Thanks for all the great local food

It’s a little more than a week until Thanksgiving, but last night I gave some thanks in advance as I looked at dinner, which was entirely composed of food raised in Price Hill, except for the roast chicken. We had mixed lettuce salad with tomatoes and peppers, garlic mashed potatoes, and kale with carrot ribbons, all wonderful, all good for us (more or less), and all grown within a short bike ride of our house.

That’s surely something to be thankful for. But there will be a little more to be thankful for on Saturday, as we pick up our traditional (as far as a tradition can be set in four years) just-before-Thanksgiving share. I remember working packout for the day-before-Thanksgiving pickup a couple of years ago. It was a dark and stormy night, cold and wet and could have been miserable, but Amy Stross and I had a great time as CSA members came in on the way home from work and got fresh vegetables for their Thanksgiving feast the next day. It took hours to thaw out after that shift, but I still remember it very fondly—it provided a much more visceral connection to our food than if we had gone to a supermarket.

This year, the pre-Thanksgiving pickup will be on Saturday morning, and the weather report looks great, sunny and in the mid-50s. So I’ll be riding my bike to the greenhouse, and as I told my family earlier today, some of what I prepare for Thanksgiving dinner will depend on what we get in the share on Saturday. Squash? Sweet potatoes? Greens? I love them all, and whatever we get, it will be part of the feast, along with some green beans I blanched and froze earlier in the season, dried peppers, and anything else from the farm that I can work in.

Thanksgiving is just a little more “real” when you eat food from the Enright Ridge CSA. Happy Thanksgiving to all!