My Favorite Tools For Making The Most of My CSA

Today was a day I’ve been looking forward to for a long time: our first pick up for the summer season for our CSA at Mighty Food Farm.  I can’t wait to share all the goodness we picked up today…stay tuned for that in tomorrow’s post (or check out the sneak peek on Instagram and Facebook). 

Brian and I have had a CSA membership for several years now and hardly a day goes by that I’m not working with some sort of fresh vegetable.  Though my vegetable “usage” is largely tied to the pounds of produce I pick up on a weekly basis, the list of kitchen tools below will be useful to anyone who finds themself eating a lot of fruits and vegetables, whether they’re from a CSA share, a farmer’s market or the supermarket.

Cutting boards – Fresh vegetables generally require some chopping.  I’m a big fan of large, flexible cutting boards, which I’ve purchased from both IKEA (shown above) and Amazon.

A Good Knife – One of the best wedding presents Brian and I received was a Global Santoku knife.  It gets a lot of use.  If you’re budget isn’t quite that high, I’m also a big fan of the set of J.A. Henckels knives we own.

A Good Peeler – I’ll be honest; a good peeler can be hard to find.  We’ve gone through a few over the past few years.  Nevertheless, a peeler is pretty handy for things like winter squash, turnips and the like.  (If you have a peeler you love, tell me about it in the comments!)

A Salad Dressing Cruet – If you have a CSA share, This is totally not a requirement; Brian made our salad dressing every night for years in a 1 cup Pyrex measuring cup.  Last summer, however, we opted to buy a container specifically for salad dressing.  It’s easy to make multiple servings of dressing in (it even has measurement lines on the side as guides!), shake and pour from, saving us a bit of time.

An Immersion Blender – The immersion blender gets less use in the summer, but during the winter the blender is one of my favorite things for turning root vegetables into delicious soup.

A Salad Spinner – This is one area where I feel like supermarket vegetables are especially different from CSA or farmer’s market vegetables.  Fresh from the farm vegetables can be really dirty and dirt generally does not make for a delicious salad.  I love our OXO salad spinner, which has been going strong for about 6 years. 

What are your favorite tools for making the most of your fruits and vegetables?

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