Beyond Post-Prego Diet Food – Exploring CSA Produce

Some women are super cute pregnant. I don’t believe I was one of those women. I got huge! I gained 55 pounds and I can’t blame it all on Lil’ O, who was born at the large, but perfectly respectable weight of 8 pounds, 12 ounces. I’ve been dieting. I’ve been exercising. I’m super close to achieving my pre-prego weight, but not my pre-prego body. I’m coming to terms that all those cute clothes in my closet may not fit again, but I’m still eating right and working toward that magic number on the scale.

When I focus on healthy eating, there’s an interesting trend in our house. While dieting, I cook more. And, when I cook more, we eat more adventurously. Yet, despite my large arsenal of cookbooks and cooking magazines, I’ve been intrigued by the movement for more community-supported agriculture, or CSAs. Here’s how it works: For a regular fee, we get a weekly box of fresh, in-season produce from local growers. Simple, right? Wooed by the allure of trying new things, especially veggies, as I work to stick to my healthful eating resolution, we made the leap and joined.

A box of new produce each week can be a bit intimidating and time consuming – after all, we want to be sure we eat up all those delish veggies before they go bad and before we get another box. For now, we’re doing a three-week trial run leading up to Thanksgiving to see if we can keep up the veggie-loving pace.

Now, I’m honestly not sure if this is the best use of my time, but exploring new veggie options does have worthwhile merits, at least in theory: we’ll eat more veggies by exploring new flavors; by knowing more veggies, we’ll be able to introduce Lil’ O to more tastes; and, if I do this correctly, we’ll be eating more healthfully (and maybe I’ll finally lose that last little bit of weight). And, if it does turn out to be too much work or too time consuming, we’ve chosen our initial intro to be a week-by-week subscription, meaning we’re not locked in to a six-month or annual subscription and stuck paying for produce we potentially can’t finish each week. Hopefully, we can stay on this healthy eating band wagon, but we’ll see. And, if we don’t, I resolve not to feel guilty about it. We’ll still be eating our veggies; the dinner side dish repertoire may just be a bit more mundane. Not the end of the world.

If you’d like to follow along by checking out the recipes I’m finding to use up all this crazy, fresh and potentially obscure produce, check out my dedicated Pinterest board where I’m currently housing my recipe finds and noting any successes.



Ants on a Log!
Thanks to some celery in a recent produce box, I introduced Husby to this childhood classic.
Truly, somehow he'd never eaten these before! Glad I could fix that!