By Laura Virginia Anderson 

It’s gotten to the point of the summer where I’m getting a little tired of my go-to recipes for the vegetables from my CSA share. Don’t get me wrong; I still love slow-cooked Greek-style green beans (one of my friends describes them as “everything a green bean was meant to be,” and I’m inclined to agree), beets baked in foil and then sautéed in garlicky olive oil with their greens, and ripe tomatoes and peaches sliced and eaten raw with a splash of sherry vinegar and a sprinkle of salt and pepper. It’s just that these dishes no longer thrill—they’ve become almost banal, a weekly occurrence.

So I’m trying to inject a little creativity into the process of cooking and eating my vegetables and fruit. This week, I received a pint of lovely little cherry tomatoes in addition to four soft, heavy slicers. The thought of eating them all in salads didn’t appeal, nor did that of broiling them with herbs or making tomato sauce. But then I noticed the bag of whole wheat flour sitting in my pantry, and one of those thoughts arose, one of those ideas that is either brilliant or idiotic, one of those recipe-notions that takes on a life of its own and demands to be made: tomato muffins.

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By Laura Virginia Anderson

[In which Ms. Anderson attempts to down the full allotment of her CSA share and then some. – mb]

Let’s say you’re a single person living in Brooklyn, and let’s say that a few months ago, you signed up for a full weekly CSA share containing vegetables, fruit, and eggs. Let’s also say—just for the hell of it—that you sometimes work as an assistant stylist on the set of your boss’s cooking videos, and that you often take home leftover vegetables from the set so that they don’t get thrown away.

My hypothetical question is this: Is it possible for you, single Brooklynite, to consume your CSA share, plus vegetables rescued from the set, over the course of the week without either throwing anything away or having a nervous breakdown?

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