FarmShare Folks: Meet Jill Ziegler

The benefits of subscribing to FarmShare are many: you’re treated to the freshest produce available during a given week; you can broaden your “veggie horizons” by tasting new varieties; you support local farmers, reduce pollution, save time and energy that might be spent grocery shopping, and learn tasty new recipes from the weekly newsletters. And, in subscriber Jill Ziegler’s case, by serving FarmShare at the dinner table, you might just uncover a little piece of family history.

That’s what happened unexpectedly when, with her first FarmShare delivery of the season, Jill invited her family over for dinner. Do you remember the kohlrabi from that delivery? You may have wondered, “what am I supposed to do with this?”, but, as Jill’s mother bit into that crunchy, cabbage-like vegetable, a flood of memories rushed through her mind. She reminisced how her grandmother, Jill’s great-grandmother, an immigrant Hungary grew kohlrabi in one of her many gardens. A love of vegetables, and of kohlrabi apparently, runs in that side of the family. Jill’s mother was so moved by this recollection that she munched the extra kohlrabi all by herself.

Along with using the lettuce, carrots, onions, and kohlrabi from the July 7 delivery to serve a local salad to her family, Jill sliced the zucchini for a chicken and vegetable pizza and sautéed the swiss chard with pasta.

For Jill, her FarmShare delivery serves as the foundation for what she cooks for herself, her husband, and her six-year-old daughter Anna during a typical week. As she explained, every Saturday morning she sits down at her computer with her coffee and plans out the dinners for the coming week.

“My husband  and I both work full-time, and we don’t have time to go grocery shopping in the middle of the week,” she said. A self-described “list person,” she said that because of the Thursday FarmShare delivery, items she needs to shop for are mostly protein, grains, dairy, and pasta.  And once the shopping is done over the weekend, the Ziegler-Helwig family is all set for the rest of the week. If only we could all be as organized as Jill!

Most of her FarmShare favorites are yet to come later in the season. “The cherry tomatoes are the best, best thing ever – I usually eat them all in the car ride home,” she confessed during our conversation.

She also raved about FarmShare corn and  the “salsa basket” from last year, which included peppers and tomatoes. Jill remembered throwing the basket’s ingredients into a food processor to make prepping salsa “fun, quick, and easy.”

Because Jill loves to eat and cook with fresh, local ingredients, it makes sense that her passion for sustainability has seeped into all aspects of her life. She has made sustainability part of her career, as she is the Program Manager for sustainability initiatives at Forest City Enterprises. In fact, it was Jill, who, with Jon Ratner, first partnered with FarmShare after learning about it through Entrepreneurs for Sustainability. Since day one, Jill has been a FarmShare enthusiast.


By Elizabeth Bruml, FarmShare 2011 Intern