I’m writing this on the last day of 2025. It’s been about a month and a half since the Greene Harvest CSA ended and I feel like I’ve been spit out of a blender. Between end of year travel, holidays, work and various social engagements, I’ve hardly had a chance to catch my breath, much less sit down to write this long-overdue recap of my CSA journey. But, I wanted to have this all documented in 2025 and sometimes you have to create your own deadlines to make things happen, so here we are.
To really lean into the end-of-year theme, I’m making this a best-of listicle. The top ten things I made from the last ten weeks of the Greene Harvest CSA. These are in no particular order, but they were memorable, interesting, and delicious.
In terms of end of year reflections, I feel like this CSA brought me a lot in 2025. I became a more confident cook and pushed my time management skills to the limit trying to keep up with life while shopping, cooking and documenting multiple meals a week. I learned what it means to develop your culinary creative instincts when crafting a menu or improvising a last-minute salad dressing. I became more flexible and resourceful, subbing ingredients even if the recipe didn’t explicitly say you could. I found countless ways to preserve and extend the shelf-life of the endless bounty of fresh produce we received every week. I’m not sure if the CSA is in the cards for 2026 (we are getting married in August and the thought of wedding prep + keeping up with another 25 weeks of CSA seems overly ambitious), but it is something I am already missing from my life. Gone are the days of 2-ingredient grocery trips because we already have everything else we need at home. We are falling back on take-out more often than not because there aren’t veggies actively ripening in our fridge. I’m not sure where to draw inspiration from when it comes to recipe selection because there isn’t a squash that needs to be roasted or kale wilting in the crisper.
My new year’s resolution in 2026 is to create this for myself – weekly trips to the farmer’s market to pick up seasonal ingredients, trying to cook one new recipe a week rather than panicking and defaulting to delivery or a tried-and-true recipe (although there is a time and place for both of those things). We shall see how it goes! But either way, I’m grateful for the CSA experience this year. So with that, I’ll leave you with my favorites from the last ten weeks of Savor Tooth CSA…
More often than not, we would open our CSA brown-paper bag and find a head of cabbage. Pre-CSA, cabbage never really made an appearance on my grocery list, so learning what to do with it was a new challenge. We roasted it, sauteed it in butter, chopped it into a slaw. But my favorite cabbage preparation was this green okonomiyaki. Okonomiyaki is a savory Japanese pancake featuring cabbage – this one was vegetarian and also helped us use up some zucchini and spinach we had on hand. We topped it with a bonito-flake-filled furikake, okonomiyaki sauce, and kewpie mayo. Moving forward, I may just find myself buying cabbage for the express purpose of making this dish!
- Apple miso tahini tart
Molly Baz has a recipe for an apple miso tart in her first cookbook, Cook This Book. I’ve made it a few times because it looks impressive but is so easy! The secret: freezer-aisle puff pastry. I decided to make it for a dinner party to use up our endless supply of CSA apples (a New York fall staple), but found myself short on almond butter. So, I subbed in something I always have on hand: tahini. I think it worked! And it also gave me a chance to show off my ever-improving knife skills.
- Kimchi fried rice with bok choy
During the pandemic, my partner and I learned how to make kimchi via a virtual cooking class. Earlier in the summer, I made some with CSA cabbage. Kimchi does keep for a while, but eventually I decided we needed to use-up the last of ours. So, I turned to one of our favorite dishes: kimchi fried rice. We also had some beautiful CSA bok choy to roast up alongside it and with a fried CSA egg on top, this truly is one of my favorite meals.
I had never eaten a concord grape until we received a bunch of them in our CSA (alongside another variety: Niagara grapes). Imagine my surprise when I realized that concord grapes are the inspiration behind the canonical purple grape flavor! Truly a mind fuck. The only problem with them is that they are seeded grapes, aka not the ideal snacking grape. So, I decided to make concord grape jelly. The process for making this jelly was fascinating. Concord grapes are actually green on the inside with a dark purple skin. You have to cook the skins separately from the inside of the grapes – that’s what gives the jelly its deep purple color. Concord grapes are a “slip-skin” grape which means that the inside of the grape pops right out of its skin when you pinch it – this made for a very entertaining and meditative task. After you cook the inside of the grapes, you sieve out the seeds and mix them in with the cooked skins, simmer them with sugar and voila! The best damn grape jelly you’ve ever had.
This recipe is on this list for a few reasons. First, it’s a fun way to use up a beet, especially for folks who aren’t beet fans. I am a beet fan (roasted beets with goat cheese in a salad – yes PLEASE), but not everyone is! Second, it’s an excellent vegan appetizer for your plant-based friends. And last, but not least, it is visually stunning. Pink isn’t a common color on the dinner table, much less hot pink, and this hummus stands out.
Sweet summer corn can sometimes turn into sweet early-fall corn and when that happens, it’s the perfect time to make corn risotto. While we did not do the extra work to make stock from the cobs (risotto is already quite a bit of work and as Ina Garten says, store-bought is fine), the final risotto was creamy, slightly sweet, and full of juicy corn kernels. When topped with a mountain of parmesan, what more could you want?
Our fall fruit share was 90% apples (not that I’m complaining). So, we made a lot of crisps and tarts. But when I saw this recipe for an apple almond cake, I was excited for a new apple-dessert application and this cake delivered! Apple and almond are a perfect pairing and the slices of apple melt right into the cake for a perfectly moist crumb. Crunchy almonds on top provide the perfect textural balance. Red Currant Bakery is a new favorite of mine – the recipes are simple, always delicious, and weirdly timely? I can’t tell you how many times I was trying to figure out a recipe to use X and then the perfect Red Currant Bakery recipe would appear on my feed! The optimist in me wants to chalk this up to seasonal ingredients while the cynic in me says “that’s the algorithm for ya”.
- Spinach and pepper frittata with goat cheese
One thing we never were able to keep up with (and still haven’t – as I speak we have 3 cartons in the fridge) were the CSA eggs. We’re not breakfast people, I don’t mind a hard boiled egg but don’t have the foresight to prep them, and I never got around to making lemon curd (a great way to use up a whole lotta yolks!) One obvious answer to this is the frittata – your average frittata recipe can use up to a dozen eggs, is a great way to clean out unused veggies in the fridge, and is fast and easy to make. So one day I finally decided to make one. In went a carton of CSA eggs, some sad CSA spinach, and a few CSA peppers that were wrinkly but still flavorful. I topped the whole thing with a generous smear of goat cheese and ate it with a slice of toast covered in grape jelly.
- Friendsgiving Short-ribs
We did Thanksgiving in Curacao this year, so in advance of our trip, I figured I would kill two turkeys with one Friendsgiving bonanza. We needed to use up the last of our CSA ingredients before our trip and I wanted a chance to enjoy some Thanksgiving flavors since we were unlikely to enjoy a turkey dinner beach-side. So, we decided to cook up the beef shortribs from our CSA beef share – these had been waiting in the freezer for a special occasion. Dev took the lead on the short ribs and I prepped the sides: butternut squash with whipped tahini, roasted potatoes, a beet and apple salad, and cranberry sauce. It was a sweet ending to our CSA season (or so I thought…)
The actual last meal we made with our CSA ingredients came in early December when I finally decided to use up the Last Butternut Squash. It had been sitting on our counter for a bit and needed to be eaten. I wasn’t sure what to do with it until I realized we had a lot of leftover rice in our fridge that also needed to be eaten or tossed. In our house, leftover rice = fried rice and so I decided we should combine the two orphaned ingredients together: squash fried rice! Surprisingly, there aren’t many recipes for this sort of thing online, but I found one for Kabocha squash fried rice featuring onions and shitake mushrooms. I subbed in the butternut squash (roasting it beforehand to speed up the process), and served it alongside miso glazed cod and pickled radishes. It was cold outside and we had been traveling nonstop so sitting down to this warm home cooked meal was particularly comforting. Also, people need to know that squash is a great addition to fried rice and I’ll be making this again soon.
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