This is our second year having a CSA with Good Food Good People (GFGP) and our fourth or fifth CSA overall. CSA means Community or Consumer Supported Agriculture. Members join early in the year, paying for our part of a growing season’s worth of vegetables at a time when farmers, who struggle to make a living during the most fruitful of times, are in their late-winter, nothing to sell, waiting for the thaw, slump. With our payment, we are, in essence, saying that we are willing to stand with our farmers, sharing in the abundance if it’s that kind of year, but, even more importantly, sharing the burden if the crops are damaged by weather, animals or what-have-you.

With the GFGP CSA, though, there’s little risk of light bags because the orders are not fulfilled by just one farm but by a community of farms and serious home gardeners. If someone has an overage and GFGP knows about it, it’s likely that produce will be in my bag the next week. (One home gardener told us last year that he had never been paid more for the sugar snap peas that we had devoured greedily days before.)

Cooking for a CSA takes some getting used to, though. Because the contents are always a surprise in both vegetable and quantity, cookbooks become useful only as guidebooks, recipes that call for certain ingredients but can be modified to suit a half pound of summer squash, three baby potatoes and a slicing tomato, or what have you. I have a few standbys in my back pocket but my favorite for CSA season, and really any time, is soft polenta with a veggie sauté.

You can get fancy making polenta, which is essentially just cornmeal mush. You can buy it premade in a tube or spend lots of extra money buying the bags of ground cornmeal marked polenta. Or – while Italians might scoff at this advice – you can do what I do which is use a coarse grind of plain old organic cornmeal and go for it.

You don’t even need a recipe. Just bring some water, milk or stock (or some combination) – say 4-6 cups – to a boil. Whisk in 1/2 – 3/4 cup of cornmeal pouring slowing and whisking vigorously until incorporated. Reduce the pot to a simmer (which will likely take you to low or just above) and stir every now and then. That’s it. In 15 minutes, you’ll have an edible but coarse polenta. The longer it cooks, the creamier it will get. If it starts to get thick, whisk in more liquid.

You could literally keep this going all day if you stir occasionally and add liquid as needed. When you’re ready to eat, season with salt, pepper, cheese, herbs – whatever is sitting around and excites you.

Now for the sauté. Get out all the veggies you want to use and line them up from hearty to delicate. Gut instinct is fine here – this dish can’t go but so wrong. Line ‘em up and plan on putting them in the pan in that order. For example, my last batch was made with (in this order): onion, garlic, the chopped stalks from a bunch of chard (don’t miss the stalks – they’re tasty and add nice crunch and color to dishes), golden raisin and chopped chard and kale leaves. That’s what I had but I just as easily could have made this with eggplant, summer squash, sweet peas, tomatoes, mushrooms – you name it.

I sautéed the onion in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil then added the garlic and stalks. After I sautéed them a minute, the pan looked dry so I poured in a couple of tablespoons of white wine (I keep a box of white wine in my pantry for just such occasions).  Next came the raisins so they’d have a chance to plump. It was the rest of a bag, maybe 3-4 tablespoons that add a nice sweetness to balance the earthiness of the greens, especially the chard (which I think of as the beets of the greens world). Finally, I added the greens in batches, letting each batch wilt a little just so I could fit the next batch in. If I had used my spaghetti pot, I would have dumped them all in at once. When they started to wilt, I started to season – salt, pepper, red pepper flakes. Lemon peel, juice or chopped preserved lemon is also nice at this point but just taste and see what your mouth is missing.

For presentation, I like to ladle the polenta onto the plates and let it spread out some, then pile the veggies in the middle. Often, I’ll put a dusting of parmesan to top it off.

It’s pretty, tasty and the kind of meal you feel good about eating.

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Sarah Beth Jones is co-owner and Business Empowerment Consultant of Nary Ordinary Business Services. As one client said, her enthusiasm for his microbusiness felt “like throwing a rubber ball at a brick wall and having it come back to you even faster than you threw it.”

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