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.