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!