The week of October 27, 2008 we got Chinese cabbage, kohlrabi (the green thing that tastes like a turnip), salad mix, leek, winter squash, sweet potatoes, apples & radishes.

Recipes: Ravishing Radishes!

Wondering what to do with all these radishes? So did I, when I first got them in my CSA box several years ago – until I unearthed some tasty radish recipes. Now I swap with my CSA share partners so that we get all the radishes!

Here’s one of my favorites: hoisin chicken and radish stir fry. (If you like dark meat, do what I do and substitute deboned chicken thighs for chicken breasts – works great!)

This is the radish dish I’m going to make this week, with fresh shrimp from the Kensington Farmer’s Market and one of last week’s green peppers: coconut curried shrimp with radish wedges. It needs the full measure of shrimp given in the recipe in order to taste its best, but once I threw in some extra tofu cubes and they were a delicious addition. It might work to substitute tofu for the shrimp, if you want to try a vegetarian version.

I’m also excited to get more kohlrabi, since we’ve never tried it before! I found this intriguing recipe for roasted kohlrabi and butternut squash (and I bet it would work with other kinds of winter squash, too!)

This Monday I’ll be posting about my adventures with a recipe involving Chinese cabbage, so if you’re curious, check out my blog.

Food for Thought: Vegetable Odyssey = Vegetable Oddity

Did you know that in the U.S., the average grocery store’s produce travels nearly 1,500 miles between the farm where it was grown and your refrigerator?

That’s what the website Sustainable Table says in its report urging people to buy local. The site touches on the idea of “food miles,” the distance that a food item travels from the farm to your home. To learn even more about food miles, check out a 2003 study by the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, “Checking the Food Odometer: Comparing Food Miles for Local Versus Conventional Produce Sales in Iowa Institutions (a PDF file). One of their tables lists the average distance that local vegetables would travel to market, versus the distance that vegetables conventionally found in supermarkets would travel: a local carrot might be only about 30 miles away, but on average, we buy one that comes to us from about 1800 miles away. Think of the cost in fossil fuels!

For a wonderfully comprehensive view of contemporary food issues facing us, encompassing health, nutrition, energy, culture, jobs, rural life, and sustainability, I once again recommend Michael Pollan’s article from the October 9th Sunday Times Magazine. We highlighted this once before, but if you missed it the first time, catch it this time – what a read.