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...

CSA 2011- Week 2

Another week already! The first week of the new CSA went well, and the only real challenge was the pea shoots. We tried just eating them raw on salads which I could have sworn I had read somewhere, but only the very tips were tender enough to eat that way. Next time we'll have to try a stir-fry or something. This week is very green, with an explosion of leaf vegetables. It's a mix of cooking and salad greens, so I think we'll make it through.

We got more Spring garlic this week, and if you look closely you can see that the scapes are still attached. Fun! We have a recipe for the grill that involves slathering chicken with a large amount of garlic mashed into a paste. I see that in our future, with both the scapes and bulbs. Red stutgart onions French breakfast radishes are usually funny looking, but these have an inch of pencil-thin neck at the top. I assume this is due to odd weather changing how they grew, but it sure is funny lookin'. The first of two spinach variants this week is Space spinach which is the astronaut of the greens world. More Baby lettuce mix means more salads. We've gotten mizuna before. It's a mildly spicy salad green, and our only real complaint is that, like cabbage, it grows two new heads for each one you cut off. Both seem to multiply in the fridge when we are not looking.

These mustard greens and this tah tsai (which the email from the farm describes as "asian spinach") will end up mixed in a spinach calzone that we like. We will likely toss in the cosmonaut spinach as well and make it a threefer. I hope to make more ice creams this summer, and if Mary will let me I will probably start that trend with a frozen yogurt made from these Earliglow and Wendy Strawberries. Fresh from the CSA, Sugar ann sugar snap peas are amazingly sweet and summery. These will get eaten on salads (and just plain snacked on.) Mary is not actually a huge fan of English spring peas when we've had them in the past, but we may have undercooked them. She actually likes 'em mushy, so we may have to do them in the English style this time. More arugula this week, this time in the form of Roquette Arugala. With this being the third salad green on top of two spinaches this week, I think we'll want to do something beyond salad with it. I am guessing pizza again, since we can have a salad on the side even when there is a salad on top, but we'll see. This rhubarb is not actually part of the CSA, but we have succumbed to madness and started buying more farmer's market produce on top of the CSA. All during the week we had ongoing discussions of what exciting thing we'd do with the next batch of rhubarb, then we found there was to be none in the box. Luckily I averted tragedy by buying these bundles, which will go into Gingered Rhubarb Apple Crisp. Yum.

CSA 2011 - Week 1

Summer is here! That means it's time to build a fortress of solitude out of outdoor cushions and eat lots of fresh veggies. This year we are trying yet another new farm. While there were upsides to a Saturday pickup, we also felt like we couldn't travel anywhere over a weekend last summer, and that was an issue for us. After searching around for a good sounding CSA with a local-ish drop-off point, we discovered that one of our favorite stands at the Farmer's Market was doing a CSA this year with a pick up site at the market. Since we have been saying for ages that someone should do that, how could we not sign up? It's the first time we have gotten in in year one of a CSA, so it will be interesting to see how they do. This one is starting noticeably earlier than previous ones, so I expect that in the next few weeks we will see a mix of spring stuff and storage vegetables, carried over from last year. We are also getting their fruit share, which for a blessed change is actually local fruit. That's getting folded into the main share, and in weeks with little fruit we may just see more veggies instead.

The first lettuce of the season takes the form of Baby lettuce mix. We've been avoiding having salads for the past month or so to prepare for the onslaught of lettuces, and now that it's here I am not fully convinced we are ready. A whole buncha Cilantro. We actually have a shrimp recipe that calls for a full cup of it, so we should be able to use this up. We have grown to absolutely adore rhubarb. We've already made a few dishes with the stuff we got at early spring farmer's markets, but we're still not out of recipes. This batch is going to be used for a roasted pork dish (with rhubarb and onion sauce.) Yellow stutgart onions look like slightly fat green onions, and will likely be used as those would be. Green garlic is something that I always think I should have specific uses for, but we usually end up subbing it in for normal garlic. This batch will likely end up in garlic naan.

These are the first strawberries of the season! So sweet, so juicy, so getting consumed as-is. We love Asparagus and will likely roast this batch. Champion radishes will get snacked on and eaten in salads. I've actually remembered to prepare some for a snack for tomorrow, so I am already ahead of last year when I managed to forget to do so every single time I planned to. When we were thinking about what we would get this early in the season, it did occur to me that we might see some potatoes carried over from last year. I'm psychic! These are russian blue and desiree potatoes and we'll...do something with them. We usually make a Rosti with potatoes, which is pretty much hash browns for dinner. It's OK though, because it's Swiss. All spring, our food magazines have all been full of recipes for sweet pea shoots. All spring, Mary and I have said to each other "We will never be in possession of this item" and tossed out those recipes. Now we find ourselves with a rather large bunch of them. We had some raw in salad last night, but past the smallest branches they got pretty tough, so I think I will look up a recipe online to use. Many of the recipes we tossed pointed to light stir-frying, so that's probably where we will end up. Oddly, most of our Arugala recipes are pizzas. We are planning on pizza-ing up this batch as well. This one is an odd bunch for us, because it actually has some flowers on it. Arugala flowers! Who knew?