I’m a Canadian (from western Canada) living in Sri Lanka for the last six years. Yeah, big change. Huge dietary change, too.
Sri Lanka is the teardrop shaped island off the south east coast of India, but it’s not India. It’s its own country. 
CSA, for the uninitiated, stands for Community Supported Agriculture, and in some parts of the world, like the US, means signing up for a season of produce from a local farm, although there are, apparently, grain CSAs and meat CSAs.
Signing up for a CSA usually means a box of produce one a week or every other week for the duration of the growing season and you get whatever’s in season, whatever the farm feels like giving you, whatever’s been growing well. That could mean vegetables you’ve never eaten or cooked with before, so it can be a bit of an adventure.
But, c’mon, who doesn’t love an adventure? 
Cooking Away My CSA started with Heather Lalley and a tweet and went from there. If you want to join in, that’s easy enough. We’re on Twitter and there’s a Google group with, at current count, 149 members and very active discussions on what to do with kale or garlic scapes or…
We don’t have CSAs here in Sri Lanka, as in there are no inititiatives to buy into a farm’s produce share for once a week or so delivery, so I’m doing things a bit differently.
I’ll be focusing on locally grown produce only, not anything that’s imported. Locally grown produce include things we’re all familiar with (green beans, carrots, beets), a bunch of stuff that’s familiar but would never be considered local in Canada (mango, papaya, banana, avocado, pineapple), and a whole lot of stuff that I’d never heard of before coming here (dumballa, mokonuvvena, gotukola, snake gourd. lotus root, wing beans, and long beans).
Because I’m married to a Sri Lankan – he is, after all, the reason I’m here – my recipes, my menu features a lot of Sri Lankan cooking. And because I’m easily bored and can’t eat the same thing all the time, it features food from just about everywhere else, too.
I’m happy to be playing with all the other CAMCers. I like having an extra incentive to be a little bit more adventurous and imaginative. And I’m willing to bet I’ll learn a whole bunch and experience better food as a result.
I’ll be using the CAMC tag for all my Cooking Away My CSA-related posts.
Howdy and welcome to my site! I'm Laurie and I'll be your, er, hostess today. :)
Love these local details. Thanks so much sharing them, Laurie.
Then wait until you read tomorrow’s post – I talk about what grocery shopping is like here. Not in huge detail – that would take too long, and the post ended up being too long as it was.