FWIW, the community-supported fishery no longer requires signing up for at least 4 deliveries per 8-week “season”. You can place a prepaid order as close as a couple of days before a delivery date. Of course, you still won’t know until pick-up day what variety of fish it will be.
No, not caviar. CAFC added a bunch of options this year, like stock, soups, a9d smoked fish. Beginning in January, they’ll offer eggs from free-range, organically-fed chickens, for the hefty price of $7/doz. Seems like a strange time to begin, as there’s little for them to forage this time of year, and it’s my understanding that hens lay fewer eggs in winter, but just passing the info along.
Thanks. I had not heard of them and I’m still searching for good fishmongers out by me (Waltham area).
This new policy is hard to find on their site (using mobile this morning).
Have you used them before? I would most likely do a whole fish share (I like having the frames for stock). If you’ve done filets, what types of things have you received over the course of a season?
It would also be a good excuse for me to get to Codman Farm out in Lincoln - that is where Pete and Jen (my chicken and pork source) just moved as well.
I have used them on and off since their second season – several years. This past season we got dabs (my favorite), flounder, pollock, hake, haddock, can’t think what else. That is filets, not sure what the whole fish folks got. We do on occasion get monkfish, mackerel and blue fish (in season). When I got the whole fish share we got flounder or other flatfish fairly often and they were awesome cooked whole. There is nothing like getting fish that was swimming that morning!
I started with CAFC two years ago next May. Typical fish are haddock, pollock, hake, flounder (and other small flatfishes), redfish (perch). Less often, monkfish, bluefish, striped bass, cusk. They e-mail you on pick-up day to let you know what it will be. Whether you get whole or fillets, it will be the same species. At first I had a whole fish share but had overestimated both my ability and the quality of my knives. More importantly, I didn’t consider that weekly garbage pick-up was the same day as fish pick-up. So I had to freeze the stock-pot dregs for a week and didn’t always remember to put them out in the barrel on the day.
Later, I became a distribution volunteer, for which I was compensated with a free fillet share. Since my location never had a lot of subscribers, they dropped it for at least this winter. They did not make a big announcement when they stopped requiring that shareholders commit to at least 4 weeks. It was mentioned in an e-mail to the volunteers but it was apparent to me that they had already been doing it for months. I’d been handing out fish to people who only appeared on my distribution list once.
