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.