CSA Week 9

This week brought a tomato bonanza. We got six tomatoes of four varieties (red slicing,w heirloom, green, and gold paste) and had no problems at all finding uses for them. We ate em all with a little salt and some basil. Actually, we still have the green one, and we plan on frying it when we get a chance.

Crimini mushrooms went into a great tuna noodle casserole we got from cooking light.

This honey bear came at the perfect time, as our old one got noticably depleted by Mary's last illness.

Romano beans were delicious boiled for a few minutes and then tossed with butter. But then what isn't?

Beets are totally the comeback kid of the CSA. The first time we made them, I accidentally over-peppered them and they definitely didn't tickle our fancy. The last time we got them and this time, we made a salad with roasted beets, carmelized onions, and feta. We actually look forward to beets thanks to this bad boy.

This enourmous eggplant ended up being the perfect size for our camponata recipe (from Cook's Illustrated.) It was a little involved (we had to prep the eggplant in two stages because you microwave it to help get rid of the extra moisture) but it was so worth it. It was good on the first day and great on subsequent ones.

A salad for two's worth of little gem lettuce.

More green peppers went into pepper steak.

Onions. I have nothing to add to that.

We usually have a tough time finding uses for odd peppers like this bannana pepper, but this one we tossed into our pepper steak as well.

This japanese cucumber was way sweeter than we are used to cucumbers being. We used it in several places where we'd use normal cucumbers (with feta in a salad, or as an ingredient to a green salad) but we probably shouldn't have. They really stood out as odd, given the sweetness.

CSA Week 7, Week 8, Week 7, and Week 8

As alluded to in the title, week 7 and 8 of our CSA got a little strange. Due to all of the wacky weather in Wisconsin, the farmers were struggling to get summer crops planted. They decided that it made more sense to delay the summer crop by two weeks and thus shifted the CSA by the same time. What would have been week 7 and 8 were shareless and two extra weeks were added at the end of the season (for a week 21 and 22, effectively.)

Our week 7 (original week 9) share we picked up on Wednesday, knowing that we were leaving for a week to visit our family. Because of this, we had to do some creative planning, including freezing our corn and two of our green peppers (the other pepper ended up in a grilled veggie dish we made.)

The eggplant also got grilled and stacked with the grilled green peppers, some grilled squash, and some goat cheese and then drizzled with a balsamic reduction. Despite being a vegetarian dish, it was pretty tasty.

The cucumber got chopped up and tossed with feta for a quick salad.

Carrots are an item that we get a lot of in the CSA, and our week off isn't going to help. These we just stashed in the fridge on wednesday and revisited when we returned, since anything that could last the week was so very far off our radar for wednesday and thursday.

Cauliflower is really delicious roasted. If the CSA has tought us one thing, it's that everything is made better with roasting.

This muskmellon was almost too ripe. It was super juicy, but tasted a bit washed out and bland.

Mary says that grape leaves are our CSA nemesis, but I think it's potatoes. Once they start, they just keep on a'comin'.

Garlic is always welcome.

We use the bottle onions as we would red onions. We tend to treat all forms of onion as fungible, within reason.

A two and a half pound kohlrabi bulb is a lot of kohlrabi. Luckily our one recipe for it calls for two pounds, so it works out. We made this dish on the Monday after we returned from our trip (it also uses some carrots, thankfully) and the veggies survived like champs.

We knew that kale wouldn't last the week, but had filled our two pre-trip dinners using up other veggies, so we made spinach and kale turnovers (with red onion and feta) on Thursday night and froze them. We've been pretty good until now about not freezing too much, so hopefully that doesn't cause us to fall too far behind.

While we were visiting family, one of Mary's co-workers picked up our share (week 8 original week 10.) In that was: green peppers, cabbage, carrots, bottle onions, garlic, sweet corn, melon, cauliflower, heirloom tomatoes, new potatoes, red tomatoes, chard, lemon basil.

We were pretty bummed to miss out on the corn and tomatoes in particular, but we'll certainly have more opportunities for both in upcoming shares.