Welcome newcomers, and welcome back old hands to the 2009 Fair Share Farm CSA. In this portion of the blog I will attempt to give ideas for how to prepare your share. I will talk about the new and less common share items, suggest recipes, provide techniques, discuss preserving, list bulk items for sale, and print photos to help explain it all.

You are also encouraged to visit our website’s recipe page. Each recipe category has numerous examples of dishes made mainly with CSA share ingredients. You can also search the website for a particular vegetable, or check out past newsletters from a similar week . And of course, there is always Google, or your favorite cooking website. So hopefully, as long as we tell you what we are giving you, you can find some good information on it.

For the first week’s share, the leeks, green garlic, lettuce, Asian greens, mint, and asparagus are well explained by the above sources. A couple other items are a little less well known. The choice of sorrel for the fulls this week is one. Sorrel is a garden green that comes up early like a hardy plant, but has the tart, citrus taste of something from much further south. It is good several ways; chopped up in salad, on sandwiches, cooked with other greens, or as a wonderful green soup (see May 20, 2008 blog).

Lovage is at it’s peak right now. A little bit goes a long way with this celery-like herb. Season your egg salad and potato salad and cole slaw with a tablespoon of chopped lovage for a new taste sensation.

The chive flowers have several uses. You can separate out the flowers from the stems, cooking with the stems and displaying the flowers in a vase. You can also pick the tops apart and use the small purple flowers as a garnish.

We hope we are helpful this year and that you visit and comment on the blog often. Enjoy.