CSA Week 14

Week 14, and we may be in trouble. We managed to go for 10 weeks with no toss aways, but now we've had our second in as many weeks. While we have managed to use most of the mizune from last week, the endive was out of sight/out of mind and managed to get really squicky before we got to it.

As expected, the beets ended up in our old standby salad which was delicious as always. We also made our standard asian slaw with half a head of cabbage, and the warm cabbage salad (I was wrong about calling for potatoes.) The warm cabbage salad was odd, but grew on us over time. It had apples and caraway seeds, which was an interesting blend of flavors.

It's the second season for lettuce apparently. This head will help us use up some of the other random greens that we've been getting.

Mary predicted that our making Best Beef Ever (which calls for two cups of carrots) would spur the CSA to send them. The girl is spooky. I, of course, suggested that we just make it again, but she's afraid it'll lose it's specialness, as if that's possible.

In light of the early demise of the celery two weeks ago, I cut off the root and leaves from this head (bunch?) and stuck it straight in water. It seems to be working, as it's still quite crisp several days later. Yay? Now we need a use for all this celery.

Ah potatoes. Potatoes, potatoes, potatoes. We have gone from having eight heads of garlic in our pantry (down to two!) to three bags of potatoes. I kind of preferred the garlic situation. I am going to use this as an opportunity to try a potato bread recipe, which takes about a pound and a half (I think, it's a bit vague) which will both scratch my bread making itch and use up some potatoes.

Onions

These pears are super sweet and tender. They're great as is, so we'll probably just eat 'em all raw.

Green Beans

Radicchio is a pretty strongly flavored green. We used half the head for a risotto recipe, which was delicious and pretty easy to make. The other half will end up in salads, a little at a time. Sadly we still have some mizune left from last week, so we'll be having some pretty strongly flavored greens in our next few salads.

More italian frying peppers are destined for a chicken chili.

It's amazingly still tomato season around here. That's fine with us -- we'll never get sick of ripe tomatoes sliced and eaten with a little salt.

CSA Week 13

Nothing too exciting to report from last week. The pizza bianca recipe we made was excellent, and really reminded us of the pizza rustica we had gotten in Rome. Next time, we'll throw on some cherry tomatoes and prosciutto (or maybe some chopped anchovies) and it will really bring us back. We've been working our way through the tomatoes, but having received so many last week we still have some left. The last handful of romas are going in a chicken dish for dinner tonight. We even managed to use some of the potatoes, which is quite the feat for us.

Despite making several sage heavy dishes (a great pasta with garlic chips, sage and sausage as well as sweet potato ravioli in sage brown butter) we're still awash in the stuff. I think we'll try to dry it this week (or we'll put off trying to dry it long enough that we can feel justified in throwing it away.) This? Is why we stopped planting herbs in our window boxes.

Mary has always had a rocky relationship with fancy greens, so this week's curly endive and mizuna are a bit of a challenge. Thankfully, at least the huge bunch of mizuna is milder than the arugula was so it can be mixed into salads in greater quantities. We've yet to dig into the endive, so we'll see how that goes.

We really did briefly consider doing something with our beets other than roasted beet salad with onions and feta, but then we came to our senses. We have a beet risotto recipe that sounds fascinating (and like it would be an awesome color,) but since it's a side we'd need a pretty easy dinner to go with it. I've also been tempted lately to try to make a quick bread or cake with shredded beets (which I'd probably base on some form of carrot cake recipe) but that may be a bit experimental for Mary. If I do give that a go, I'll post pictures of the misadventures.

Two red onions.

Thank goodness, it's more potatoes. We have a few potato recipes on the menu for the coming week, including a dill potato salad and a roasted potato recipe that we've made before, so hopefully we won't fall too far behind. I made hash browns with some of last week's, and they actually came out crispy! The trick is to keep squeezing the shredded potato until you can't get any more moisture out before tossing them in the pan. Who knew?

Half of this head of red cabbage is getting turned into asian slaw, and the other half will likely become a warm cabbage salad. With potatoes, so it's a twofer!

Italian frying peppers

Honeycrisp apples and moonglow pears both sound a bit like they were named by the same guy who names paint colors. We had the apples in a pork dish where you simmer them in apple cider, then reduce the cider into a glaze for the pork. It was delicious, though whole wheat egg noodles are to be avoided in the future. The pears will probably just get eaten as is.

Sungold tomatoes are like candy. We grew them last year, and they are sweet and wonderful.

Green zebra tomatoes and our "heirloom" tomato (no variety name was given) pretty much tasted like tomatoes, but with less acidity.

This red slicing tomato ended up in an omelet with some of the red onion and italian frying pepper. A hat trick!

CSA Week 12

Last week's CSA went well, though we did have our second (or third, depending on if you count our willful disposal of the first grape leaves) bit of CSA produce expire before using. The juvenile celery that we got wilted almost immediately, and my placing it upright in cold water did nothing to revive it. The crab apples were successfully integrated into a summer fruit crisp along with the apples from the share, which was delicious if a bit overly sweet.

Sadly, the grilled pizza was a bit of a letdown. I am not sure if I under-kneaded it, or if it just had too high a content of whole wheat flour, but it never really developed gluten and didn't really rise during grilling. It also got quite soggy once the sauce was added, and partially disintegrated on the grill. I am not saying we won't try it again, but we will use a different recipe next time.

On with the show.

Two pounds of roma tomatoes will get turned into a topping for pizza (based on the Cook's Illustrated pizza bianca recipe) and maybe sauce.

Acorn squash is slated to get stuffed for lunch today, we'll see how that goes. The stuffing has turkey sausage in it, so it can't be all bad.

Would anyone like some sage? Because we have a ton. We plan to make a couple three dishes that call for it (white bean dip, a pasta dish, and chicken saltimboca) but will still likely have a ton leftover. We're going to try drying it, so that'll be an adventure.

Zucchini and a pattypan squash are both going into zucchini bread. Putting the squash in that isn't exactly cannon, but what else are we gonna do with one small one?

More garlic to add to our ever growing collection. We did make a rub for grilled chicken that took 8 cloves, so at least we are only up a half a head this week.

Pears and more crab apples will probably go into the same fruit crisp we did last week. Mary had one of the pears and reported that it was very tart, so that should help offset the sweetness of the crisp itself.

Red and cubanelle peppers

This? Is a really effing big boc choi. I should have thrown a small child or yardstick in for scale, because this is a seriously mutantly large vegetable. We'll probably do a stir fry kind of thing with this, since that seems to be the prominent way to cook it.

French breakfast radishes still look just like fingers and taste just like radishes.

Potatoes will be keeping all the garlic company in our pantry. I've looked up a technique for making crispy hashbrowns, and I also want to try making potatoes with onions and bacon (sort of a variation on lyonaise potatoes), so at least we have some plans for this batch.

Arugula will join the little bit we have left over from last time. It's got such a strong taste that only a little can go into salads without blowing us away. Maybe we'll look for a soup or something that can take it. We have a pretty mild spinach soup that might benefit from the sharpness.

CSA Week 11

We seem to have come out the other side of pepper season in one piece, and not having tossed any out. We ended up making a roasted pepper salad with a sun dried tomatoes and caper dressing as a bit of a clearinghouse for them (one green, one red, one cubanelle) and it was very good. The eggplant parm was underwhelming, and we'll probably look for a different recipe next time, or try Sheri's caponata recipe.

We've also officially signed up for our winter share which is one share in each of November, December, and January. We'll be awash is squash and may be hit by the tsunami of potatoes that we apparently only imagined last fall. We're also trying the cheese share (two one pound blocks each share) because how can you participate in a CSA from Wisconsin and not try the cheese share?

This seemed to be the week of variety. We got a summer fruit medley with apples,, tiny little plums, and crabapples. I'm not sure what the heck one does with crabapples when their brother lives hundreds of miles away; I guess I'll have to throw them at someone else.

A single red pepper which made it into our aforementioned roasted pepper salad.

We embraced the end of summer and made a risotto with sausage and arugula. The creaminess helped cut some of the pepperiness of the greens, which worked out well.

Mary had to resist eating these amazing raspberries for a whole day because I was out with work folks on Wednesday, watching the Cubs suck. I'm glad she did, because they were super ripe and delicious.

These tomatoes were almost overripe when we got them. Two were juicy and delicious, but one had suspicious dark grey abcesses when I sliced it so we went the safe route and tossed it. Bet you never thought you'd see the words "delicious" and "abcesses" in the same sentence.

The second chapter in the variety pack of this week was the herb bouquet. This contained sage, chives, and parsley.

Summer squash is going onto grilled pizza and getting steamed as a side.

A smallish watermellon.

A youngish celery that probably has a pretty aggressive taste. Since Mary doesn't care much for celery anyway, I'll probably bring most of it to work for snacks.

More broccoli is going into a mac and cheese casserole that is designed to trick your kids into eating veggies.

Bottle onions are big this time of year. We'd never really heard of this kind of onion before the CSA, but we sure know all about them now.

We have gotten pretty far behind on the garlic. Most of our garlic heavy recipes (Roasted Garlic Soup and Best Beef Ever) are fall/winter things, so we've managed to store up four or five heads from the last few CSAs. Now that we're getting into cooler weather, we'll start making some of those longer cooking things and work through it. Tastiest backlog ever.

CSA Week 10

Crimini mushrooms are going into fake ravioli (fake because they are wrapped in wonton skins) with some smoked cheese.

These odd little dessert pears are much smaller and sweeter than normal varieties, and also ripen earlier in the season.

Wax beans are something that I remember very fondly from my childhood. They were always one of my favorite veggies when I was little, probably because there are so few yellow options there.

Two smallish leeks.

Red slicing tomatoes will never get old.

The broccoli was slow to mature this year. Guaging from how often this fact was mentioned in our newsletters, this was a Big Deal.

Radishes are going into salads.

Another japanese cucumber.

Basil is getting pestoed along with last share's. We'll probably have that over the fake mushroom ravioli.

As with the banana pepper last week, I am unsure what we'll do with a cubanelle pepper. Probably just pretend it's a normal green pepper and use it however we used the other one we got this week. We also got a purple pepper, which we'll cut up for salads.

Another eggplant. As good as the caponata was with the last eggplant, we figured we'd branch out and try something else. We made eggplant parmesean from a recipe in the CSA newsletter with this one, and it was ok but needed more sauce. Live and learn.

Corn is one of the things that we most look forward to from the CSA (along with berries and tomatoes.) This was delicious, if a little on the small side. We used it and the leeks to make Cooking Light's creamed corn with bacon and leeks. It was so amazing that I am linking the recipe. Sweet and savory and smoky; just the perfect way to show off corn. We will definitely do it again.