CSA Week 8

I somehow seem to have gotten my numbering off on these posts. We are in week eight now, but the last post was on week six. I suspect that my catchup should have covered an extra delivery, but let's let sleeping dogs lie, shall we?

More Fennel this week. This time it had more bulb and a little less frond. We made a roasted pork tenderloin with apples and fennel with it, and it was absolutely delicious.

Portobello Mushrooms went into a pasta.

Hey look, it's more potatoes! We used a bunch in a Rosti and are down to just under one bag. Until this week's share comes.

Apparently green beans like the cold weather. We have been getting a ton of them. We made a bean and bacon salad for thanksgiving one year, I think it's time to bust that bad boy out.

At this point in the season, what is left to be said about zucchini?

A small bunch of parsley. For a change, it's small enough that we might reasonably be able to use it.

We plan on stacking these carrots up with last weeks carrots and building a tower to the moon.

Having grown weary of making cucumber and feta salads, I decided to try making a sorbet with these cucumbers. My plan was to aim for a Cucumber Mojito Sorbet, and I based it off a recipe I found online. I swapped out the vanilla in the simple syrup for mint from the rooftop deck, but found that after I mixed it into to cucumber puree, the cucumber flavor was still surprisingly dominant. I ended up picking some more mint and pureeing it into the mixture. This lead to a nice balance of flavors, and flecked the sorbet with tiny bits of dark green. The sorbet has a surprising melon flavor, and is really growing on me. I can definitely see making it again (maybe next week, if we get even more cucumbers.)

These oblong onions appear to be the only kind we are getting this year. Either that, or the normal ones are delayed along with the corn and tomatoes because of the screwy weather.

CSA Week 6

Back on schedule!

The big kitchen excitement from last week was my attempt to make a sourdough starter. I was following the method outlined in The Bread Baker's Apprentice, which involves multiple days of feeding and culling the starter, followed by turning it into a more standard starter (called a 'barm'.) Sadly, this didn't go so well. I made it about halfway through the process (just about to barm) and decided that I really wasn't getting any rise at all. I looked online and got some tips to help with the situation, so I started the process again. This time I rode it out all the way to the barm stage, but when that was supposed to have doubled in four hours but showed no rise in eight, I threw in the towel. Instead I made french bread which was more delicious than I remembered. Take that, sourdough!

We are firmly in summer now (despite the lingering cold) which means we are getting hardier fare. Still no corn or tomatoes, but we'll hoping for a good season (and raiding the farmer's market.)

We got our first potatoes of the year. It feels a bit early for these, and if we end up with more than ten weeks in a row of getting potatoes then we are in real trouble. These are going into a roasted potato salad that we like.

Two huge bulbs of garlic. I mean, really huge.

More onions.

A very small head of lettuce. After the spring's onslaught, we took a bit of a break from salads, so this guy ended up being a nice, fresh reminder of spring.

Chives will get snuck into pretty much every place we can think to. We always find it a challenge to get through them before they go bad.

This year seems to be the year of Green beans and dill. We made a recipe with the last share's beans using dill and goat cheese, and plan to use this one to make an orzo, dill, and fennel salad.

Portobello mushrooms are not an acceptable substitute for meat no matter what the vegetarians say, but they are tasty marinated and grilled.

And so our nemesis carrots slip into the house silently. Again, if we get two pounds a week for ten weeks we are in trouble.

Two small bulbs of fennel with hugely long fronds. These are slated for the bean and orzo salad. Fennel is an odd duck. It has such a strong scent when I cut it, but it seems to disappear into most dishes we put it in. I do like it, but it befuddles me so.