I dare you to guess what kind of nuts these are. Write it down. No cheating. Okay, now you can read on…

Last month, I wrote about Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) and how my husband and I have been getting CSA boxes for the past 6 months or so. Every CSA is set up differently, but the gist of it is that you pay upfront (we pay $120 for 6 weeks in advance) for whatever veggies are being harvested from a local farm at that time. It breaks down to $20/week which is way less than you would spend on fruits and veggies from the store, especially if you prefer local and/or organic. Our CSA sources from several local farms, so we get a variety of foods from week to week. And it’s pretty much guaranteed that there is always something new or interesting like purple potatoes, shishito peppers, or mustard greens. Thankfully they also give us a newsletter with recipes every week so we don’t even have to research how to cook the mysterious items.

In CSA Box = Amazing, I gave a list of reasons why everyone should sign up for one. The short and sweet argument is that you don’t have to be tree-hugging hippies to love fresh, local veggies. We are… but you don’t have to be! Either way, signing up for a CSA is like signing up for a healthy meal plan. You will have a fridge stocked with fresh fruits and veggies – and you don’t even have to think about it or decide what to buy at the store. Just like saving money is easier when you set up automatic transfers from your checking account to your savings, eating healthy is easier when you’ve signed up for a CSA box.

Every week, I plan to share a picture of something we got in our CSA box so you can see how cool it is. This week, I chose pecans. I had no idea that we would be getting nuts in our CSA box, but here in Arizona, we do. And it is fantastic.

Who knew that pecans looked like this before being shelled? Did you guess right? We thought they were Brazil nuts until we cracked one open. And yes, we had to ask a friend for a nutcracker because like most Americans, we buy our nuts at the store, and the shells have already been removed. I don’t at all mean to imply that there is anything wrong with that, but there is something really inspiring about seeing the nuts with their shells. It’s a simple reminder that our food grows on farms – on bushes and trees and in the dirt. We so often forget all of the work that goes into growing our food and the people who labor over it. Who’s your farmer?