In what I hope will be a boring and tedious weekly post I bring you:

The Weekly CSA Harvest Report

They’ve gone and changed the system on me from last year! Previously, you could wake your ass up at 7.30 on a Saturday morning, drive down to the Bottom, and be presented with a list of vegetables and associated quantities to abscond with. Bleary-eyed, you’d stuff cucumber and squash into your sack and head back home for more sleep.

This year things work like my college meal plan: you start out at the beginning of the semester with a set amount of Veggie Dollars that disappear at the end of they year. Throughout the semester you must budget and use your VD wisely. If you aren’t careful you could end up, stuck, at the end of the year with too many VD’s.

No one wants this.

This week the good farmers at Victory Farms gifted us with:

• carrots
• easter egg radishes
• a nice salad mix
• arugula
• scallions

There were lots of types of greens, some spinach, and some broccoli rabe — of which I chose not to partake. Hopefully later I’ll write a post about why CSA’s (community supported agriculture) are awesome.

But in the mean time, anyone know any good carrot recipes?

I thought I was being really slick when I hatched a moneymaking scheme last fall. The idea was that I’d buy baking ingredients in bulk and get out all my baking energy* every week by making wonderful loaves of bread for my friends and making them pay for it.

All went well for six months or so, until I got burnt out on it lately and took a few weeks off. Then I got my electricity bill and it was SEVENTY DOLLARS less than the month before!

SEVENTY DOLLARS!!!!

Granted, we have been cutting back in a number of ways, like unplugging the microwave when we’re not using it (turns out we don’t use it as much as we thought), ditto with the giant wedding toaster we have (which we use even less), and other stuff like that. But little things. Not things that should add up to 70 clams. This all makes me want to buy one of those energy meter things (but which one? and is it worth it?) and see how much my baking hobby is really costing us.

While I was pondering these things, I made these:**

It required an oven, yes, but they were really easy?? And used up extra puff pastry I had lying around in my freezer? That’s good, right?

So how else can I save resources? Give me electricity tricks, the People.

*I have that. It’s weird, I know.

**I don’t have jaundice, I had just made something with tomato paste and it stained my fingernails yellow. Not that jaundice is anything to joke about. Because it’s not.