CSA Week 3

For a second week in a row, we've managed to keep up with the CSA and use our full share. A lot of stuff (radishes, lettuces, sprouts) ended up in salads. We roasted the asparagus with balsamic brown butter (yum.) The spinach got souped. The mint was used to make mojitos and encrust lamb chops, both of which were awesome. Overall, it was a good share.

On to this week, which contains our first real CSA roadblock of the year.

Cabbage is destined for slaw and soup.

We accidentally ended up with an absurd mushroom bounty. We forgot that we had picked some up from the store, so we bought a second package. Then, we got some in this share. That's a lotta mushrooms. Hopefully between omelettes and other uses, we can get them used up.

Little Gem Lettuce is adorable, and makes one large or two small salads.

Sugar Snap Peas are tasty, but this is too many to put on salads. Maybe we'll go for a mushroom and pea stir fry?

Parsley.

Lettuce.

Collards are getting subbed for kale in a soup with the cabbage.

Now this is what a strawberry share should look like. These were so sweet and delicious, we ate the bulk when we got them home and only had a few leftover to bring as lunch the next day.

Garlic Scapes we usually just sub for garlic.

The first zucchini of the season is slated for zucchini bread.

Meet our nemesis: Grape Leaves. The only thing we can find to do with these is stuff 'em, and neither of us are very gung ho about any of the recipes for those we have seen. Also, eight leaves seems like too few to make a full recipe of anything, but we certainly aren't going to go buy more. This will be the first item of the CSA that we don't use, though I think we deserve credit for willfully composting them rather than letting them rot in the fridge for two weeks and then tossing them shamefully in the night.

CSA Week 2

We're off to a good start. By the end of last weekend, we'd managed to use up all of our CSA share. Considering that last year we always had one or two things we threw away even with less frequent pick-ups, that's a great start. We used everyting in the predicted way last week, and it was all delicious.

Since storms continue to flood a lot of the farms, we didn't have very high hopes for this week's share. Luckily, they pulled it out and we got a pretty good variety again.

More spinach this week. We don't have specific plans for this (usually a red flag) and may just end up steaming it as a side dish.

Escarole will end up in one of our favorite soups. How can you not love anything that has an entire roasted head of garlic in it?

Lettuce and radishes are salad bound.

Green garlic is slated to get grilled and then used to flavor a white bean dip. Hopefully that works out for us as I'll be winging it with the recipe.

Asparagus was already roasted, with a balsamic and brown butter sauce. So good. We could have roasted asparagus every day for a week and not get sick of it or run out of recipes to try.

The strawberry harvest must have been hard hit by the weather, because we got a sad little container with thirteen small berries in it. They were delicious, but we were still pretty sad to see so few. Berries are a real highlight of the summer for us.

Some kind of sprouts have already been consumed on salads.

Mint is bound for drinks (we've already used it to determine that we don't like juleps) and grilled lamb chops.

Rhubarb is getting frozen so that we can make crisp after the season. I found the good recipe after making the just ok one, so we clearly need to make it again soon.

Naansense

It's summer, which in Chicago means heat and humindity -- hardly bread baking weather. Still I do love bread and since we had soup for dinner tonight, I decided to look up a recipe for grilled bread. I found a promising looking one for naan and decided to give it a go.

The dough is fairly straightforward. There's no real fancy work or a pre-ferment so I was able to do it the day I decided to take it on, which is nice. It is a very soft (wet) dough though, so it might be a bit of a test of patience when kneading and shaping. I found that for the shaping into portions, I was much happier if I kept my fingertips oiled and kept the dough moving a lot.

After the first rise, you punch the dough down and knead in garlic until it's distributed. I used green garlic from the CSA, which had a pretty mild flavor. Next time I'll be more careful to get it evenly distributed: As it was, I ended up with some pieces having very little garlic and some having a lot.

The dough is then divided into golf ball sized pieces, shaped into balls, and risen again.
Once the grill is hot, you stretch the dough balls and place them right on the grill. The recipe doesn't specify how thin the dough should end up, and I started with some pretty thick pieces. With practice I found that the thinner you can stretch it, the better. If you can see the gluten, toss those suckers on the grill. The dough does not stick as it would to the side of an oven (where the bread is usually baked) so it does contract a bit in the cooking.
Once the first side is done (which only takes a few minutes, depending on the heat of the grill) you brush the naan with melted butter (ghee would probably be more traditional, but plain ole melted, unclarified butter worked great too) and flip them over. They puffed up a lot during the cooking on the first side, even when they had been stretched extremely thinly during the shaping. At this point, you brush the just cooked side with butter as well. Mmmmm...so much butter.
The recipe made quite a bit, but it was so good that volume was not a problem. The 'loaves' were not huge, and were amazingly delicious. Of the twelve pieces that came off the grill, seven were eaten within a few hours.
The resulting crumb for the bread was very nice. The puffed up parts had nice large holes, and the bread was pleasantly chewy throughout. The early loaves that I had not stretched as thinly were very slightly undercooked, but even those were excellent and not at all doughy. In reality, the dough seemed very forgiving of cooking time and temperature, and loaves ranging from very lightly colored to deeply browned were all wonderfully textured and endowed with great flavor. I had been concerned that the melted butter brushed on the done side of the bread might make it greasey, but it didn't.

Overall, this was an excellent recipe and one that we will certainly add to our normal rotation. Being able to cook the bread on the grill rather then baking it in the oven makes it a great summer option, and the quality of the resultant bread means you really aren't missing anything by going that route.

Update: Yesterday I read some of the comments on allrecipes for the original recipe, and it seemed like some folks had complained about the toughness of the bread. I realized that while I had measured out the full amount of flour, I used way less than it called for. This lead to a much softer dough, which probably explains the difference. It makes it a little harder to knead and shape, but I would certainly repeat this decision, based on the quality of the final bread.

CSA Week 1

It's CSA time again! After enjoying last year's biweekly shares despite not having a kitchen for a chunk of time there in the middle, we decided to take a chance on a full share this year. That means weekly veggie shares and a whole lot of not ordering in for us.

It also means I have to update here at least once a week, or I'll fall hopelessly behind. On to the veggies!

For a first delivery, we actually got quite a bit of variety this week.

Button Mushrooms are destined for salads and omelettes.

Two heads of lettuce (one red sails, one romaine) will keep us in salads for the week.

Spinach is going into our favorite spinach and kale pie.

Pear Butter may just get spread directly on our tongues. We've already had most of it on bread or toast, and it is so very delicious. Nice pear and apple flavors, with some caramel background. Super tasty.

Asparagus was born to be roasted.

Green Garlic is new to us, but we plan on using it as we would normal garlic. It'll probably make it's way into the mushroom omelettes.

Rhubarb is destined for an odd lentil soup recipe (yes, rhubarb and lentil soup) as well as the ever delicious crisp.

A small bundle of chives will likely get snipped onto anything we can think of.

Mint will be used to flavor ice tea, probably in the form of a syrup (which is also convenient because the sugar is pre-disolved.)

Radishes will be snacked on and eaten in salads.

The newsletter and emails this week have all commented on how hard hit the supplying farms are by the recent storms, so we're curious to see what the share looks like next week. Hopefully there aren't too many ruined crops, since that would stink all around.