Going into the CSA, I expected each week to be a surprise – farmers market meets master chef mystery box. So the day before our first pickup, when I received a note in my inbox titled “GHCSA 2025 Week ONE”, I was delighted to find a fruit and veg sneak preview! This night-before-summary has turned out to be a weekly thing, and in addition to this being super helpful for meal planning purposes, the email has become one of the highlights of my Fridays (second only to my post-run-club pastry from Thea). Here’s what I received for week one:

So totally wholesome (heart eyes emoji). And so totally quality! Garlic scapes AND strawberries? Could it get any better? Talk about a strong first impression.

As soon as the bounty hit our kitchen counter, a menu was taking shape in my mind. Starting with dessert (after all, this started as a baking blog):

Strawberry Snacking Cake from Bon Appetit (2019)

While I can’t actually recall the first time I made this recipe (and in spite of scrolling through 4 years of photos, I was unable to find evidence of the first bake), the image of this cake lives rent-free in my brain. Golden brown corn cake with rows of perfectly sliced strawberries embedded in the sugar-crusted-sponge. If the picture doesn’t sell you on the cake, then the title is sure to pique your interest. Snacking cake? I hadn’t heard of such a thing until coming across this recipe, and while the internet is split on whether or not it actually differs from regular cake, after one bite I couldn’t disagree – the cake is downright snackable. You simply can’t have just one piece. 

While the combination of corn and strawberries is unbeatable and undeniably summer, the best part of this cake, in my opinion, is actually the creme-brulee-esque 360 crust that you create by coating the pan in oil and granulated sugar, followed by a generous dusting on top. This caramelizes in the oven and creates a wonderful crunchy texture (just don’t think too hard about all the extra sugar). 

My only gripe with this cake is that I keep messing it up time and again because I can’t follow instructions: “8 oz. strawberries, hulled, thinly sliced lengthwise”. Emphasis on the “thinly sliced” – though I wish they would highlight this in bold in the recipe because the past two occasions have resulted in sunken strawberries and a decidedly less memorable presentation. 

Still, the taste stands up, it’s simple and straightforward, and for that reason, I give this recipe 5 out of 5 stars. 

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With dessert accounted for, let’s move on to the veggies. 

Of all the CSA caveats, I was most apprehensive about the risk of food waste. Even with proper storage (here are some tips, not all of which I follow to a tee, but useful nonetheless), the clock starts ticking as soon as you pick it off the shelf, so use it or lose it. While we probably cook more than your average New Yorker, I knew that this could pose a challenge. What if we didn’t cook it fast enough? Nothing hurts me more than watching food, especially fresh produce, end up in the compost bin. 

So, while I was excited about the prospect of fresh lettuce, arugula, kale, and cilantro, my first thought was “oh no… we are going out of town on Thursday and we have a LOT of veg to get through in a SHORT amount of time”.

My action plan was two pronged: 

1. Eat what you can and prioritize the most fragile greens first. This looked like turning my dinner plans with a friend into a home-cooked meal which used up our head of lettuce: Korean Beef Lettuce Wraps. 

A remix of Pete Well’s NYT Cooking “Korean Grilled Beef Lettuce Wraps” recipe, I used Impossible Beef and mixed the marinade ingredients straight in. Funnily enough, the recipe also called for fresh herbs like cilantro and radishes, thinly sliced – both items included in our CSA share! Kismet. 

The final product was delicious – the lettuce was perfectly crunchy and the flavors were perfectly balanced. But the best part was the experience of having a friend over on a weeknight for dinner. She was touched by the gesture of a meal made from scratch and it felt more personal to catch up as we sliced radishes and cucumbers, set the table, and eventually, washed the dishes. I sent her home with a take-away box of leftovers (I save and wash our takeout containers to keep on hand for such an occasion) and went to bed feeling especially heartwarmed. Now who said Mondays had to be dreary? 

This trend of “spreading the CSA love” continued later in the week at a Wednesday night picnic in Brooklyn’s Botanic Garden. I sliced up radishes and leftover cukes, whipped up some seaweed butter from Casey Elsass’s new cookbook “What Can I Bring” and packed up the leftover snacking cake. Perfect picnic fare and no leftovers in sight. What a success. Sharing is caring and there’s nothing I love more than sharing food. 

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 Unfortunately for my CSA dreams, my first week was cut short due to a trip to Yellowstone (PSA: it is great you should go before the federal government sells off our public parks). Which brings us to my second prong:

2. Find a way to freeze it! Everything lasts indefinitely in the freezer (just ask the ramp oil in my freezer from last year that I finally thawed out). And when we are talking about fresh leafy greens and herbs, nothing freezes better than homemade pesto. 

I already had pesto on the brain when I saw the garlic scapes – ramp pesto was all the rave back in the spring, and garlic scapes seem similar enough. When I saw the state of the arugula (a bit sad after a day or two in the fridge), I decided it would be garlic scape and arugula pesto. I used up some leftover walnuts and eyeballed my ingredients (Carla Lalli Music swears by a 1282 ratio of nuts:cheese:greens:oil which seems about right, but my approach is more rough-estimate than precise-science). Since my partner prefers a dairy-free option, I usually substitute nutritional yeast for cheese, and I always add a splash of fresh lemon juice and a healthy pinch of salt. 

For my remaining greens, I had to get a bit more creative and consulted the internet for advice: 

• Kale Pesto from Melisa Clark’s NYT Cooking “Pasta with Kale Pesto and Roasted Butternut Squash” – a first for me and the kale didn’t blend as finely as softer herbs/greens might, but very tasty! Unfortunately, can’t recommend this one for the freezer – I recently defrosted it for a summer pasta and it turned an unappetizing shade of green-black in spite of blanching the kale pre-pesto (a tip that many folks recommend to keep your pesto from turning brown). Best to use right away! 
• Cilantro Pesto from Serious Eats (recently featured in Bon Appetit’s summer issue) – a wonderfully different spin on your traditional pesto, this was almost giving chimichurri! I ended up defrosting this the week we returned and serving it over salmon and roasted veggies. YUM! Will be making again the next time I have too much cilantro OR am looking for a bright herby sauce to top a protein. 

All three pestos were packed into leftover takeout containers (endless applications for these!), labeled with the date, and popped in the freezer for a rainy day. And with that, week one of GHCSA was complete – no waste, all taste. 

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Honorable Mentions

As part of my brainstorming, there were a few recipes that I thought would be a good application of our veggies, but didn’t end up making the cut: 

• Garlic glazed sea bass (or any white fish) with ginger-pickled radish/cilantro slaw from Justine Cooks – I’ve made this before and it is AMAZING, and when I saw the radish/cilantro pairing this is the first thing that came to mind. 
• Sauteed kale and mushroom frittata – no go-to recipe here, but as part of our CSA we get a dozen eggs every week. This is an incredible deal given they are from happy chickens (very important criteria for me when buying eggs), but it’s also a lot of eggs! We didn’t actually use all 12 in the first week, but that’s okay because eggs last a while. Still, this will no doubt be a challenge in the future as the eggs continue to pile up (as I write this we have 24 in our fridge… oops.)