Fresh Vegetables Inspire Good Eating

Fresh mixed greens with cucumber slices and cherry tomatoes

Yesterday I went to Harvest Community Foods on Union Street, at the edge of Vancouver's Chinatown. It's an inviting small grocery store that has fresh vegetables and fruits. At the entrance there were large yellow-orangey globes of peaches, verdant green English cucumbers, giant russet-coloured tomatoes, pears that had yet to ripen, and bright red cherry tomatoes.

The shop sells CSA produce, or Community Supported Agriculture, where they connect with local farmers, get their produce, and Harvest bundles them up in paper shopping bags to sell. It's a farmer's market mixed bag of veggies that changes weekly depending on what's harvested.

French fingerling potatoes from an organic farm

The owners, chef Andrea Carlson and Gabrielle Meyer, had just signed a lease on a space a few doors down just weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020. They had just started doing the CSA bags with about 40 subscribers. When everything shut down and people were worried about going to supermarkets, they began inquiring about Harvest's CSA bags and instead of 40 subscribers, they got 400.

While it was a lot of hard work for Harvest's team in sorting out the vegetables evenly into bags, it was a lifeline for local farmers who didn't know how else to get their produce to customers.

I was given a bag of CSA produce to take home too and today I started eating some of it.

For lunch I made a spring salad and cut up some of the English cucumber and the ripe cherry tomatoes. The tomatoes were so good, almost as juicy sweet as the ones in Tuscany! 

The roasted potato slices with salt and pepper

Then for dinner I took the French fingerling potatoes, sliced them, marinated them in oil, salt and pepper and then roasted them for 20 minutes. They tasted so fresh, and complemented roasted chicken drumsticks.

I also took the bunch of spinach and stir-fried them Chinese-style with shallots, garlic and ginger. The spinach was delicious mixed with leftover shrimp and tofu with vermicelli.

There's still a bunch of kale, the exotic-sounding Dragon Tongue beans, a red pepper, onion and corn left!