CSA 2010 - Week 5

As with our previous citrus, these grapefruit had the flesh cut away from them, the excess juice consumed in a glass (tasty), were tossed with a shot of brandy, sprinkled with a few tablespoons of brown sugar, and broiled. It's a great, simple way to dress up citrus, and a healthy dessert to boot. These nectarines are, as I type this, being converted into a butter. The process is basically to make a puree and then simmer the heck out of it to reduce the moisture content. It smells like it is going to taste amazing, and it keeps for a year in the freezer. Sold! Wow. Look at all these avocados. This is not an ingredient that we seek out, though it has grown on us over time. We have a great taco salad that will consume one, then we will probably make a whole mess of guacamole. I love guacamole, and hopefully Mary comes around enough on it to help me with the consumption, or I am going to get real sick of it. These rainier cherries are slated for a pie as are...

...these plums. The recipe we are following (from Cook's Illustrated) uses a mix of sweet cherries and plums to simulate the flavor of sour cherries. It seems like a great idea, and we are excited to try it. Plus, it's a twofer. Some of these white peaches found their way into the nectarine butter, and some will get eaten with lunches. More grapes, more lunch snacks.

While we love sage, most of the dishes we use it in are more suited to the winter. This is also going into the turkey meatloaf mentioned in the previous post, and if we have some left we may make a pasta dish we love (which also has tons of garlic.) The first corn of the season has arrived! We love corn, though since our deck is still being worked on, we can't grill it. We will probably cut this off the cob and hold on to it for later, probably for use in our creamed corn with bacon and leeks. Mmm..... Oh zucchini, you need to stop being so eager to please and learn to play hard-to-get. If you'd just be a little less available, maybe folks would like you more. So yeah, more zucchini. Some will get steamed, some will probably get en-breaded, some will sit in the crisper, begging us to love it. This kale and the beet greens from last week will be used in soup along with...

...this cabbage. That's right cabbage, we were ready for you this time! It is even a small enough head that we can use it all in one dish. We actually have a startling number of cabbage plans this year, from a Barefoot Contessa stuffed cabbage recipe, to me using a few leaves to kickstart a sourdough starter (apparently it's full of wild yeasts, who knew?) These small heads of lettuce seem likely to be the last we see for a while. They're getting turned into taco salads with the avacado. The first carrots of the season will likely get used here and there, but primarily as snacks. We have reached the point in the season where I have nothing new to say about onions. Three, count 'em, three cucumbers. These are quite large, though not as big as the first one we got this summer. I plan to make another attempt at Cucumber Mojito sorbet this year. The first time I made it I was shocked at how aggressive the cucumber flavor was, so I'll be adjusting up the mint and lime this time. We'll see how it goes.

CSA 2010 - Week 4

We've started getting full sized sweet onions this week, which are easier for us to use than the green onions (see next picture.) We generally will swap the greens in for chives and use them when they are called for, but these bigger fellas we can just use in place of yellow onion. As it turns out, almost everything we make calls for some form of onion, so that's convenient. There is nothing exotic in the future for this cucumber. It'll see salads and feta salad. Yellow and Green Zucchini (which I totally spelled right on my first try) are destined for another batch of quick bread (this time without the chocolate chips but with walnuts, a major breakthrough for Mary) as well as our quick quiche-y bisquick pie. That's particularly good with a bunch of basil thrown in, which is convenient. The basil will also make its way into an herb cream cheese for bagel topping. This thyme has been used here and there, and will be finished in some mushroom and turkey meatloaf (better than it sounds on paper) and a delicious maple and mustard glaze/sauce for pork chops.

We really didn't get the deluge of lettuce that we have in past years, which I think relates to the growing season being shifted so early. I think with the warm spring, lettuces were actually peaking before the CSA even began, so we missed out on the salad-every-day days. I can't say this is a complaint. Broccoli side shoots (which I did not spell right on my first try) are presumably the smaller heads of the plant that form near the main head. We used it in a shrimp stir-fry, and having the smaller, leggy heads actually made cutting it into small florets for that easier. The aforementioned green onions. Red and golden beets with beet greens attached. We are fairly new to beets, and haven't worked with golden ones in the past. We ended up roasting most of them and then dressing them with a horseradish and crème fraiche sauce. It was tasty, though it hasn't supplanted our ol' standby.

CSA 2010 - Week 3

The pictures here are not going to align properly, since I am posting them long after the original post went up.

CSA Week three and we are still without internet. In fact, here I sit having transferred pictures from the camera from week five and I still don't have internet. Some of this delay is due to equipment (dead DSL modem, bad info on DSL modems, cable signal too bad to use cable modem) and some is due to the joy of customer service. I am writing this up now, though, in hopes that Monday will see internet returned to our household. Let me tell you, not having the internet to lookup recipes during CSA season is downright barbaric. On to the share!

Mangos are not a fruit we usually get, so we were flying a bit blind here. I ultimately went with mango sorbet, which was pretty good. I think these were actually a little under ripe, but it tossed in a little extra sugar and we were good to go. This week's fruit share came to us a little abused, and one place this was quite evident was in our peaches. They don't show it here, but they were quite badly bruised. Still, we managed to enjoy them just fine. Pineapple is not normally something that we would seek out (and in fact, we often avoid it) so we were a bit leery of this fellow. This one turned out to be much less fibrous than the canned stuff, and ended up tasting great. Some went into a winter fruit salad (which was awesome,) some went into a salsa to go with pork tacos, and some I actually ate raw. Madness! I must admit that I am looking forward to our next pineapple, and I could even see myself, gasp, buying one! The nectarines were not as bruised as the peaches, but were still a wee bit beat up. We made a great tart tatin-style dessert with them and it was very good.

These cherries were used in a preserved cherry recipe that we have been dying to try. The whole cherries (stems, pits, and all) are soaked in a mix of bourbon and brown sugar for a week in the fridge. They ended up being good, but wow are they boozy. We had some over vanilla ice cream and some blended with it into shakes. The shakes were a better way to tame the booziness, and were excellent. Blueberries were mixed with the peaches as a quick fruit salad. Grapes are great snacks with lunch, and also went in the winter fruit salad.

It's hard to tell from this photo, but this cucumber was so large that we carved it out and used it as a canoe. Actually, we used it in salads with this lettuce, in a salmon dish, and tossed with feta for a quick side. I honestly don't recall what happened to this squash. It may have just ended up steamed as a side, or we may have done something more exotic. This kohlrabi went into our old standby dish, which includes matchsticked kohlrabi and carrots in a sauce with a bit of chicken stock, honey, and lemon. Nice and easy, nice and tasty. We always say that curly leaf parsley is too big for its britches. I mean, it thinks it's all fancy, but really, it's just parsley. I am not sure what all this went in other than the kohlrabi dish which calls for a bunch, but it tends to get spread around.

Beets went into our old standby beet salad (roasted with caramelized onions, feta, and a vinaigrette) and the beet greens and chard went into a soup together. We tried a new recipe with this cauliflower which was only so-so. It had a lot of great Italian ingredients (herbs, anchovies which we love, tomatoes) and yet in the end it didn't really wow us. These grapefruit snuck in from the fruit share. One went into the winter fruit salad, the other got eaten as is. I have no recollection of what happened to this broccoli or these green onions. I blame the lack of internet, rather than my horrible memory.