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.