CSA 2010 - Week 11

Last week's share went well overall. The lemon balm syrup ended up tasting as mild as it smelled, but at least it served to sweeten the tea. Mostly everything else went into recipes that we have made in the past, so not much to report there.

More oranges are going to be a challenge to use up. We'll probably just supreme the lot of them. Half of the avocados will get guacamoled and the other half will likely get given away. We really need to start searching for other avocado recipes, since it seems likely that these are not the last we will see. These white fleshed nectarines are sweet and delicious. These pluots are very odd looking. They are the size of large plum tomatoes, and firm fleshed and green. We've been working our way through the other fruit, so we haven't tried them yet to report on taste.

Two kinds of apples this week. Some will go into apple cake, some into a roasted pork dish, and some will just get eaten as is. Red flame grapes. We have a great recipe for pork with roasted grapes, but since we are doing the apple one, we'll likely just eat these as-is. Muskmelons Plums

We have gotten a surprisingly small amount of kale this year, which is a shame. We actually like it quite a bit, and have a bunch of great recipes for it. This bunch will go into a pasta dish with tubetti (we are actually using ditalinni, since we have it for a soup recipe), red pepper, and various other things. These beets are getting steamed and glazed with orange juice (one orange down!) It's a recipe that works will all forms of root veggies, but we like it best with beets. The onions this season have been a bit iffy. It's very common for them to have one or two layers that are already browned and mushy when we get them, which is an unpleasant surprise. This cilantro will go into the guac as well as into tacos. This is a much more reasonable number of tomatoes than we have been getting. These will be easy to use and go into all sorts of dishes.

Zucchini Cucumber Lettuce This eggplant has triggered the CSA paradox. We need a little more than we have to make the caponata recipe that we have, so we had to buy a second small one. In the end it was worth it, plus it used up a tomato and some of the celery from last week. A threefer! In this week's newsletter, we learned that green peppers are likely to be the only color we get. Apparently the longer they ripen (and color), the more likely they are to rot or get disease. For that reason, this slightly red-ish one may be the darkest we see. The freezing of last week's oregano seemed to go well, so I am going to try the same with this thyme. We have some storebought thyme kicking around too, which will likely get frozen with it. We will be roasting this fennel with apples for the pork dish. These hot peppers will be used here and there. This hard-neck garlic contains a small number of very large cloves within a head. We do love garlic, but having enormous cloves can make it hard to use in normal dishes. We do have a garlic based rub for grilled chicken that uses a ton, so we'll likely do that with a large portion of it.