Full Circle Farms

I've been interested in Community Supported Agriculture(CSA) for a while now. There's a lot that goes into producing food, whether it's community based or on a global scale. I'm not one of those economist types, so I don't know what all goes into it and how each choice effects what,  but I like to think that screwing over little guys and growing bigger and badder E. coli O157:H7 isn't what I want to encourage with my purchases.

Just from a hedonistic standpoint not homogenizing all of our foods is a good thing. Don't you want different varieties? Flavors?   Sure, McDonald's makes a good salted, greasy tater wad, but that doesn't mean I only want access to the Russet Burbanks they use. Just saying.

So- back to CSAs. I've been interested in a while, but they've not been very accessible to me. Most of the ones around here require full payment of that year's share before the year even gets going. This is understandable, they've got to run the farm and it's a small business sort of thing; but it's not the sort of cash a paycheck-to-paycheck person like me has on hand.

A friend at work as been talking up Full Circle farms for a couple years now. Every day-before-payday she picks up a box and it's been fun hearing what she has coming and what she plans on doing with it - particularly with the weird stuff.

When she first started talking about it it wasn't something I could get into. Even though I would be able to pay bi-weekly I wasn't exactly prepared to haul my box through the rain and the 1.5 hours worth of busing. So I lived vicariously and didn't think much of FC or any other CSA except to encourage others to use them.

Until last month, that is.  I just happened to be nosing around the FC site and behold! They had a pick-up spot practically across the street from Mark's workplace.

I signed right up.

Today I got my first box. Two boxes, in fact, because I'd added on all sorts of extras.

Aside from that awesome pile of produce I got a box of Earl Grey with Lavender, a package of breakfast sausages from Heritage Meats, organic "for reals" cage free eggs, cider and a candy bar (also some beets and carrots.) These were all add-ons and I shouldn't do them often, but it was my first box, and I was a little over-excited.

Full Circle isn't necessarily a traditional CSA, and it says that right on the box.  Plenty in my order came from their own farm or other Washington state farms they source from. But those Tangelos and Mangos up there could never come from Washington. The tangelos (so good - so fragrant) came from California and the mangos from Peru.  

What they are doing at FC is growing over 400 acres of their own produce, and then sourcing additional product - all with the goal of sustainable, organic food.

The thing I've most enjoyed so far? One tiny nibble from an apple Mark was eating - a Cameo from Brewster Washington.

After moving from Eastern Washington (where I spent a sizable portion of my childhood at my grampa's -which happened to be smack in the middle of the apple orchard he managed) to Western Washington I gave up eating apples. One, I wasn't going to pay for them - nobody I grew up with paid for apples! And two - store bought apples are gross. They have a layer of wax and pesticides on them that no amount of Dawn will scrub off.

After a while I forgot the taste of a real apple. We bought them at the store for the boys' lunches, and once in a while I'd get a box from home and make pies or something, but even those had been processed and had their first layer of waxy grossness.

One day we were visiting the Public Market in Seattle and someone laid down a big slice of Honeycrisp apple on us. We all loved it, so we started buying them from the grocery store. They were still good. Well, they were still okay. They were shiny.

But the cameos we got today? They didn't shine. They weren't practically tap dancing for attention with a happy little sticker stapled to a waxy shell. No, these weren't those kind of apples.
They simply rested there, nestled in the produce basket in our garage (did they have a sort of quiet luster? Sure they did. My memory may have romanticized events just a little.)

As I was putting them away I didn't think much about them - I was excited for beets and pears - but Mark chomped into one right after we got home. He was having a really good time too -ker chomp ker chomp ker chewy chomp-  all but exclaiming that the snozzberries tasted like snozzberries. Then he offered me a bite.

I don't remember a lot about what will always be "grampa's orchard" but cameos weren't something he grew. Walking up the long driveway from the school bus there were Reds (yech) on one side and goldens (yum!) on the other, and I heard a lot of jabber about jonagolds and romes and granny smiths and winesaps, but never cameos. Right before my father stopped working there as their mechanic (which was shortly after some businessmen bought it from the old owners widow) they were ripping out trees by the acre to plant galas and fujis - weird tiny trees strung on wire that the businessmen purposely shorted on water to keep small and "marketable." Apparently they were big in Japan (what isn't?) but for me, for a lot of people in my family,  those trees marked the beginning of the end.

I refused to like those apples for years, just on principle.

But oh - This cameo was sweet and somewhat acidic and, and... Well really, it was just an apple.  But it had something else going on. There was this tiny hint of nuttiness underneath. It was just different and so, so good. So surprising. Also, my teeth didn't squeak against gross and waxy skin because there wasn't any (wax, I mean - it's not a magical skinless apple, though Max would be pleased if it were.)

When was the last time you tried something as humdrum and ordinary as an apple and were so pleasantly, deliciously surprised?  If it wasn't pretty recent, here's hoping it happens to you soon.

So there -I'm done pimping out Full Circle for now. I'll be getting a box every other week though, and as I struggle to adequately and purposefully use everything in my box I'm sure it'll ooze into the blog.

Hey, I'm all caught up on blogging!

Tomorrow I'll post about last Sunday - that's Sunday #10. Was it The Most Challenging Sunday Evar!?

We'll see.

Strawberry Trifle: The Extra Flavor is Meh.

On the second Sunday of this year I made King Arthur Flour's Original Butter Pound Cake. We put half in the freezer and I've been waiting ever since for some decent strawberries to come along.

Because, see, I have this issue. I'm afraid of stuff not getting cooked all the way - particularly baked goods. You can use the toothpick test on a lot of stuff, but if the cake is supermoist (isn't that a Duncan Crocker word?) it can be hard to tell because crumbs still stick and all that. So... yes, I cooked this until it was dry and sad and needed something.

That something was tasty strawberries all macerated and juicy so that the pound cake could soak up awesome tasty strawberry juice.

So it's still way too early for decent berries, even if they haul them up from California.

Except for Costco had some and they were pretty close to awesome. I was fooled. We ate the Costco berries over the course of a day, but I had it in my head that in a week or two I'd buy more and we'd haul out that cake and it'd be awesome!

So, with this cemented in my head I went and bought crap strawberries from Safeway because Costco had nothing but stinky moldberries.

I could have changed my mind. I could have figured out a different recipe but ooooooh no. I was going to have tasty berries and cake and it would be great.

Except after eating a couple of berries it really sank in that it so wasn't going to be okay. They weren't freakmolded like Costco's but they were lacking. So I went and found Emerille's recipe and thought that would work. It would also let me use my trifle dish!!!! I bought the dish a good 4-5 years ago and never used it for anything but storing a pile of tea-lights.

My first problem was that I followed the recipe. I didn't think the amounts of sugar in the berries and the pastry cream was enough. But I'd never made pastry cream before, so what did I know.

I let the berries macerate in the sugar and liqueur for a good two hours, so they'd be extra juicy.

I layered cubes of my pound cake in the bottom and did my best to get all the juice poured over the cake. Then I added berries, cream, berries and cream again. The recipe called for three layers of each but Emerille can eat it.

Oh, then you top it with sweetened whipped cream and some chocolate shavings.

This is what it looked like:

Well, that's what it looked like after dishing out a few servings. I guess it was sorta pretty - in an Old Country Buffet sort of way.
The cream was very light on the sugar but heavy and gross on the tongue, the whipping cream on top didn't do anything, it was just more cream.

I'm not sure what, if anything, would have fixed this. Maybe this is just how it was supposed to be and I'm too much of a corn syrup glutting oink to enjoy it.

Nah, it's just Emerille.

We ate maybe a quarter of this. I spent the next two days picking out berries and cake cubes before giving up on it and scraping it into the garbage. What a waste.

Sunday #9: Birthday Dinner in the Big City

I didn't make dinner February 27th. That was Max's birthday and we had to take him out for dinner because we'd taken his brother, Simon, out to dinner for his February 25th birthday.

I would have rather made him dinner. Surely I could have concocted something better than what he picked. But no, we live in an equal-equal kind of world, and that meant if Simon got taken out to dinner, we'd need to take Max out too.

So Max's dinner was technically our "Sunday Dinner." Even though Simon's shouldn't count, let's review to have something to compare Max's choice to.

Simon chose Outback Steakhouse for dinner. All three of us (Max was feeling cruddy and stayed with grandma) ended up ordering essentially the same meal. Steak and two sides. I also had a salad. All the food groups were represented.









We also had a greasy appetizer and shared a generously portioned sundae. But the point is that this was an actual Dinner.


Two kinds of potato equal
one vegetable.



Oh, wait. Let me tell you about this Sundae. It was made with Blue Bell ice cream and it was wonderful. Man. It was good. I'd regularly cheat on the Tomato and Basil Baron with the Blue Bell ice cream man. This was French Vanilla, which I don't usually get excited for, but this was like the best custardy frozen creaminess ever. Super Vanilla is what it was.

Okay, my point is that Simon chose a place with actual meals. Max chose the Old Country Buffet.

Man. Have you ever been to one of those? We have!

Basically our rule of thumb is that if the place is busy we don't go. The busier it is, the more stretched the cleaning staff is, the more likely some boogerfingered bastard is going to finger the food on the line - just... no. This means no going on weekends, particularly when church has just let out because it's disgusting and full. 

And this was Sunday, and Max wanted to go. So we said okay. We got in line and it was pretty long. We convinced Max that it was too busy to be any good and did he want to go somewhere else? 

(we've done this to the boys before - once when they wanted to go there was a senior travel bus in the parking lot and we convinced them it was pointless because the old people from the bus would have eaten all of the macaroni and cheese.  I don't know that we were actually lying.)

He chose Olive Garden. Yes!

So, the trade off for allowing us to flee the OCB was that we would also take him to Krispy Kreme since he wouldn't have as many dessert choices.

Max was very concerned that we would cheat him out of this somehow. On our way to the car he saw the KK in the distance and a little further beyond that Shari's (Restaurants and Pie.)

Have you never been? You're not missing out. They do some okay hash browns and eggs, but as a dinner sort of place they suck. Now, I realize they're a diner, I'm not expecting much and still...

Yeah, that's pretty accurate.

But anyway, it's what Max wanted.  He got the Three Ring Sampler. It was 900 calories. Thankfully it was too disgusting for him to do more than eat the cheese sticks.













Do you see any malevolence in this picture? No, he's pretty happy with himself. Basket of Fried. Milkshake - if Max were released into the wild this would be his natural diet.

So - that was Sunday #9. That and TWO BOXES OF KRISPY KREMES.

We're getting him a cardiac bypass for his 12th birthday.