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.