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.