, brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, and some kinds of cabbage are members of the same species, Brassica oleracea. Generations of inbreeding had the same effect on the cruciferous vegetables as on the royal houses of Europe. Some offspring were paragons of buck-toothed blue blood, with the precise genetic makeup necessary for such difficult tasks as waving to swooning crowds and having mildly titillating but still respectable love affairs. Such is kale. Other offspring were hideous perversions of nature who had to be locked away in drafty castle attics and fed a sporadic diet of wayward servants. The attic monstrosity of House Brassica, of course, is broccoli.***

Choose wisely. Choose kale.

Kale and Dumpling Soup in a Rice Cooker

A standard rice cooker, despite its unfortunately specific name, is ideal for cooking soups and stews because it has both necessary settings: simmer (cook) and steep (warm). Warning: If you are making soup, not rice, the sensor will not automatically determine when your dinner is ready. Your rice cooker may seem magical, but sadly, it is just a relatively stupid robot.

For the soup:

• 1 head kale (6-8 large leaves), washed, de-stemmed, and torn into bite-size pieces
• 1 onion, chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, sliced
• 5 cups chicken broth
• 1 cup leftover or canned beans (I used black-eyed peas in the pictured batch)
• 1 tsp thyme
• salt and pepper to taste
• optional: other assorted vegetables nearing their expiration dates

For the dumplings:

• 2 tablespoons butter, softened
• 1 tablespoon cream cheese, softened
• 3/4 cup flour
• 1/4 tsp salt
• pinch of baking powder
• drizzle of olive oil
• 1-2 tablespoons water (just enough to hold the dough together)

1. Throw the onions in the rice cooker, add the broth, and set the switch to “cook.”
2. After the onions have been simmering for ten to fifteen minutes, add the rest of the vegetables, the beans, and the thyme.
3. In a small-ish bowl, combine the butter and cream cheese. Add the flour, salt, baking powder, and oil, and mix until you get pea-sized crumbs (as though you’re making a pie crust).
4. Slowly add the water to the dumpling mixture until the dough just starts to stick together.
5. Roll the dough into 1-inch balls, as if you’re making cookies.
6. When the soup is simmering steadily, or even boiling, throw in the dumplings and immediately replace the lid. Cook for 5-10 more minutes, until the dumplings are cooked through. Flip the switch to “warm,” season and serve.

*Dubious in that buying local is only sometimes (kind of, slightly?) better for the environment. Like most issues that people consider simple, this one is actually very complicated.

**Using the same standards by which we consider tomatoes vegetables, one could argue that seal is, in fact, a vegetable.

***My knowledge of the history of the European nobility comes from such indisputable sources as gothic novels and the Daily Mail.

Advertisement