Farm Fresh Vegetables

We recently renewed our summer CSA membership with Cure Organic Farm and can’t wait to start getting fresh fruit and vegetables again.  Every Wednesday during the summer I get excited to go to the farm.  I love the feeling of being outside on a nice summer evening, the sound of the stream trickling along, and excitement over finding out what we will get for the week.  Then we head home and actually enjoy prepping everything for easy use.

Joining the CSA has been rewarding in many ways.  It has forced us to become better cooks and eat vegetables we had never even heard of before.  Sauteed brussel sprouts have become one of our new favorites, and we learned to cook everything from turnips to rutabagas.  At first, I found planning meals around the week’s vegetables challenging, but adjusted.   Now that it is winter, and we are no longer receiving produce, I am having a hard time narrowing down our options for dinner.  During the summer, Cure provided us with recipes and information about how to cook the vegetables we’d received.  Their newsletters are fun to read even if you aren’t a member and are one of the things that convinced me to join.

Our farm has also been a great source of information about local food.  They grow most of the vegetables themselves, but last year gave us corn from a neighboring farm and fruit from various farms in the Palisade region of Colorado.  There, farmers grow cherry, peach, apricot, apple and pear trees.  Cure also offers their members coffee shares from a local grinder, chickens from Wisdom poultry, and local turkeys at Thanksgiving.  Because of them, we’ve realized that eating local is possible, you just have to know where to find the food.

Cure is sold out of their vegetable shares this summer but still has fruit and coffee shares available.  If you live in the Boulder area, they have a farm stand where you can buy vegetables  in the summer (located at 75th and Valmont).  They also attend the Boulder’s Farmer Market every Wednesday and Saturday.  Cure has a list of other farms on their website which may still have vegetable shares available.

This is the breakfast smoothie that Stephanie and I have most mornings. It isn’t really considered green since it contains bananas and they are one of the most harmful fruits to the environment. However, these shakes are super delicious and very easy to make (~10minutes) so I thought we’d share. This recipe is slightly adapted from our friend Tara. We originally started these shakes while Stephanie was pregnant as a way to get the recommended Omega-3 fatty acids. It’s much much tastier than trying to swallow 6 fish oil pills.

Mmm... Delicious Breakfast Smoothies

Serves 2

2 Bananas (peeled )

1 cup of Orange Juice

1 Cup of Cranberry-ish Juice

Flax seed Oil – Squeeze the bottle and count to 5

1 scoop of protein powder (Vanilla Ice Cream Flavor)

Frozen Berries

Blend until smooth and there are no large frozen berry chunks.

The key to this recipe is to loosely measure the juices & frozen berries so that every smoothie is slightly different from day to day. We have a glass with a line about halfway through that’s approximately 1 cup and we just try to get sorta close to that line.

We use 100% juice for both the OJ & Cran-mix to avoid High Fructose Corn Syrup. We’ve tried Cranberry, Cran-grape, Cran-Pomegranate, Grape & Pomegranate juice and all have turned out delicious so don’t worry too much about which one you choose.

The frozen berries can consist of blueberry, blackberry, raspberry and/or strawberry. We normally use about half to one cup of blueberries and 4-5 strawberries. If you have a Costco membership you can get a giant bag of frozen strawberries and organic frozen blueberries for about $20 which will last a couple of weeks. It makes these smoothies very affordable on top of being nutritious and delicious.

Also one last adaptation, you can substitute vanilla ice cream if you run out of protein powder or you’ve got a pregnant wife craving ice cream and you need to figure out a way to get it into breakfast. Be careful it’s tough to go back to the healthy smoothies once you’ve dabbled with dessert breakfast smoothies!