VEGETABLES!!!!!

Earlier this spring we joined a CSA - I'm not sure what it stands for, possibly "Community Shared Agriculture", but basically it means that we bought a share in a friend's farm and every week we get fresh vegetables delivered to our doorstep. Pretty cool, huh?

Last week was our first delivery - we got several bags of green leafy stuff (lettuce varieties, we're guessing), some spinach, and green onions and radishes (which were promptly delivered to Mom's house as I knew she'd rinse them off and eat them for dinner. I was out of town at a presentation last week, so D and M were in charge of the delivery and what to do with it. I think they did some tasting and had a salad for dinner, but didn't rinse or anything. D thought that was the best choice - don't rinse until you're ready to eat.

Today I get home from work to find a huge pile of bags of greens on my front porch, and buried under all of them...6 farm fresh eggs! I can't wait to cook those eggs in the AM! I quickly identified the radishes and green onions (and sent them home with Mom), but the rest was a mystery. M said, "I've seen this one before", grabbed one of the bags and headed out into our backyard - sure enough, it was a sprig of Rosemary, which I also happen to have growing in my herb garden. YEAH M!!! Mom told me to rinse it all, clean it up and put it into Ziploc bags and plan on eating A LOT of salad!

I set out to identify the greens, and have to say, thanks to Google I was pretty able to do so. There were 2 bags of what I'm calling generic leaf lettuce, 1 bag of swiss chard, 1 bag of red leaf lettuce, 1 bag of butter lettuce, and 1 bag of something I couldn't identify at all. I must have looked like a Monkey doing a math problem going from the sink to the laptop, then back to the sink again trying to figure these things out. AND, I have to say, there aren't a lot of good, "WHAT THE HELL KIND OF GREEN LEAFY SHIT IS THIS????" sites out there. Perhaps that will be my next career...

In the middle of the process, I got to take a moment to teach M about exactly WHY we rinse our vegetables with the discovery of a big fat caterpillar, a medium sized caterpillar, and a baby caterpillar in one of the bags of generic leaf lettuce. Of course they are all in a tupperware container waiting to go to school tomorrow for sharing now along with the 2 others I found in the red leaf lettuce after she'd gone to bed. Of course, the discovery of the caterpillars sent us down a whole new Google pathway, and again, I was NOT impressed with the info out there on identifying my caterpillar. I did stumble upon (and couldn't find again) a picture that looked just like the big guy that we decided worked and, you'll never believe what this breed of caterpillar is called??? The Lettuce Caterpillar. SERIOUSLY????? I could have made that up and saved myself a lot of time and energy!

Now comes the fun part...what do I do with all of this stuff? I've asked that next week we get post-it notes, or possibly just a Cliff Notes picture guide for the horticulturally impaired like me to help out with identification. If it were up to me, it'd all go in a salad, but I think some of it gets cooked (like the chard maybe?).

Nothing like trial by fire (or lettuce)...

OH, and did I mention that after I found the caterpillars (and one smallish spider) I have that "bugs all over me" feeling? Gotta love it!!!! Think I'll take a quick shower before bed now!