Farm Market program offers plenty of weekly produce

This weekend, the party started – the produce party.

As soon as doors opened at Five Points Community Farm Market in Norfolk, the “in crowd” started showing up to get their due – bags heavy with just-picked fruits and vegetables.

Each paper sack contained a trio of bumpy cucumbers, minus the synthetic shine of the waxed ones offered at some local grocery stores. A tangle of green beans nestled next to matching summer squashes, a quartet of dusty beets and a svelte pair of eggplants – one purple, one white. And more.

Saturday marked the start of the summer subscription season for the market’s Community Supported Agriculture program, or CSA. These farm-to-fork endeavors started in Switzerland and Asia in the mid-1960s, according to Gail Moody Milteer, a market development manager with the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. The relationships provided safe foods for consumers and stable markets for the farmers.

CSA seeds took root in the States in the mid-1980s, and the first ones sprouted locally just a few years back. Today, farms from Isle of Wight to Virginia Beach to the Eastern Shore participate in CSAs offering everything from produce to poultry, eggs and pork. Most have long waiting lists.

I secured a spot in Five Points’ CSA a few months back by signing up for the summer subscription. It cost $240, which I split with a friend. Each Saturday through September, we’ll tool on over to the market to pick up our bag, which will contain whatever nearby farmers are harvesting. Five Points pulls mostly from local farms, but sometimes from out of state.

Like the final exams in culinary school, we’ll get a mystery mix of food and attempt to transform it into something deliciously different.

Faced with the first bounty, I just wanted to eat most of mine raw, sliced or julienned into colorful summer salads. I was perplexed about what to do with the interracial eggplant couple. They were too cool to separate. But cooking them likely would dissipate their differences, and conventional wisdom recommends against eating them raw.

There’s another challenge lurking. Like some parties, I’ve heard the CSAs can get out of hand with an overflow of certain foods – say, an abundance of beets, bok choy, tomatoes or cukes. Already, we can see that this problem will be compounded by the fact that we both have backyard gardens.

This week worked out fine. My friend’s garden is yielding lots of zucchini and way more cukes than mine, so I took those goods and handed Mr. and Mrs. Eggplant off to her.

I ate some of the zucchini and squash raw, over a lovely salad with a light vinaigrette. Peaches went unpeeled into smoothies for my daughter. But I was also motivated to cozy up to Mark Bittman, TV personality, cookbook author and New York Times columnist, whose cooking philosophy is fresh and simple and few ingredients. (I’m secretly in love with him, by the way.)

His most recent cookbook, “Mark Bittman’s Kitchen Express: 404 Inspired Seasonal Dishes You Can Make in 20 Minutes or Less,” comes out next week. It’s an easy, breezy cookbook with few fast rules about measurements and seasonings. I turned to my review copy to find out what to do with the beets. In no time I had a shredded salad of raw beets with a sherry vinegar and Dijon dressing, slightly bitter and better the next day heaped upon pita points.

For my bounty of cukes, I turned to an older Bittman volume to make a cucumber salad with scallops, a recipe I’d been eyeing for months. Salting the cucumbers before tossing them with dressing made them crunchier and gave the flesh a gorgeous green hue.

Throughout the summer, I’ll be quizzing local chefs and cracking cookbooks and magazines to figure out what to do with this constant stream of produce. I’ll keep you posted with occasional stories in our Flavor section and frequent posts to my blog, where all CSA subscribers (and non) can share recipes and ideas about how to use the fruits of summer. I’ll also keep you posted on when it’s time to sign up for fall subscriptions.

Our mission: waste not and eat well.

Lorraine Eaton, (757) 446-2697, lorraine.eaton@pilotonline.com