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It always seems a bit odd to get lettuce (and mizuna for that matter) so late in the season, but I guess they can get two harvests so there's an early and late one. Arugula on the other hand seems to belong to the late season, because of it's peppery bite. It all got turned into salads, of course.
The last tomato of the season seems so very long ago now. We were very pleased with the quality and quantity of tomatoes that we got this year, and most of them (this one included) just got eaten with a little salt.
We have several leek recipes that we did with the various doses of them we got. We made a risotto, a fritatta (I think), and a soup. Other than that last one (which I liked but Mary did not) they were generally delicious recipes.
I think that the veggie that the CSA has most opened out eyes to is squash. It's something that we never really had before joining the CSA, and now that we've tried many recipes (all of which we love) we actually look forward to its season. We've even gone so far as to purchase it at the store, which is pretty serious praise.
The acorn squash we mostly stuff with a delicious southwestern filing that has sausage, tomatoes, black beans, cumin, and red pepper. It's delicious and offsets the sweetness of the squash.
The butternut squash and delicata squash are pretty much interchangeable to us. We have a half dozen recipes we love, including a risotto, several pastas, and a stew that mixes the squash with dried fruit and beef for a great sweet and savory meal.
I honestly can't remember what we used this celeriac for. I am pretty sure that we used half in a pot pie recipe we have, and that the second half ended up going bad in the fridge. We like it, but do need to go out of our way to find recipes for it.
Through the fall, we got a lot of apples and pears. Most of these we just ate as is, but we also made apple cake with some of those.
We got a wide variety of peppers as well. As I have said before, we mostly consider them to be fungible and tend to wantonly swap (sweet) varieties. We do have a bag of green "chili peppers" in our freezer, waiting for inspiration or a bout of cleaning to strike.
Onions are another common fall crop that we've gotten a lot of. We mostly got yellow onions, but have also seen red onions and sweet onions cross our paths. This is fine though, since we tend to use them a lot without trying.
Green Beans usually just get steamed, though for Thanksgiving we made an amazing recipe with shallots and bacon. It was amazingly good, and disappeared quickly.
I honestly have no idea how we used these turnips. I do know that we are not compelled to use the greens from beets and turnips when we get them though, so those suckers went right into the trash.
A big daikon radish was delicious sliced into salads, and lasted quite a while. That's good, since it was the size of a baby's arm and took a while to get through.
This year's challenge crop was definitely carrots. We don't use them that much, and for much of the season got a big new bag weekly. We frequently cut some for a snack at work (along with celery,) but only if we remembered to do so the night before. We used them in a few dishes, but few of those call for more than a little. Still, we were pretty good about not tossing too many away.
We always manage to use one half of each head of cabbage pretty easily, but the second one causes us issues, for some reason. We made a soup and slaw out of this one, which worked well because the soup could freeze.
Parsnips tend to get used along with other root veggies: in the aforementioned pot pies; in pot roast; caramelized and mashed with potatoes.
This was the first time we got rutabaga and marked the first time we made the pot pie with it. We had been subbing in whatever other ingredient that we had extra of, and I can't say my palate is so refined that I really noticed the change in using this instead.
I historically have not loved sweet potatoes on their own, but we have a bunch of recipes that use them with other ingredients that are delicious. We have a burrito filling that uses it, which is quite good. We also made a sweet potato casserole for Thanksgiving that was popular, but way to sweet for me.
We made a mac and cheese bake with some of the broccoli which, while designed to hide veggies to get your kids to eat them, was delicious for us adults as well.
It's a good thing that potatoes last. We like them, but it does take a while to use them up. We have started to find some entree recipes (like Rosti, a Swiss dish that's basically hash browns for dinner) which help to use them up a bit more quickly.
Spinach has a zillion uses. I think we made soup with this batch, but we also like it in a calzone-like spinach and feta pie and in spinach-kale turnovers. Speaking of kale, for whatever reason we didn't manage to use the batch from the last share before it went bad. We do have several recipes we like with it, but none of them managed to get on the schedule before it went bad.
I turned the pumpkin into puree and we used it to make pumpkin bread and for a cinnamon roll recipe that gets a little extra flavor and color from it. This time around we roasted it instead of steaming it, which lead to a much less soupy puree.
Dried mint is the grape leaves of the fall. All the enthusiasm that the newsletter can work up is, "Great for tea". It doesn't even get an exclamation mark. I would say that it's fine for tea, though I won't necessarily pine for it once it's used up.
Last and least, brussels sprouts. How can roasting and the addition of shallots and pancetta not make something amazing? Brussells sprouts easily sunk to meet that challenge, ending up bitter and mushy. We'll give these another try next year with a different recipe, but as of now our dislike of them stands.
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