Speaking of the farmers market, I never did mention how the farm share we participated in this year turned out. We got our produce from Sandhill Organics, mainly because they deliver at a little cafe in Oak Park that's about a block away from us, and so it was about as convenient as possible. (They deliver at other locations around Chicago as well.) It was our first time participating in a farm share.
The quality of the produce was very good -- in most cases they had noticeably better flavor and/or texture than what I would have bought at my local Dominick's. The cipollini onions, fresh garlic, heirloom tomatoes, beets, carrots, and squash all come right to mind. The quantity was also good -- I think the cost of the share worked out to something like $25 per week, and I never felt like we were getting less than our money's worth. On the other hand, sometimes there was too little of a given vegetable to really build a dish around, so I either had to be creative enough to put vegetables together, or I had to go and find more of what I needed. This probably wouldn't have been a problem if I'd been cooking with meat, but if I'm cooking a vegetarian dish and I want to highlight a particular vegetable (and given the quality of the produce, this was most of the time) then I need a reasonable quantity. Sometimes simply waiting for the next week's allotment would solve this problem.
Ultimately the reason we won't sign up for a vegetable share next year has nothing to do with the quantity or the cost or the variety of the vegetables we got, but rather with the commitment that a farm share requires. We traveled enough this summer that there were many weeks when we couldn't make use of all our vegetables -- a couple weeks we weren't even able to be there to pick them up! -- and of course there was pressure and guilt associated with that. And as I mentioned yesterday, we ended up going to the farmers market every week in spite of ourselves, and we could have picked up the same produce on a week-to-week basis in quantities that were appropriate for whatever our immediate plans were.
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