CSA Week 5

The last of the strawberries. Sad to see you go, little guys. You were excellent.

What we initially thought was lettuce ended up being a huge head of escarole. My memory is a little fuzzy (a problem with waiting so long to blog the share,) but I think we made our roasted garlic and escarole soup with this. If we didn't, we should have -- it's an awesome soup.

Hey look, it's more zucchini. We made a dish with this share that was a sort of cobbler, almost. It took sliced zucchini, onion, and a batter made with Bisquick. It turned out pretty well, and seems like it'd be a good CSA clearing house for odds and ends of future shares.

Turnips are funny looking fellows; They kind of look like oranic baseballs. As we often do with root vegetables, we turned to our old friend, Mashed Potatoes with Root Vegetables (from Cook's Illustrated.) We made a variation with bacon and thyme, and very much enjoyed it.

Radish sprouts have a mild radish flavor and are great in salads.

Sugar Snap Peas were also to prove to be the last of the season.

We are never quite sure what to do with mini onions. We put them in salads, but always worry that they are too mild to sub for real onions but too strong to sub for scallions. We've used them in a few different ways, but desipte them being a rather small amout of onion, still have some kicking around the crisper.

Rhubarb got cryogenically frozen until science develops a cure for absent-mindedness so I can find the really good recipe for crisp.

We roasted these beets and made an amazing salad with carmelized onions and feta cheese. It was delicious, and totally got Mary on board the beet train.

Cucumbers are often a challenge for us, since one can only have so many cucumber and feta salads. We found a salmon recipe that was served over a bed of shaved cukes though, plus it took the last of the dill from week 4. Any dish that takes more than one CSA ingredient gives us an absurd thrill.

Bok Choy was our first casualty this season. We fully intended to grill it tossed with asian seasonings, but by the time we pulled it out of the fridge it had clearly passed the point of no return. I think we should get credit for making it this late into the season before having something rot on us though.