CSA Week 2

One week of CSA successfully completed! Other than a few stalks of green garlic, we managed to use up the full share in various ways. We had many, many salads, a mushroom stir fry, and a great spinach pasta dish. The lentil and rhubarb soup was as good as we remember it, and we have some in the freezer for lunches this weekend. Overall a delicious week of food, and we didn't have to struggle to keep up. Yet.

More green garlic this week. We managed to get by well last week by subbing this for regular garlic, and I think we'll do the same this week. I did find that if you use a full bulb of green garlic for garlic bread, the result is still deliciously mild. Sugar snap peas are sweet and fresh tasting. These will be used primarily in salads. A rather small bunch of spinach presents a classic CSA issue: Having to buy more of a CSA item to have enough to make any of the recipes we want to make. We could just sink this into a pasta or something, but we really want to make one of our spinach and feta pie/calzone dishes, all of which call for way more than this tiny amount. We will probably just bite the bullet and buy more at the store or farmer's market. These strawberries are going to be turned into frozen yogurt this weekend. The first ice cream of the summer! White button mushrooms are destined for omelets on weekend mornings. Omelets are fritatta are great produce sinks, since that can take almost anything and still taste good.

This week's rhubarb is going to be used for the pork dish we didn't make last week. We were hoping to get enough for both the pork and a rhubarb crisp, but twas not to be. If you had told me before we joined the CSA that I would have been hoping for more rhubarb I would never have believed it. Oh good, I was worried we wouldn't get more lettuce. At least these two heads are slightly less monstrous than the last two. We are going to try a mustard vinaigrette this week, as well as breaking down and making lettuce wraps with crab salad over the weekend. More mint, more mojitos. We have some mint planted in a window box as well, and I am hoping to make fresh mint ice cream this year once I have enough. It's time for summer squash already. This is an item that one tends to get a lot of from the CSA, but we are usually pretty good about using it up. Just two zucchini came this week, and it's pretty easy to prepare as a side, microwaved for a few minutes and then tossed with butter and sprinkled with Parmesan. Once we get later into the season, we'll get more creative with it.

CSA Week 1

Summer has arrived, which means it's time for the CSA. We've had a lot of cooler, wetter weather this year, which is good for some crops (lettuce, spinach) and not so good for others (strawberries.) We were both very excited for the season to start, as we really enjoy the fun of getting a mystery box of ingredients and then planning meals around them. It forces some variety and makes us try recipes that we pulled out just in case we ever got [insert strange produce here].

Rhubarb will be used for a lovely lentil soup. Any extra will either be frozen or turned into a relish with onions for port tenderloin, depending on how much remains.

I suspect that this season, our nemesis might be lettuce. The weather has apparently been very good to it, as we got two huge heads. We will continue to get it for several weeks, and there are very few lettuce sinks -- It's salad or nothing. We are going to try some homemade dressings this year to help take the edge off.

Despite the claim that strawberries don't like this weather, we got tons of them. Some were actually a little under ripe, but mostly they were delicious. Hopefully we keep getting these larger containers as they get on towards the height of the season.

Green garlic will get subbed for regular garlic, as is tradition in these parts.

Spinach is heading for a pasta bake, (along with some of the green garlic.)

Mint means mojitos.

Mushrooms are another item that is a bit hard to use up. We like them a lot, but we will be getting a full carton every week for several weeks. This particular batch is heading for salads and a stir fry.

Asparagus is, per usual, getting roasted.

Some Forward Progress

My folks came out this past weekend to help with the bathroom, and we made great progress. The first step after demo is to put up cement backer board in the shower. It's a lot like sheetrock, but more irritating in every way imaginable. It's significantly heavier and harder to cut, and since it's denser it's harder to get the screws that hold it up set in enough that they won't catch on the trowel when laying the adhesive for the tile. After getting it up, I asked my mother (the queen of sheetrock) to take a sharpee and circle any screws that she thought needed to be set in deeper. You may notice that about half of the screw heads in the image linked have black circles around them...

We gave her a bit of a hard time about that, but when it came time to lay the wall tile it went very smoothly. In the other bathroom there had been a few places where we had to fiddle with the tile a little to accommodate screws that were not all the way in. On this project, we had no such cases. For the wall we used one inch square tiles, which come in foot square sheets. This was pretty easy to actually lay, but we spent a lot of time making sure that all of the rows and columns lined up, and a lot of little shifting to get things to line up was done. While I didn't love how much of that we had to do, I was very pleased with the final result.

Once the tile was allowed to set for twenty-four hours, it was grouting time. This is a task we have done several times before, and I actually find it to be fairly fun. It is time consuming, however, as there are a lot of little rest periods in the middle of it. The process is: mix the grout, let it rest ten minutes, then smear it on the walls into the spaces between the tiles, then let it sit thirty minutes, then sponge off the excess, then let it sit sixty minutes, then buff off the haze. Since once it sets it's hard to work with, most walls need to be done in sections in order to keep it workable. It leads to it being a long process, with lots of coffee breaks. Once the grout is in and set, the lines between the tiles are much less stark, so the huge field of inch square tiles blend. This makes what started out a bit busy look like a nice, soothing texture.

The last thing we did before the folks left was to tile the floor. These big square guys were super easy compared to all the little wall ones, and despite some places that needing cutting went down quickly. Such is the upside of putting foot square tiles in a twenty-five square foot space. There had been some discussion of laying these on an angle, making them diamond shape instead of square. In the end we decided to take the square route, and we are quite happy with the appearance. We have reached the stage in the project where there is a lull in the huge, obvious changes. We need to finish up the grouting on the walls and floor, then do several coats of sealer (which of course each have extended drying times.) We are hoping that we can get those steps, plus some painting done during the next weekend and work week, and then do the big installation the following weekend. Hopefully in two to three weeks, we will be done with the bathroom!

English Muffins

I've always been a fan of english muffins. With all the wonderful nooks and crannies, they are the best vessels for butter out there. Now that I have gotten more into baking bread and understanding what is going on, I have wondered more and more how these delightful little fellows get all those butter holders, so I decided to try making some.

The dough is a heavily enriched one, made entirely with milk and a little shortening instead of water. I used 2% because it's what we had on hand. The dough came together easily, and was lovely to knead. The higher fat content really kept it tender and easy to work with -- barely requiring any extra flour to keep it from sticking to my hands. This bread is done without a starter, so it's just a mix, knead, and two risings and you're ready to go.

For the second rise, the dough is divided and formed into small boules. Once they have risen (which mine did nicely) they are then cooked for 5 minutes per side on a hot skillet. At this point, they are supposed to swell up and out, widening and flattening a little. You'll note the use of the phrase "supposed to" up there. Mine cooked to a lovely golden brown on the first side, but never quite managed to swell. This is odd, because I usually do get a nice oven pop when I make bread. I suspect that I had too dry a dough, and will probably try using more liquid (and maybe higher fat content) the next time I attempt this. Once cooked on both sides, the muffins go into the oven to finish cooking the centers.

The final results were ok, but not stellar. As I suspected would happen when they failed to swell, the muffins did not have any nooks and crannies to speak of. The texture was more like that of a rustic white bread. Without the crannies to justify an artery clogging amount of butter, the flavor was just ok as well. Without a pre-ferment, this lacked the sharpness that I prefer in breads.

I do think that I'll try this again, with a few notable changes:

1. Hydrate the dough for longer and with more liquid.
   
2. Aim for a (slightly) higher fat content in the final dough.
   
3. See if I can work in a pre-ferment, perhaps using water in that and then cream once I form the final dough.
   
4. Clean my stove and tea kettle before posting pictures of them on the internet.
   

Once More Unto the Breach

It's time for a new project! Having renovated both the kitchen and spare bath, we now turn our attention to the master bath. It has the same oddly patterned white, grey, and beige tile that the spare had, as well as a strange peninsula of counter that stretches behind the toilet. Considering that the toilet has an issue where it will periodically fail to stop running and require me to muck around in the tank, that's not our favorite feature. The white vanity is also original to the condo, and doesn't do much for us style-wise. The shower area has the same tile, and also shows some evidence of water damage in a few places where there were had been chinks in the grout between the tile when we moved in. The plan is to leave the tub, but replace everything else. We have large square tiles for the floor, and smaller inch square (mesh backed) tile for the shower walls. Both tiles are a tan colored stone. We also have a new vanity which is a dark wood with a carrera marble top and a rectangular sink. Fancy!

We did the bulk of the demo in one day. We always assume that the tile demo will take a while, but forget that all of the other little stuff is not instantaneous. We spent most of the morning removing the counter, toilet, and vanity. The vanity once again came out in pieces, since it had been plumbed in place which leads to the holes in the back not being large enough to allow us to slip it over the water shutoffs. Nothing that they reciprocating saw can't handle though. With all of the big stuff out of the room, we started the tile demo the same morning. We planned on re-using the subfloor, so the process of tile removal for us is all about chiseling off the old tile. It's a loud, messy business and tends to produce a lot of shrapnel. On the upside, it gives me an opportunity to bust out the mini sledge hammer which is always a fun time.

The bathroom is pretty small (about five feet square if you take the tub out of the picture) so in order to not be in each others way I worked on the wall tile while Mary worked on the floor. With the wall tile (in the shower) you can't reuse the substrate, so it's more about getting a good handhold and using whatever leverage you can get to rip off the old wallboard. It was around this point that we discovered that our downstairs neighbor had plaster and tile shards raining down on him. Apparently the spaces between the walls don't have subfloor under them, so any crap that fell into those spaces (which was a lot, since I was banging liberally on the wall with the aforementioned sledge) was sifting through the timbers of his ceiling and into his unit. I was thankfully able to modify my approach (notice the newspaper stuffed in between the joists) to get less debris into the walls while still getting the bulk of the backer board off.

After lunch, Mary and I swapped jobs. She worked on the third wall of the shower (which has an extra layer of sheetrock beneath the backer board because it's a shared wall with our neighbor) and I on the floor. Mary is not very comfortable with the sledge, so she uses a smaller hammer when she is demoing. This, sadly, seems to lead to more fractured tile on the floor. Once I was at it with the sledge it went a bit more quickly. The small hammer approach was actually better on the walls, however, and she managed to make very quick work of the third wall. What a team! After only one (solid) day of work we had the bulk of the demo done.

CSA Summer Share Closeout

Blogs. They seems like such a good idea. You post some pictures, get in a habit. Then you miss a week and it all goes to hell. I now have five (!) CSA summer shares that I have failed to write about, as well as two winter ones. Yikes. I am going to post the pictures all together, then do some quick writeups of what I remember as being standout uses of them. Since a lot of it is months old though, details will be foggy.

Week 16:
Week 17:
Week 18:
Week 19:
Week 20:

It always seems a bit odd to get lettuce (and mizuna for that matter) so late in the season, but I guess they can get two harvests so there's an early and late one. Arugula on the other hand seems to belong to the late season, because of it's peppery bite. It all got turned into salads, of course.

The last tomato of the season seems so very long ago now. We were very pleased with the quality and quantity of tomatoes that we got this year, and most of them (this one included) just got eaten with a little salt.

We have several leek recipes that we did with the various doses of them we got. We made a risotto, a fritatta (I think), and a soup. Other than that last one (which I liked but Mary did not) they were generally delicious recipes.

I think that the veggie that the CSA has most opened out eyes to is squash. It's something that we never really had before joining the CSA, and now that we've tried many recipes (all of which we love) we actually look forward to its season. We've even gone so far as to purchase it at the store, which is pretty serious praise.

The acorn squash we mostly stuff with a delicious southwestern filing that has sausage, tomatoes, black beans, cumin, and red pepper. It's delicious and offsets the sweetness of the squash.

The butternut squash and delicata squash are pretty much interchangeable to us. We have a half dozen recipes we love, including a risotto, several pastas, and a stew that mixes the squash with dried fruit and beef for a great sweet and savory meal.

I honestly can't remember what we used this celeriac for. I am pretty sure that we used half in a pot pie recipe we have, and that the second half ended up going bad in the fridge. We like it, but do need to go out of our way to find recipes for it.

Through the fall, we got a lot of apples and pears. Most of these we just ate as is, but we also made apple cake with some of those.

We got a wide variety of peppers as well. As I have said before, we mostly consider them to be fungible and tend to wantonly swap (sweet) varieties. We do have a bag of green "chili peppers" in our freezer, waiting for inspiration or a bout of cleaning to strike.

Onions are another common fall crop that we've gotten a lot of. We mostly got yellow onions, but have also seen red onions and sweet onions cross our paths. This is fine though, since we tend to use them a lot without trying.

Green Beans usually just get steamed, though for Thanksgiving we made an amazing recipe with shallots and bacon. It was amazingly good, and disappeared quickly.

I honestly have no idea how we used these turnips. I do know that we are not compelled to use the greens from beets and turnips when we get them though, so those suckers went right into the trash.

A big daikon radish was delicious sliced into salads, and lasted quite a while. That's good, since it was the size of a baby's arm and took a while to get through.

This year's challenge crop was definitely carrots. We don't use them that much, and for much of the season got a big new bag weekly. We frequently cut some for a snack at work (along with celery,) but only if we remembered to do so the night before. We used them in a few dishes, but few of those call for more than a little. Still, we were pretty good about not tossing too many away.

We always manage to use one half of each head of cabbage pretty easily, but the second one causes us issues, for some reason. We made a soup and slaw out of this one, which worked well because the soup could freeze.

Parsnips tend to get used along with other root veggies: in the aforementioned pot pies; in pot roast; caramelized and mashed with potatoes.

This was the first time we got rutabaga and marked the first time we made the pot pie with it. We had been subbing in whatever other ingredient that we had extra of, and I can't say my palate is so refined that I really noticed the change in using this instead.

I historically have not loved sweet potatoes on their own, but we have a bunch of recipes that use them with other ingredients that are delicious. We have a burrito filling that uses it, which is quite good. We also made a sweet potato casserole for Thanksgiving that was popular, but way to sweet for me.

We made a mac and cheese bake with some of the broccoli which, while designed to hide veggies to get your kids to eat them, was delicious for us adults as well.

It's a good thing that potatoes last. We like them, but it does take a while to use them up. We have started to find some entree recipes (like Rosti, a Swiss dish that's basically hash browns for dinner) which help to use them up a bit more quickly.

Spinach has a zillion uses. I think we made soup with this batch, but we also like it in a calzone-like spinach and feta pie and in spinach-kale turnovers. Speaking of kale, for whatever reason we didn't manage to use the batch from the last share before it went bad. We do have several recipes we like with it, but none of them managed to get on the schedule before it went bad.

I turned the pumpkin into puree and we used it to make pumpkin bread and for a cinnamon roll recipe that gets a little extra flavor and color from it. This time around we roasted it instead of steaming it, which lead to a much less soupy puree.

Dried mint is the grape leaves of the fall. All the enthusiasm that the newsletter can work up is, "Great for tea". It doesn't even get an exclamation mark. I would say that it's fine for tea, though I won't necessarily pine for it once it's used up.

Last and least, brussels sprouts. How can roasting and the addition of shallots and pancetta not make something amazing? Brussells sprouts easily sunk to meet that challenge, ending up bitter and mushy. We'll give these another try next year with a different recipe, but as of now our dislike of them stands.

CSA Week 15

Though we have used most of the produce from last week, nothing really stands out as a particularly noteworthy usage. We managed to finish the mizuna from two weeks ago and last week's head of radicchio in salads, so that feels like an accomplishment. We're still stockpiling bags of potatoes like there's a famine coming, but hopefully some of that will change.

Oh! Potatoes, potato bread. I used a pound and a half of potatoes (which made a depressingly small dent in our stockpile) for my first shot at potato bread. My usual source for bread recipes (The Bread Baker's Apprentice) wasn't much help as the potato bread recipe in there is for a sourdough, and I didn't want to spend a week getting the starter in place. I found a good sounding recipe online (good in that it used a pound and a half of potatoes) and made that. It was a very soft bread with a texture more like sandwich bread than the rustic loaves I made all last winter. It was good though, and found it's way into grilled cheese and breakfast toast. Plus: Pound and a half of potatoes.

French breakfast radishes

Lettuce

Tomatoes. Still not getting old. The biggest of these was a two pounder!

Leeks went into a rustic mushroom tart, built on a foundation of phylo dough. It was good as a side, but definitely was a bit light for an entree which is how we were using it.

Another head of radicchio was used for a pasta dish that also used our two pound tomato. This was fantastic tasting and also used up most of the head, so that was great.

Last time we got spaghetti squash it did not cook well and ended up tasting raw and crunchy. This time, we managed to get it cooked all the way through and tossed it with herbs and garlic. We still weren't overwhelmed with the recipe, but at least the veggie didn't seem horrid. Another veggie rescued from the swap box by a second try.

Carrots

We're catching up with the garlic and can envision a day when we actually have to buy it from the store again.

Apples and pears