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...