Saturday, August 25, 2012

CSA 2012 Week 11

It's midsummer, so it's officially time for me get to behind on posting the CSA pictures and watering the plants. Like clockwork, I am. Hopefully the chard on the roof isn't all dead.

More corn is always welcome. We tend to sneak it into various soups and dishes that don't necessarily call for it, and it brings a nice sweetness and crunch. Love it.

Quite a mix of tomatoes this year. I don't recall getting as many cherry tomatoes last year as we are this year, but I am sure that if I looked back I'd be wrong.

Green beans

It seems early for a rutabaga, but they keep well so it's fine if it ends up sitting for a bit. Rutabaga is probably our favorite root veggie, so it's welcome even if it is early to the party.

I have nothing left to say about potatoes.

Towards the end of the season, broccoli plants start sending off a bunch of smaller offshoots which look like slightly leggy florets. We got a huge pile of them this week, and ended up roasting and tossing them with chili-garlic paste. Roasting makes most things better.

Onions

These bell peppers got roasted and made into a salad.

We've swapped pickup sites this year, and due to the logistics of the new location our veggies are spending a bit more time un-refrigerated. This has lead to some stuff arriving slightly overripe or -- in the case of peppers -- already with some soft spots. It's tough to use this many of them in such a short amount of time, though roasting helps to extend the runway.

The farm is aware of the issue and trying to adjust the shares a bit to compensate.

Saturday, August 11, 2012

CSA 2012 Week 10

More corn! It's odd, because corn is the crop that is most often shown when the news wants to demonstrate the drought conditions, but I feel like we are getting a ton of it from this farm. I think we'll finally grill some (with delicious Chorizo Brats from Paulina Meat Market) and then wing it with the rest. I cut out two recipes for corn ice cream that Mary is not at all on board with, but I am dying to try. We'll see if I can sneak that in.

A giant bag of yellow and green beans. The bulk of these will go into a salad with dill and sweet onion, the rest will probably just get steamed.

Fingerling potatoes do well in potato salads, so we'll likely pull one of those recipes out.

Shockingly brightly-colored orange eggplants. We made caponata last week, but we also have a pasta recipe that calls for either zucchini or eggplant, so we'll probably swap this in on that.

So, about that cantaloupe...I guess they really like the weather. While last week's was absurdly small, this is one of the largest I have seen. We're scheduled to get another this coming week, so I am curious to see if they will continue to grow until we need a separate box just to hold the melon.

Shallots, garlic, and onion all came bundled together. Nothing has a specific destination yet, other than the bean salad (these are supposedly vidalias and the salad calls for sweet -- serendipity!)

More lovely tomatoes. These are going into the aforementioned pasta dish with the eggplant, and getting sliced and eaten with salt. Mmm...tomatoes.

A honest to goodness, full size green pepper. We always seem to get a wide variety of sweet and hot peppers from this place, so sometimes it's nice to see a plain ol' bell pepper. Ah, the simple things.

Sunday, August 5, 2012

CSA 2012 Week 9

This week's share felt a bit smaller, but it's hard to judge the farm harshly. There are currently four counties out of over a hundred in Illinois that are not deemed at an emergency level of drought, and the non-drought ones are all the urban area around Chicago. Yikes.

This week the full-sized tomatoes begin! We also got a nice mix of various cherry and grape varieties. mmm....tomatoes.

This rather large bunch of basil will get pestoed. I have read that if you blanch the basil before making the pesto that it will stay greener, but time will tell if I will go through the effort.

More glorious corn. A bunch of this got used for our favorite corn recipe. So good. Though we have been grilling a fair amount this summer, we haven't actually grilled corn yet. Weird.

One gigantic cucumber. This guy is just massive. It went into a simple tomato, cucumber, and feta salad.

This cantaloupe is evidence of how spare the veggies are. Generally fruit only goes to folks with the fruit shares, but I think the veggie harvests are so far down they are scrambling a bit.

Red potatoes

The New York Times had a big article on ways to use eggplant last week that proved to be well-timed. We had a few from last week still, so we made caponata with those and some of this batch, then will use one of the NYT recipes with the rest of these. Aside: White eggplants actually look like eggs. Weird!

A big bag of small sweet peppers. These run the gamut from green to red, and were used in the caponata and here and there. We did our roasted pepper salad, but used last week's share for that.