Our local Tuv Ha’Aretz ended recently, and we were faced with the decision: do we want to sign up directly with the farm to keep getting its boxes of produce?

It was a no-brainer of a decision. On our “meet-the-farmer” night way back in April, Nigel, our farmer, told us that some of his subscribers had threatened bloody mutiny if he ever stopped producing — or, well, his chickens, to be exact – eggs. At the time, it sounded kind of humorous, but after six months of eating them practically daily, my husband would no doubt be one of those people.

But the eggs weren’t the only reason. After spending a Sukkot Shabbaton on the farm, and standing by it during its recent Medfly crisis, we realized we couldn’t just quit. It was more than the eggs, and more than the produce. It was the people who were bringing us our food, and the fact that we were helping to support them. We had a relationship with Eatwell, and we couldn’t just break it off now.

And besides, after all the tomatoes and zucchini we got all summer long, delicious as they were, now the boxes were really getting good. Arugula. Spinach. Kale, all in one box. For a leafy greens-fanatic like me, it can’t get any better than this.

One of the first posts I wrote for this blog after we began with the CSA was about being introduced to a variety of turnip I had never tried before. Tokyo turnips, they were called; a small white variety that look more like radishes.

Well, last week, we got yet another new variety of turnip, called red scarlet. As my photograph shows, at first glance, they do look more like a beet or a radish, but oh no, my friends, they are indeed as turnipy as a turnip can be. I was expecting them to have that scarlet hue all the way through, but alas, they did not. Yet, the turnip potato soup I made with them did have a slightly pinkish hue. (The second photo shows them in slices before being put into the soup pot).

If anyone has any other favorite turnip recipes, bring them on. I am on a mission to find new and wonderful things to do with this little-used-until-now (at least for me) root vegetable.