So far the winter share is going well, though we are coming into holiday travel season so we'll see if that lasts. We have some travel plans coming up, so delicate stuff runs the risk of getting lost in the shuffle.

Both lettuce and this gigantic bag of mizuna can really only be used for salads. Actually, It is possible that mizuna can be cooked, but we've never tried. If we get another huge bag like this I will have to ask the internet. More sweet potatoes. We had planed on making the samosas this week, but it didn't happen. We did make a sweet potato mash with curry flavors, but I can't find the recipe online and the physical one seems to have wandered off. It was very good, so I'll try to link it if we make it again. Blue potatoes This celeriac is going in a risotto this weekend. It is an odd recipe, with less stirring than usual, so we'll see how that goes.

Oh apples. These are going into our usual apple sauce, a new pizza recipe with this arugula, and no doubt many other things. We managed to get the apple drawer empty enough that we can put this week's apples in, which means we will be freeing up the counter for next week's apples. Yay? These leeks are going in the risotto with the celeriac. After spending an irritating amount of time peeling these sweet dumpling squash, I had an epiphany: Peeling them is foolish, so stuff those mofos. We have a few different acorn squash recipes that should adapt pretty well and save us from having to get into all the indentations on these suckers with a peeler or knife. We are roasting these beets for our favorite salad and used the greens in our winter green pizza (linked last week.)

CSA Winter Share 1

Winter share! Last time we did a winter share, we were buried under a pile of potatoes, had our car break down and lock us out at the pickup site in freezing temperatures when we had no coats, and discovered that we are incapable of eating two pounds of novelty cheese a month. What adventures does this year hold? Tune in to find out.

I am going to attempt to mix it up this time through and actually link in recipes where I can. We'll see how long that lasts.

More cabbage, this time in the form of an oddly shaped savoy cabbage. You can't really tell here, but it's very flat and wide. No idea what we will do with it, having just come off the six pound napa last week. This garlic has been added to the garlic chain in the closet. Though we still have a dozen or more heads in there, I do feel like we are going through it at a fair clip. We will probably use this zamboni rapini to keep our ice rink nice and smooth. We may also make some winter green pizza with it, a favorite recipe of ours. No specific plans for this arugula, so it'll probably end up in salad. I tossed these sweet onions into my onion bin, so hopefully they aren't that much different than the other half dozen varieties we have in there.

The very first time we got Brussels sprouts we tried roasting, and didn't much care for them. Now that we know that there are good preparations of them, we're going back to that well. Radishes for salad and snacking. More potatoes. More lettuce. Still odd to be getting so much so late. Oh apples. Apples, apples, apples. So much for getting fewer from the non-fruit shared winter share. We plan to make a new recipe for apple sauce this week, so we'll see how that goes. We are also taking advantage of fresh cranberries to clear out some pears from the apple drawer in the form of pear cranberry pie.

CSA Week 21

This week is actually our last summer share. Due to the timing of the farmer's market where we pick up our share, this one is both share 21 and 22 leading it to have a few items in bulk.

We've signed up for the winter share and it starts this coming week, picking up on Wednesday. We prefer later week pickups, so that's an improvement. We also hope that with so much of the winter share being hearty stuff, they will know what is in a share a bit earlier and send us that before our pick up. That's been an issue this time around, and not knowing until we bring it home has seriously interfered with our normal system.

Finally we are getting some cooking greens, in the form of kale and swiss chard. The chard went into our scramble for a quick weeknight dinner, and the rest of that and the kale are going into soup. This pumpkin is actually a culinary one, so I plan to roast and puree it. I think they current plan is to use the puree in my Pumpkin Cinnamon Rolls for Thanksgiving morning. I'll also roast the seeds, and may get creative with the spices there, depending on if Mary plans on having any. Various squashes. Two of these look like rounder delicata, so we may be able to eat the skin. The others will definitely need more prep work, but that's ok. Squash has grown on us so much that it's worth the work.

Twelve heads of garlic. I had a storage crisis due to this garlic, and did a flurry of re-organization in our pantry/root cellar. It's better, but I am still agitating to deal with our overflow spices that also live in there. Another celeriac. Sunchokes are something that folks seem to go gaga for, but we have yet to find a recipe that we're in love with. We've only gotten them once before, so it's not a huge deal. At least this time we got a bunch of them, so it should be easier to find a recipe of the proper scale. A lovely bag of turnips. Less sweet that many other root veggies, we're big fans. These have already been roasted and glazed, along with some other roots. Notable about this recipe is that it appears to be a gateway for walnuts, perhaps the nuttiest of nuts. Onions The last CSA did not grow sweet potatoes. They actually had a policy against it, because they are an extra-hippy farm and sweet potatoes don't fit into their overall philosophy. Every time I worry that I have become the crazy guy that composts his own feces, someone comes along and reminds me that I am not actually that bad.

Guess the weight of this napa cabbage. Four pounds? Too low. Five pounds? Too low. Six glorious pounds. Of cabbage. We have three recipes planned, and with any luck we won't be throwing out too much after all that. These leeks are going into a pasta dish with lemon and chicken. Sounds a bit odd, but it's very good. A very large bag of potatoes of widely varying sizes and colors. A lot of times when we get oddly colored veggies, they prove to be the same as their non-oddly colored brethren under the hood. These purple carrots actually have streaks of purple in the flesh as well as purple skin. Fun! The last apples of the season! They are sitting on the counter at the moment, since the apple drawer in the fridge is full. Also, I am sure we will see more apples in the winter share, though hopefully fewer now that there isn't a formal, separate fruit share. I think that in the end, doing a fruit share with all local fruit in the midwest just isn't viable. Once you get past the berries of spring, there just aren't enough options.

CSA Week 20

We have so many apples at this point that I am considering making my own cider. Not very seriously, but the thought has certainly crossed my mind. We made our green bean, dill and feta salad with these beans. It has easy prep, and we could consume them over time. Garlic. Our first (and so far only) butternut squash from this place. This remains our favorite winter squash, and we are saving it for a beloved pasta dish (with roasted squash and red pepers.) Green cauliflower. Onions.

More lettuce means more salad. The greens on the beets were pretty anemic, so I actually tossed them. How odd that I have gone from making fun of others for being so frontier woman as to cook the greens on their root veggies to feeling sad that I had to toss them out myself. As with many new vegetables, after finding a way in via a gateway recipe (Brussels sprouts with lemon and caraway) we have successfully branched out and come to like other recipes. Not sure yet what we'll do with these, but they keep well so there's not too much rush. Green onions One nice thing about the zillions of potatoes we have gotten from this CSA is that many have been fingerling potatoes. Since they are small and have thinner skins, prep is much faster. It's nice to have potatoes that we can prep on weeknights and still eat at a reasonable hour.

CSA Week 19

I had actually gotten caught up on the blog and was feeling so good about myself, then life got crazy. Oh well, these things happen. Onward!

We're getting properly into root veggie season, though we've been getting potatoes all along. They last well, so we're not too worried about them. It feels like leeks have been a pretty popular veggie here. It's always interesting to see how much the CSAs vary between providers, given that it's all sourced from roughly the same area. I am quite fond of celeriac, and not just because it sounds like a vegetable-based super villain (though that undeniably helps its case.) It has a mild celery flavor without the stringiness of actual celery. This one got glazed and roasted, but in general they can be treated like any other root veggie. Parsnips need a little extra prep work compared to other roots (the core is very fibrous and generally gets removed) but it has a nice sweet flavor and we really like it mashed with potatoes. Apples and pears

The salad green situation from this CSA has been so bizarre. We ramped up for the spring onslaught, and it never came. Now that we are expecting lots of cooking greens, we get lettuce and arugula. Weird. I have gotten so much better about prepping radishes and bringing them as snacks. The secret is not buying my lies when I tell myself I can just prep them in the morning. A few small heads of broccoli. More poblano peppers went into a fritatta and got subbed for bell peppers. They are not very hot, so it's an easy sub. Dried black beans are sitting in the cupboard, getting stored until winter. We tend to use canned beans rather than dried, though that's just habit so maybe having these will convert us. Several of our cooking magazine suggest prepping a huge batch of dried beans on the weekend and then using it throughout the week, but we just don't eat that many of any one kind of bean.

CSA Week 18

As of this post, I will be fully caught up! For a few hours, anyway.

More dragon tongue beans. These look fun, but can be treated as wax beans, which is cool with me because I've always liked wax beans. Decorative mini pumpkins gave last week's gourds the boot. We can only be so festive here. Green tomatoes for frying. This is our first time with kabocha squash I believe. I am sure it's roastable and delicious. Cauliflower And the gigantic 500 pound elephant in the room, apples and pears. So many apples and pears. We did apple butter and a rustic apple tart this weekend, and I do believe I am officially buying an apple corer and slicer. We signed up for the winter share, so I am expecting our apple drawer to stay full for a while.

A zillion little eggplants are going into componata. More garlic It's been ages since we made our sweet potato samosas, so that's likely where these fellas will go. Red onions We finally broke down and bought oyster sauce, but we didn't really notice a significant change in the recipe we make for boc choi. It had been my impression that everything it goes in take on its flavor, but maybe this recipe just had too little. Various gigantic radishes. I was worried that these would be crazy fibrous and hot, given their size, but they actually aren't bad. We used most of the red ones in our cooked radish recipe and they turned out well.

CSA Week 17

What'da'ya'know, it's more apples. Brussel sprouts More carrots. This time we roasted them with salt, pepper, and fennel seed. Beets with greens. The beets got roasted and saladed (our old standby) and the greens were cooked and served on pizza.

Sugar snap peas are great stir fried with red pepper. And we got these mixed peppers, so perfect! Onions I can't for the life of me recall what we did with this spinach. We actually were running low on garlic after making naan and our braise last week, so it's nice to get more. These gourds are purely decorative, which is a shame because I was all excited to actually cook with them. What can I say, the CSA has made me like novelty vegetables. We dutifully propped these on the mantel for a week. Festive. Fingerling potatoes

CSA Week 16

After having so many recipes that called napa cabbage and subbing in regular, we finally actually have the darn thing and we are flummoxed as to what to do with it. Ain't that the way? We ended up slawing it, and that appears to be the one way it's inferior to normal. Live and learn. Mizuna is a pretty mild flavored salad green. Mild enough that we made salads with it subbed in for the lettuce. Delicata squash is unique in the squash world because you can eat the skin. For real! It looks like it will be the crazy armor that other winter squashes have, but you don't even notice the texture of it once cooked. Bizzare. We used these italian plums in an Asian-inspired pork tenderloin with plum barbecue sauce. It's fusion, yo. After all this time being serious(ish) about food, I still make a "take a leek" joke every time we cook with them. We make our own fun.

What's this? More apples? Not that we have any shortage of potatoes (shown here along with their sweet cousins), but apples are quickly replacing them as our vegetable that we are buried under a heap of. The largest drawer in our fridge is now our official apple drawer, and each week we worry that we will overflow it. Arugula for pizza. We talked a big game about swapping up our recipe for Brussels sprouts but couldn't pull the trigger and swapped back at the last minute. Wax beans

CSA Week 15

Ah, so far behind. You know how it goes, you start something, then you get a little behind, then you get so far behind that being behind is the excuse for not actually doing the new posts. Yeah, I'm in that spiral. This share was a solo pick-up by Mary, since I seem to have a knack for scheduling work obligations on Tuesdays. I stink that way.

Lima beans went into a three bean salad. Inoffensive. I think that these carrots went into our favorite fall and winter dish, Best Beef Ever. While I am sad to see summer go, I do love cold weather food. Apples and pears We usually have trouble finding a use for spaghetti squash. We keep trying fancy recipes that we think will rescue it one way or another, but this time we broke down and just doused it in a tomato based sauce (with turkey and a lot of red pepper.) It was pretty good, and I think part of that was roasting (instead of steaming) the squash. I feel like we've turned a corner here, and dare I say I am hoping to get another to experiment with?

Cauliflower Broccoli Various onions While this fella looks like boc choy, the claim is that he's asian spinach. Not sure if that's the same thing or not, but we subbed it for normal spinach in a soup and it was fine, though a bit bland due to following the recipe (vegetable stock) instead of our hearts (chicken stock.)

These green beans are actually hariocot verts. Ooh lah lah! This mix of tomatoes are the tail end of the season. Farewell, tomatoes.

CSA Week 14

Between learning Italian in our free time, me playing video games, and me working on writing my own video game, I have gotten myself very behind on the CSA post. I am going to attempt to do a flurry of catch-up posts, but we'll see how far I get before losing steam...

Assorted tomatoes I think of leeks as a spring thing, but this farm is rocking them in the fall. We have a ton of recipes that use them, and I don't think we've had to revert to subbing them for other onion-relatives yet. Nice! This farm has not been great about sending us what is in the share beforehand. With this share, we actually got that email two days after picking up the share. We did a lot of internet research on these two purple colored forms of peas. Turns out all our research was wrong. The first are a form of shelling pea (which we subbed into our fave pea pasta) called missippi crowder peas and the second are edible shell beans called dragon tongue beans. For the record, we had guessed purple hull peas and cranberry beans. This watermelon turned out to be yellow. We froze most of it and have been enjoying the resultant margaritas (they turn into a very fun color when you use both pink and yellow.)

Holy mother of bell peppers! This place sure likes 'em. Most of these either got stuffed (the larger ones) or sliced and used in a recipe for pepper chicken (which was quite tasty.) Caped gooseberries were less bitter than their non-caped brethren, but still had a certain oddness about them that it's hard to put my finger on. They had a sort of....almost savory or meaty flavor, but not in a necessarily good way. We ended up subbing them for fresh cranberries (augmented with some fresh cranberries) in a crisp with some of these pears. Apples mostly got turned into our favorite apple sauce. Fingerling potatoes got added to the giant pile of potatoes in our pantry. We have a few recipes for fingerlings, we just need to clear a whole in the menu plan for 'em.

CSA 2011 - Week 13

Last week's share went fairly well, and we even managed to use up the many peppers. We stuffed the poblanos and made an insanely spicy (but addictively delicious) salsa with the serranos.

Half of the watermelon got frozen and blended into margaritas where it takes on a pretty mild flavor. Since it's got more solids than ice at room temperature, the drinks keep their thickness even partway through drinking them. Next big thing, mark my words.

I did make the basil syrup for ice tea. It's actually pretty mild, and blends in pretty nicely with the tea flavor.

Summer squash is an item that we have been buried in by every previous CSA. We love it, but we are used to getting several a week for many weeks in a row. We have all sorts of savory and sweet dishes that use it, and we are fond of all of them. I wouldn't say that we look forward to the tenth week of it, but I will say this: We feel a little shorted this year. These guys (a mix of pattypan and odd little globular fellas) went into a dish with some leeks and feta cheese. These daikon radishes are getting split. Part will be shredded and added to slaw (with this blessedly small head of cabbage.) Part will be subbed for turnips in a root vegetable stew (our second foray into cooked radish!) Ah celery. You are a divisive vegetable. I like your crunch and your tang. Mary, less so. This went into a lentil soup that we love (as if we could not love anything with six slices of bacon) and will otherwise get snacked on. Though we got these potatoes, Mary still purchased yukon golds for the root veggie stew. Madness! These guys will go into our old standby, the Rosti (along with some shredded daikon.)

These tomatoes went all over this week. In pie with some of the corn. on Pizza with some of these peppers. Sliced and sprinkled with sea salt. Diced and tossed into salads (again with the peppers, I think there might be some kind of fling going on there.) Our carrots went into the lentil dish. When life gives you apples, you make apple sauce. Given that we will be grilling this evening in high-60 degree weather despite it being labor day, I fear we must admit that autumn is upon us. The good side of that is that we can finally feel good about making apple cake, which is what we'll likely do with the batch of apples we are sure to get in the next share. Radishes went in salads and got taken to work as snacks. This year's challenge veggie is definitely the peppers. We always get more than we need since we don't use a ton of them in cooking, but this CSA seems mad for them and sends a ton of them each week. They freeze very poorly (the texture breaks down) so we can't even fall back to that. Who would have thought that I'd be missing the cucumber onslaught from the last place?

Smokin'

I always joke that I should take up smoking. I actually find it to be a pretty gross habit, but man those smokers get a lot of breaks. Well as of this past weekend, I believe I am converted to the cause, thanks to this recipe for bourbon smoked chicken.

The great thing about the recipe is that there is no need for a smoker: You can do it right in a normal grill, even a gas one. We do have both gas and charcoal grills, but we use the charcoal one for special occasions (we'll be grilling a T-Bone on it for the long weekend, for example.) For weeknight cooking (or long cook times where we'd have to add more coals) it's hard to beat the convenience of turning on a knob.

The equipment and layout is shown here. Other than the grill, you just need a few disposable pans, a trustworthy thermometer (see below (we call this foreshadowing)), and some wood chips. In the layout shown, I am only heating the front burner, which is why the chips are piled in that area. The chicken in at the back of the grill, where it has the most clearance (the lid slopes more in the front.) Following the recipe, we tossed in half the (presoaked) chips and placed the brined and patted dry chicken over a pan of water (to help keep the temperature more even) and then kept the grill at 275 for two hours, adding more wood chips halfway through. We used a probe thermometer to monitor the temperature of the bird, so we didn't need to do anything other than adding the extra wood chips.

The other key piece of equipment is a comfy place to sit for two hours and a beverage or two. Unfortunately, the grill thermometer was right over the one active heating element, so it reported the grill as being hotter than it really was. Because of this, our two hour smoke turned into a three and a half hour one. Our probe actually has two readings, one for in the bird and one for the ambient temperature. In the future we will trust that, which should shorten the cooking time to the recommended length. And will there be a next time? Oh yes. Despite the long cooking time and some frustration with grilling in the dark due to that, the chicken had a great flavor and texture. It was totally cooked, but still very juicy with a great flavor imparted by both the brine and smoke. Definitely a keeper.

CSA 2011 - Week 12

Oh melon. Melon, melon, melon. This week we got two watermelons. Mary is a bit particular about not consuming any seeds, so cutting this up for consumption was pretty involved. The more solid colored one of these was the normal pink and the lighter one was yellow. We ate some of it and froze the rest for margaritas. This rutabaga is a harbinger of autumn, I am not at all happy about it. Thankfully they are called "storing vegetables" for a reason, so I can tuck it in the back of the fridge and pretend that it's July for a few more weeks. Glorious tomatoes. Most of what we planted this year were grape tomatoes, because they tend to do much better on our deck. It's nice to get the larger varieties from the CSA. These will go into this and that, including a corn and crab salad we're having for lunch today. Onions Garlic I am not quite sure what to do with this odd looking basil. We have a few pucks of pesto in the freezer already, so I may attempt something creative (basil simple syrup for flavoring ice tea?) or I may go easy and just make more pesto. Time shall tell.

Leeks to us are more of a spring thing for us, so we're a bit adrift with these. We'll likely sub them in for green onions, which is a bit of a stretch. What can I say, I'm a rebel. Beans I had always thought that Serrano chilies were milder than jalapenos, but it turns out I had that backwards. We are going to put most of these into a salsa that cooks the peppers to soften the heat, so hopefully that comes out well. Pears went into our fruit butter along with some of these (and if I'm being honest, last week's) apples. I also have an apple pie in progress as I type this, though it turns out our uglier apples are actually ugly pears, so it's more of an orchard fruit pie. I'm sure we'll muddle through. Pablano peppers got stuffed, and while the recipe wasn't horrible, it also wasn't anything special. The remaining ones (there are two left) are going into poblano burgers, so with luck that'll be a hit. We've thankfully found a potato salad that we love, so we've been a lot better about using them as they come in this year. Thanks Ina!

CSA 2011 - Week 11

Ah, midsummer. The corn is flowing, the tomatoes are ripe, and I am slacking off on the blog posts. All is right with the world.

Let's start with the elephant in the room, and by elephant I mean giant, elephantine mellons. The small one in the picture is a normal mellon size. The other two are....larger. Much larger. Most of the biggest one got turned into sorbet, and the other two are getting eaten as-is. If we get more next week (which seems likely) then I am going to cut it up, freeze it, and use it for a base to margaritas like we did with the watermelon last year. Corn is still sweet and delicious. So many peppers, we have no idea what to do with them. We actually made Chili over the weekend to consume some, even though that's much more a winter item. We also had them raw in salads and in a few other dishes. We'll like have to do a fridge-clearing roasted pepper salad soon. Red onions

We got two different types of apples this week, and it's looking like they will end up in pie. We also have a great fruit butter recipe that we usually make with pears that I am stumping for. We have one recipe that calls for watercress and we can never find it in the store. Do I remember what recipe that is, now that we have it? I do not. Red okra got roasted, just like the green stuff. This time I tossed it with a spice blend instead of just salt and pepper, and it turned out well. We made a fantastic vegetable gratin with these tomatoes and some zucchini. Potatoes Cucumbers These odd little fellas are actually eggplants, despite not being aubergine (see what I did there?) They are the size of a small apple and shockingly orange. We chopped them and used them in a new componata recipe, so we'll see how that is once I toast up some pitas.

CSA 2011 - Week 10

Last week's share went swimmingly, and the okra recipe we used (roasted with salt and pepper) was actually very good. There was a bit too much salt, but otherwise it was quite tasty. I'm still not buying okra.

Nice melons. These were cantaloupe and while they averaged to a normal size the standard deviation was, shall we say, high. Green peppers Garlic We were pretty thrilled to get more beets. This time they are golden beets and are going into our root vegetable gratin (along with several of these shallots.) The mail from the CSA describes banana peppers as being spicy, but I find them fairly mild in general. Not sure what we are going to do with such a pepper bonanza. Every head of cabbage is a little betrayal.

Tomatoes have arrived! We got quite a variety, with a few different types of full-sized ones as well as a bag of cherry-sized ones. We will make a salad with some of them, and a pie with the others (along with the corn from this week.) Baby artichokes are actually mature specimens of a variety that grow small. They supposedly are easier to prepare and have no toxic choke on the inside. We plan to make a salad with them. This mix of apples already contributed to a dessert with last week's pears, and the rest will become delicious maple applesauce. Baby white carrots will contribute to the gratin along with the beets.

CSA 2011 - Week 9

Despite me being gone for a fair chunk of last week, we actually did well keeping up with the share.

The cooked radishes were a success. Before cooking, these were pretty spicy and a bit fibrous and cooking really mellowed the heat and soften the flesh. It helps that the dish also had a wine, mustard, and tarragon sauce.

The other tricky bit had been the garbanzos. I had hoped to roast them, but on the day we wanted to have them we were running late, so we just boiled them in shell, popped them out (which was a huge pain in the butt since each pod contains just one to two beans), and tossed them with salt. I do still want to try roasted ones, but we can use a can for that.

I ended up triggering some bad settings on the camera this week, so the pictures are pretty low quality. I'd save live and learn, but it's hardly the first time I've done that.

This week's corn is mirai bicolor sweetcorn which the CSA administrator guy says is the the best they grow. We'll probably eat it mostly off the cob, this time around. Savanah Green Beans These six little fellas are yellow gypsy peppers. Even though we just did our grilled pepper salad, we will probably repeat that. We'll also toss some on a pizza this weekend. We have a great recipe for camponata that we'll make with this sicilian bicolor eggplant. A huge bunch of fidenza basil will get used mostly for pesto (which we'll freeze) but also allows us to make Chicken with Peaches and Basil. Yum. How surprising to see more broccoli.

This week's challenge will be okra. It's not a veggie that either of us particularly likes, though Mary is more forgiving of it than I. As with all troublesome veggies, the plan is to try it roasted. Baby vidalia onions These cool breeze cucumbers will get used for science pickles this weekend. It's hard for me to name this melon. It's milder than cantaloupe, but more strongly flavored than honeydew, with green flesh that turns orange near the seeds. Oddness. Regardless, we are just cutting it up and eating it as-is. We don't yet have a plan for these seckel pears, but I suspect that a dessert is in their future. Red thumb fingerling potatoes These tokyo green onions got eaten on tacos. How international of us.

CSA 2011 - Week 8

Bit of a late post again, but at least I have a valid excuse this time in the form of an almost week-long visit to the Corporate Mothership. It was a good visit, but it did leave Mary to pick up and photograph the CSA on her own, and got us a bit behind on the consumption curve.

I am told that there were raspberries in this share, but they were long gone by the time I returned home. Mary reports that they were juicy and delicious. More tasty, tasty corn. We already had two of these off the cob, and plan to make a smoked mozzarella and corn pie with the other. Yum. These turnip looking fellows are actually watermelon radishes. We are going to enter the scary world of the cooked radish for the first time, so we'll see how that goes. Two incredibly dark red shallots. Assorted sweet peppers will get roasted and turned into a lovely and colorful salad.

These quinte apples are getting baked into a rustic tart. We actually have a bunch of non-dessert apple recipes, but for some reason we have been using them all in desserts lately. I guess I can convince myself that Apple Pie is a summer thing, whereas Roast Pork with Apple and Onions just screams autumn. Red bull onions will get mixed with some storebought ones and made into a rustic onion tart with feta and thyme. We are apparently in a rustic mood this week. This is a new recipe for us, but I have been told that it's great by others so I am excited to try it. Oh garlic scapes, I thought we were done. These will go into naan and our garlic lover's rub, which is entertainingly green when done with scapes. Did you know that there is such a thing as fresh garbanzo beans? I mean, logic dictates that there must be, but it never occurred to me that they came from anything but a can or bag. I guess I thought the stork brought them? We're at a bit of loss with these, and we may just roast them or make them into hummus and get our snack on.

These red potatoes will likely get mashed and eaten with the radish and chicken recipe. Carrots are carrots. We'll either fool ourselves into thinking that we will cut them and bring them to work as snacks then fall back to roasting them, or we'll just roast them. I suspect the first is more likely. This freakish fellow is an Armenian cucumber. It's not only striped like a circus tent, but also slightly fuzzy. We haven't cut into it yet, so we'll see what other wonders await.

Cucumber Mojito Sorbet

When one is in a CSA, one sometimes finds him or herself buried under a mountain of something with no idea how to use it all. For many it is zucchini, for us last year it was cucumbers.

I set out to find an interesting application that was delicious and consumed as many cukes as possible. I settled on sorbet, since it's something I enjoy making anyway. It helped that it was off kilter enough to seem odd, but plausibly delicious.

I fairly quickly got the flavor to a place I liked, and found that the cucumber itself brought a nice melon-like flavor once sweetened. Sadly, I had a lot of issues getting the texture to be anything but rock solid once it was frozen. I fiddled with adding more rum and higher proportions of simple syrup to overcome this, but to no avail.

Reading over a melon sorbet recipe more recently, I saw a comment that all the water in the melon meant that the texture would be extra icy. I wondered if I could psych out the simple syrup by making it with cuke juice rather than water. That was the key. This batch is still a little crumbly, but still scoopable when frozen and great tasting. Take that, cucumbers!

Cucumber Mojito Sorbet
1.5 Pounds cucumber
.5 Cup sugar
2 Tablespoons corn syrup (also helps reduce iciness)
.75 oz mint (that's one supermarket packet)
1 Shot of rum
Juice of 2 limes

1. Peel, chop, and puree the cucumber. If you are working with small-seeded varieties (as I was) go ahead and leave them in. For other types, you'll probably want to remove them.
   
2. Pour the cucumber puree into a strainer over a measuring cup and collect 2/3 cup juice. Keep the remaining solids and liquid (which in my case was about 1.5 cups total.)
   
3. Combine the cucumber liquid, sugar, corn syrup, and mint in a saucepan. Boil to dissolve sugar. Allow syrup to cool to room temperature and mint to steep. Remove mint.
   
4. Mix the room temperature syrup, cucumber solids, lime juice, and rum. Chill the mixture, then freeze in an ice cream machine.
   

CSA 2011 - Week 7

Not too much to report from last week. Things went pretty smoothly and other than my science pickles (which I plan on trying a second, larger batch of today) we didn't do anything too wacky.

Let's start with the most important bit: It's sweet corn season. For both of us, corn and tomatoes are the apotheosis of summer, and we look forward to them every year. While we love to grill it, we are going to make our creamed corn with leek and bacon with this batch. These fingerling potatoes are going to get steamed and made into potato salad. The first proper garlic of the summer. We'll use it here and there. Three colors of french beans. We always talk big about all the things we are going to do with beans, then we get home from a long day of work, take one look at the recipe, and say, "I ain't blanching." We will likely just steam these in the microwave with a little butter. Sweet vidalia onions A head of savoy cabbage. Savoy cabbage tends to appear in recipes for stuffed cabbage and cabbage wraps, so maybe we'll give one of those a go. And then have three quarters of a head of cabbage left.

These four Japanese eggplants are going into a baked pasta dish. It can also take zucchini, so it's keeper. One of these heads of broccoli is actually a head of romesco cauliflower. This tastes like cauliflower but looks all fractal-y and pointy. Neat! These two Japanese cucumbers are grist for my experiments. As I type this, I have a batch of sorbet underway where I am trying a new approach to solve my texture issues. I'll either follow up in another post (success!) or the header to the next CSA post (failure!) on how that goes. Last time we had black and red currants I managed to totally waste them by failing to make jam. This time around we are going to make a crisp with them and these apples, so hopefully we have better luck. Arugula will go into salads with the last of last week's lettuce and also onto egg and herbed ricotta sandwiches.

Pickles! Science!

Having received a bag of small cucumbers this week that were clearly intended to be pickled, I searched around for recipes. Most require full sterile bottling, though I did find some quick pickling recipes.

One thing that all of these recipes did in common was time. Since I am not filling my larder for the long winter months with Ma Ingalls, I don't really need these fellows pickled but just want to infuse in some extra flavor. I was reminded of an article I had just read on using a wine vacuum saver to quickly infuse flavors and figured I'd give it a try.

For the test I made a brine with:

• 1/2 cup white vinegar
  
• 1 1/2 tsp salt
  
• 1/4 cup sugar
  
• 1/4 tsp mustard seed
  
• 1/4 tsp celerey seed
  

I popped the brine ingredients into the microwave for two minutes on high to boil in the sugar and salt, and then let the mixture sit for an hour to so to come back to room temperature.

Next I cut a cucumber into spears and put it into a wine bottle. I had to cut them thinner than I may normally have (eights rather than quarters) to get them through the neck. Over the cukes I poured the cooled brine.

Now, the science! I used the wine savor to suck out all of the air in the bottle, then released the pressure as described in the article. Just to be sure, I repeated this step a second time. I upturned the bottle (over the same measuring cup I had had the brine in) and dislodged the logjam of (hopefully transformed) cucumbers with a bamboo skewer.

How did they turn out? Interesting. Because it was a very quick pickling, there was a much more overt cucumber texture and flavor, but the brine had clearly infiltrated. There was too much sugar for my taste and the seasonings were barely present, so I think next time I will reduce the sugar by half (which will put it at 1/4 what the original recipe had) and up the brine additions. I may also try boiling the brine for a longer period to help the added herbs infuse it.

The amount of brine I made was way more than was required, but that dumb bump at the bottom of wine bottles fooled me into thinking I would need more than I did. Next time I'll push my luck and see how many cukes I can fit into this amount of brine.

CSA 2011 - Week 6

Oh, I had big plans. I was going to open this blog post with a picture of gorgeous, jewel-toned currant jelly. But then I overcooked the berries, causing the juice to coagulate too early and one kitchen sink crime scene later, the currants were done for and I was jelly-less. If we get them again some time, I will have to try the recipe again, but without the boiling and the sorrow. I also ended up way behind this week due to a few late nights at work. Hopefully all that madness is behind us.

This place is quite a Broccoli farm. We've gotten it several weeks in a row. This will probably get roasted. When in doubt, roast. This week's onions are Supersweet vidalia onions. These won't be 1:1 substitutable for yellow onions, but we have a bunch of recipes that call for the sweet ones, so we should be ok. Not sure what we'll do with these eureka and concessa snap beans. We have a great salad that uses beans, sweet onion, and feta so we'll likely take that route. Once the zucchini begins, it doesn't stop. This week: Lebanese zucchini.

For a thrilling twist, we plan on not making our scramble with this Ruby swiss chard. We've made a saute before with shard, leek, and lots of butter, and that's where this is headed. We've never had Gooseberries before, but according to the internet, they are often very sour and are often used with rhubarb. Once we actually got our hands on them though, they really weren't that bad. We ended up just eating them as-is. They taste vaguely like plums. These Blueberries likely won't survive the night. Mm......blueberries. Cilantro is something we always seem to need until we actually get it from the CSA, then our minds blank on recipes that use it. Mary has been bemoaning the lack of salad lately (yes, really) so she was most excited by this Mixed baby lettuce this week. Freak.

The first cukes of the season are these Japanese cucumbers. Last year we had so many that I ended up experimenting with them in the form of Cucumber Mojito Sorbet. We're not to that point this year, but I am hoping we do get there because I think I have a way to make the sorbet not get quite as solid, and I am dying to try it this year. These are vaguely spiney, which is odd. As with broccoli, so with Cauliflower Greens are back in the form of darkibor kale. We have a small amount of cabbage leftover, so we may make soup and freeze it. We liked the pea pasta that we made earlier in the year so much, both Mary and Immediately though of it when we got these Green arrow english peas. Repeats aren't always bad. When we saw that we were getting Wisconsin SMR pickles we were unsure if we were getting pickles, or just pickling cucumbers. We are still not sure since we've been consumed with consuming other stuff.

CSA 2011 - Week 5

It will be a bit of a quick post today, I am afraid. With the holiday we didn't get the warning email from the farm this week, so some of our pre-share prep wasn't able to be done until post-share pickup. Not a huge thing, but it put us a little behind, CSA-wise. The only real comment from last week is that the Favas were fine. We did end up doing a pasta with them. It was good, but not so good as to warrant running out and searching for Favas. Maybe next time we are in Italy (ahh......Italy) we will try them at a restaurant.

The greens from these white beets are the only ones we are getting this week. It's a nice reprieve, since we've been having them in dishes and as sides for a few weeks now. We can't resist putting this radicchio into our favorite risotto. Cauliflower The internet seems to imply that the only use for red and black currants is to turn them into jelly. Who am I to disagree? Fresh, delicious, sweet raspberries. Oh cabbage, my old nemesis, we meet again. This guy will probably get slawed, though he's pretty big. I am sure that this summer we will continue our crusade to find good, non-slaw uses for this prolific vegetable. Currently, our only liked non-slaw recipe is a fall soup which we almost always freeze for later consumption.

More carrots More onions These two small heads of broccoli will probably go into a stir-fry with shrimp. The first zucchini of the season. One chubby green one and one pattypan, both will likely go into a side dish we've had before and liked. This farm always has tons of potatoes at their farmer's market table, so I think we need to gird our loins for an onslaught of the things. These are very thin skinned and need to be kept in the fridge. They do look really good though, in a leprous kind of way. We turned the previous kohlrabi into a pretty tasty slaw with carrots. This one will likely get cooked with lemon and honey, which is a recipe almost worth seeking out kohlrabi for.

CSA 2011 - Week 4

Last week's share went pretty well, though we do still have a large bag of beet and turnip greens taking up valuable fridge real estate, even after making a few different dishes. We have a good recipe for gingered greens that calls for three pounds of mixed greens, so we'll likely attempt to clear things out with that, this week. The new item last week had been the rapini, which we prepared as we would kale (which seemed to be its closest relative.) It was good, but I can't say that it tasted significantly different than kale to us. Nothing to fear, but nothing to seek out. Despite my big talk, I once again did not do anything exotic with my scapes. They ended up in three or four different dishes, with some left over. Maybe next year.

I am not sure what we'll do with these purple haze carrots. We like to roast carrots, but since these look so odd they may just be eaten raw as snacks. Last week's tokyo turnips got consumed with the beets in a gratin. This week we will probably try something that's a bit more turnip focused. A lot of the recipes we find are much more autumnal than we are looking for in June (even a rainy, cold June) so we may ask the magical internet for a good option. Spring onions As far as I can tell, fava beans are lima beans with more work. Also, I've heard they go well with liver. They are a large bean that needs to be shelled twice (once from the pod, then once from a tough skin around the actual bean) that is popular in Italian cooking. Neither of us have had them before, so we'll report back next week how it went. Florence Fennel sounds like a character from a children's book about misunderstood vegetables.

More beets! This time it's chioggia and kestral red beets. We had to bail on our favorite beet recipe last week due to having guests who were beet-averse, so we will almost certainly do that this week. Mmmm....roasted beet and caramelized onion salad... Tuscan kale will get added to the big bag o' greens along with two types of beet greens and turnip greens. Yikes. Emerald Broccoli These jewel strawberries are sadly the last of these berries for the year. But all hope is not lost: Blueberries, raspberries, and currants are coming into season, so we should start seeing those. We till have a little strawberry frozen yogurt left-over due to my tendency to make ice creams when there is already another dessert available, but maybe we'll have that done in time for me to justify blueberry sorbet. If not, blueberry pie!

CSA 2011 - Week 3

Another good week of CSA-ness down. I did end up making the strawberry ice cream (frozen yogurt, actually) and it's delicious and bursting with fresh berry flavor. We also made a seemingly simple but very good pasta with the peas, winning Mary over. She has even forgiven it for needing thirty minutes of pea shelling prep, it was so good. Wow! Surprisingly, we got no lettuce this week. In previous years we have gotten a landslide of it all spring and early summer, so it's a nice change to have a week off.

Our email from the farm indicated that these are "real baby carrots". Most baby carrots from the store are actually regular sized carrots whittled down to a smaller size to feed America's all-consuming obsession with baby eating. We'll see how these differ and report. Not sure what we'll do with them, which means we'll probably roast them. We weren't expecting it, but we got a bunch of kholrabi this week. It tastes like a mix of cabbage and broccoli, has a texture like a firmer radish, and looks like a alien softball. We are going to try a slaw with it, this time around. We plan on doing a quick stir fry of these sugar ann sugar snap peas as a side. We've done it before and it elevated the starchier store-bought ones, so I am curious to see how it works with the much sweeter fresh ones. We may be ruining this recipe by doing it right. It seems too early for turnips, yet here are some Tokyo market turnips. We have a few good recipes, but to me root veggies are more of an autumn/winter thing, so we may have to figure out a use that's more summery. More red spring onions.

Hiding on the left, looking for all the world like a beet green, this sprigariello rapini is apparently of the broccoli family. The internet tells me that it's basically broccoli where you eat the leaves instead of the flowers. Not yet sure what we'll do with it. Another one that seems eary (but I am not looking a gift horse in the mouth) is yellow rangel beets. We may actually branch out from our several well loved beet recipes and try a new one (roasted and tossed with citrus sections.) To the untrained eye it doesn't look like we got many cooking greens, but since we tend to eat the greens from beets and turnips, we actually have a giant bag of them in the fridge, awaiting their turn to become culinary delights. The closest thing we got to lettuce this week was baby spinach, and I think the beet salad calls for it. Score! If that's not the case, we may buy a small head of lettuce at the store to consume this as part of salads. Ah, spring; time of berries; how we love you. We have family coming to visit for the weekend, so these Jewel and Cavendish Strawberries will get cut up and eaten over lemon pound cake. The pound cake is the French Pastry School recipe that I love to fiddle with (Lemon Ginger Pound Cake and Earl Gray Pound Cake were both amazing) but since the berries are the star here I will likely just make the original recipe. It's still great. Swiss chard will get scrambled with eggs and herbs for dinner. Every year I struggle to figure out a great use for garlic scapes and every year I end up subbing them for regular garlic. Since we already made our eight clove garlic lover's rub this past week with the green garlic and associated scapes, I hope that this will be the year I get inspired. We'll see. An idea is forming to char them on the grill to mellow the flavor and bring in some smokier tones, then puree the lot into a white bean dip. We'll see if that happens...