Living La Vida Midwestern
May. 4th, 2010 06:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
catherineldfWe got a thank-you note from "our" farmer yesterday, which reminded me that I hadn't talked about joining a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) a couple of weeks back. CSAs are arrangements by which consumers (in this case, us) contract with a local farmer to buy shares of her or his crop. Depending on the farm, you can get various in season veggies and fruit, meat and other produce in full or fractioned shares. A full box delivered once a week might get you enough groceries for the month depending on your household size. You get fresh local and often organic food and the farm gets cash flow, has to do less marketing and builds a hopefully longterm relationship with their customers. The farms often encourage visits and provide workshops and harvest days where you can go out and pick your own.
I've been working on reforming our household eating habits for a variety of health and environmental-related reasons: less meat, less eating out, more fresh fruits and veggies, more foods made from scratch instead of processed. Last year, I canned several quarts of low sodium spaghetti sauce, made orange marmalade, fresh pickles and mango chutney with veggies and fruits from the local farmer's markets and co-ops. All to the good but
we are crazy busy much of the time and do not eat at home or on a schedule as much as we would like. So right now, the plan is that I make a big vegetarian meal on Sunday night and we eat leftovers for a few days afterwards. We'd been figuring that a CSA share would be too much food that we wouldn't get around to eating given where we're at, but we still wanted to try it.
Enter LTD Farm (Living the Dream). Khaiti (the farmer) raises goats, ducks, turkeys and pigs for humanely-raised meat, eggs, soap, cheese and other products in rural Wisconsin. We were hoping for goat cheese but it's her first year and she wasn't sure how much she'd get from the goats so we're going with a once a month delivery (to our local co-op pick-up site) of duck eggs and goat's milk soap. Turns out duck eggs make for really fluffy pancakes and have more texture than chicken eggs. Jana's also read that you can use them for a glare (used in book gilding) that's supposed to be easy and good to work with so she's looking forward to that making that. The soap is plain and pleasant with lots of suds and comes in unscented or very mild. We'll get extra feta if the goats have a good year. And now we have a farmer of our very own who's very excited to hear how the duck egg glare experiments turn out.
I've been working on reforming our household eating habits for a variety of health and environmental-related reasons: less meat, less eating out, more fresh fruits and veggies, more foods made from scratch instead of processed. Last year, I canned several quarts of low sodium spaghetti sauce, made orange marmalade, fresh pickles and mango chutney with veggies and fruits from the local farmer's markets and co-ops. All to the good but
we are crazy busy much of the time and do not eat at home or on a schedule as much as we would like. So right now, the plan is that I make a big vegetarian meal on Sunday night and we eat leftovers for a few days afterwards. We'd been figuring that a CSA share would be too much food that we wouldn't get around to eating given where we're at, but we still wanted to try it.
Enter LTD Farm (Living the Dream). Khaiti (the farmer) raises goats, ducks, turkeys and pigs for humanely-raised meat, eggs, soap, cheese and other products in rural Wisconsin. We were hoping for goat cheese but it's her first year and she wasn't sure how much she'd get from the goats so we're going with a once a month delivery (to our local co-op pick-up site) of duck eggs and goat's milk soap. Turns out duck eggs make for really fluffy pancakes and have more texture than chicken eggs. Jana's also read that you can use them for a glare (used in book gilding) that's supposed to be easy and good to work with so she's looking forward to that making that. The soap is plain and pleasant with lots of suds and comes in unscented or very mild. We'll get extra feta if the goats have a good year. And now we have a farmer of our very own who's very excited to hear how the duck egg glare experiments turn out.