CSA Week 9

This week brought a tomato bonanza. We got six tomatoes of four varieties (red slicing,w heirloom, green, and gold paste) and had no problems at all finding uses for them. We ate em all with a little salt and some basil. Actually, we still have the green one, and we plan on frying it when we get a chance.

Crimini mushrooms went into a great tuna noodle casserole we got from cooking light.

This honey bear came at the perfect time, as our old one got noticably depleted by Mary's last illness.

Romano beans were delicious boiled for a few minutes and then tossed with butter. But then what isn't?

Beets are totally the comeback kid of the CSA. The first time we made them, I accidentally over-peppered them and they definitely didn't tickle our fancy. The last time we got them and this time, we made a salad with roasted beets, carmelized onions, and feta. We actually look forward to beets thanks to this bad boy.

This enourmous eggplant ended up being the perfect size for our camponata recipe (from Cook's Illustrated.) It was a little involved (we had to prep the eggplant in two stages because you microwave it to help get rid of the extra moisture) but it was so worth it. It was good on the first day and great on subsequent ones.

A salad for two's worth of little gem lettuce.

More green peppers went into pepper steak.

Onions. I have nothing to add to that.

We usually have a tough time finding uses for odd peppers like this bannana pepper, but this one we tossed into our pepper steak as well.

This japanese cucumber was way sweeter than we are used to cucumbers being. We used it in several places where we'd use normal cucumbers (with feta in a salad, or as an ingredient to a green salad) but we probably shouldn't have. They really stood out as odd, given the sweetness.

CSA Week 7, Week 8, Week 7, and Week 8

As alluded to in the title, week 7 and 8 of our CSA got a little strange. Due to all of the wacky weather in Wisconsin, the farmers were struggling to get summer crops planted. They decided that it made more sense to delay the summer crop by two weeks and thus shifted the CSA by the same time. What would have been week 7 and 8 were shareless and two extra weeks were added at the end of the season (for a week 21 and 22, effectively.)

Our week 7 (original week 9) share we picked up on Wednesday, knowing that we were leaving for a week to visit our family. Because of this, we had to do some creative planning, including freezing our corn and two of our green peppers (the other pepper ended up in a grilled veggie dish we made.)

The eggplant also got grilled and stacked with the grilled green peppers, some grilled squash, and some goat cheese and then drizzled with a balsamic reduction. Despite being a vegetarian dish, it was pretty tasty.

The cucumber got chopped up and tossed with feta for a quick salad.

Carrots are an item that we get a lot of in the CSA, and our week off isn't going to help. These we just stashed in the fridge on wednesday and revisited when we returned, since anything that could last the week was so very far off our radar for wednesday and thursday.

Cauliflower is really delicious roasted. If the CSA has tought us one thing, it's that everything is made better with roasting.

This muskmellon was almost too ripe. It was super juicy, but tasted a bit washed out and bland.

Mary says that grape leaves are our CSA nemesis, but I think it's potatoes. Once they start, they just keep on a'comin'.

Garlic is always welcome.

We use the bottle onions as we would red onions. We tend to treat all forms of onion as fungible, within reason.

A two and a half pound kohlrabi bulb is a lot of kohlrabi. Luckily our one recipe for it calls for two pounds, so it works out. We made this dish on the Monday after we returned from our trip (it also uses some carrots, thankfully) and the veggies survived like champs.

We knew that kale wouldn't last the week, but had filled our two pre-trip dinners using up other veggies, so we made spinach and kale turnovers (with red onion and feta) on Thursday night and froze them. We've been pretty good until now about not freezing too much, so hopefully that doesn't cause us to fall too far behind.

While we were visiting family, one of Mary's co-workers picked up our share (week 8 original week 10.) In that was: green peppers, cabbage, carrots, bottle onions, garlic, sweet corn, melon, cauliflower, heirloom tomatoes, new potatoes, red tomatoes, chard, lemon basil.

We were pretty bummed to miss out on the corn and tomatoes in particular, but we'll certainly have more opportunities for both in upcoming shares.

CSA Week 6

Two really lanky bulbs of fennel are planned for a fennel and citrus salad. Until recently I'd never had fennel, but I've become quite a fan. It has a very fresh and crisp taste, and is much milder than one would expect from the strong flavor of fennel seeds (which can make anything taste like sausage.)

Oh good, I was worried there wouldn't be any zucchini. These two are slated for a summer vegetable gratin (from Cook's Illustrated) for lunch today. If you can belive it, we actually had to buy zucchini because we had used all the previous shares and only had half as much as we needed for this dish.

Cabbage got slawed, as always. We had planned on making a new slaw with thinly sliced sugar snap peas, but discovered that our sugar snap peas were, in fact, just peas. Instead we made the asian slaw that we usually make, which turned out well.

A tiny little head of lettuce. This was about one salad (for two) worth. The lettuces were much easier to keep up with this year, but that may have been due to the biblical levels of flooding Wisconsin had in the spring.

We have started slicing cucumbers and bringing them to work as snacks. With the garlic scape bean dip, they were delicious and refreshing. If there is any remaining, I may sneak it into the fennel salad, since it has a similar texture and flavor.

Last year, we had no kitchen during the height of potato season. We ended up grilling a lot of potatoes, and feeling a lot of pressure to get through them. These darlings may prove to be our biggest challenge in going to the weekly shares. How many potatoes does one man need?

Chard got made into soup with the potatoes and a lot of rosemary. We had to add in some store bought spinach to reach our needed amount, but it turned out well.

Green onions got sliced into the slaw as well as a few other dishes. We had forgotten we were getting them and bought some from the store, so we're certainly at risk of them going bad.

Black Raspberries

Peas are a vegetable that Mary prefers frozen to fresh. We have no plans for these ones in particular, which could be a problem. With a little luck, we'll be able to find a use for these before the new share arrives.

CSA Week 5

The last of the strawberries. Sad to see you go, little guys. You were excellent.

What we initially thought was lettuce ended up being a huge head of escarole. My memory is a little fuzzy (a problem with waiting so long to blog the share,) but I think we made our roasted garlic and escarole soup with this. If we didn't, we should have -- it's an awesome soup.

Hey look, it's more zucchini. We made a dish with this share that was a sort of cobbler, almost. It took sliced zucchini, onion, and a batter made with Bisquick. It turned out pretty well, and seems like it'd be a good CSA clearing house for odds and ends of future shares.

Turnips are funny looking fellows; They kind of look like oranic baseballs. As we often do with root vegetables, we turned to our old friend, Mashed Potatoes with Root Vegetables (from Cook's Illustrated.) We made a variation with bacon and thyme, and very much enjoyed it.

Radish sprouts have a mild radish flavor and are great in salads.

Sugar Snap Peas were also to prove to be the last of the season.

We are never quite sure what to do with mini onions. We put them in salads, but always worry that they are too mild to sub for real onions but too strong to sub for scallions. We've used them in a few different ways, but desipte them being a rather small amout of onion, still have some kicking around the crisper.

Rhubarb got cryogenically frozen until science develops a cure for absent-mindedness so I can find the really good recipe for crisp.

We roasted these beets and made an amazing salad with carmelized onions and feta cheese. It was delicious, and totally got Mary on board the beet train.

Cucumbers are often a challenge for us, since one can only have so many cucumber and feta salads. We found a salmon recipe that was served over a bed of shaved cukes though, plus it took the last of the dill from week 4. Any dish that takes more than one CSA ingredient gives us an absurd thrill.

Bok Choy was our first casualty this season. We fully intended to grill it tossed with asian seasonings, but by the time we pulled it out of the fridge it had clearly passed the point of no return. I think we should get credit for making it this late into the season before having something rot on us though.

CSA Week 4

As you can tell, I've managed to get quite behind on blogging the CSA. I would like to claim that I was doing a lot of cooking or some other inspirational hobby, but the reality is that I was playing GTA 4 the whole time. And then I bought Oblivion, which seems like it will prove to be a similarly engrossing game. At least I wasn't so busy as to not manage to use the produce from the CSA, so that's something.

Sugar Snap Peas are so very sweet and fresh when we first get them, that we've taken to just eating them raw as a snack before (or with) dinner. These have turned out to be a real treat, and I'll be sad when we stop getting them.

Lettuce

The fresh fruits are one of the highlights of the CSA for us (we almost jumped ship to a different CSA just to get a fruit share) and these Strawberries are a perfect example why. So fresh, so ripe, so delicious. Berries never last past the first day for us.

Garlic Scapes ended up getting subbed for garlic, as usual, and also ended up in a white bean dip that was tasty.

A big, honking cucumber.

We actually have a startling number of recipes that call for dill, and we managed to use it all up, a rare occurance for herbs.

Which brings us to grape leaves. You remember grape leaves? Our pointless nemesis? Well we couldn't bring ourselves to landfill 'em two weeks in a row, so we gave stuffing them a go. We followed a recipe in that came in the CSA newsletter, and while they were entirely inoffensive, they were also pretty underwhelming for the work involved. If we get them in future shares, we may just share box them.

Collards we wilted and cooked with some onion and garlic (scape) and folded into phyllo dough with goat cheese for a spanikopita-like turnover. It was pretty good, though we should have seasoned a little more aggressively.

Last year, we managed to let our kohlrabi go bad before getting to it, desipte having a pretty good sounding recipe that used it (kohlrabi in brown butter and honey.) This year, we made the recipe and despite all of Sheri's loathing of this vegetable, we enjoyed it quite a bit. I passed it on to her; maybe it'll convert her (or at least prevent her share-boxing of it next time around.)

Radishes

Arugula

And here continues the zuchinni onslaught. From here in the future, I can tell you that we have been seeing a fair amount of this lovely vegetable. This share's dose ended up in zuchinni bread. We seem to have a dozen recipes for it, and the one we did this time (from Cooking Light) was pretty good.

CSA Week 3

For a second week in a row, we've managed to keep up with the CSA and use our full share. A lot of stuff (radishes, lettuces, sprouts) ended up in salads. We roasted the asparagus with balsamic brown butter (yum.) The spinach got souped. The mint was used to make mojitos and encrust lamb chops, both of which were awesome. Overall, it was a good share.

On to this week, which contains our first real CSA roadblock of the year.

Cabbage is destined for slaw and soup.

We accidentally ended up with an absurd mushroom bounty. We forgot that we had picked some up from the store, so we bought a second package. Then, we got some in this share. That's a lotta mushrooms. Hopefully between omelettes and other uses, we can get them used up.

Little Gem Lettuce is adorable, and makes one large or two small salads.

Sugar Snap Peas are tasty, but this is too many to put on salads. Maybe we'll go for a mushroom and pea stir fry?

Parsley.

Lettuce.

Collards are getting subbed for kale in a soup with the cabbage.

Now this is what a strawberry share should look like. These were so sweet and delicious, we ate the bulk when we got them home and only had a few leftover to bring as lunch the next day.

Garlic Scapes we usually just sub for garlic.

The first zucchini of the season is slated for zucchini bread.

Meet our nemesis: Grape Leaves. The only thing we can find to do with these is stuff 'em, and neither of us are very gung ho about any of the recipes for those we have seen. Also, eight leaves seems like too few to make a full recipe of anything, but we certainly aren't going to go buy more. This will be the first item of the CSA that we don't use, though I think we deserve credit for willfully composting them rather than letting them rot in the fridge for two weeks and then tossing them shamefully in the night.

CSA Week 2

We're off to a good start. By the end of last weekend, we'd managed to use up all of our CSA share. Considering that last year we always had one or two things we threw away even with less frequent pick-ups, that's a great start. We used everyting in the predicted way last week, and it was all delicious.

Since storms continue to flood a lot of the farms, we didn't have very high hopes for this week's share. Luckily, they pulled it out and we got a pretty good variety again.

More spinach this week. We don't have specific plans for this (usually a red flag) and may just end up steaming it as a side dish.

Escarole will end up in one of our favorite soups. How can you not love anything that has an entire roasted head of garlic in it?

Lettuce and radishes are salad bound.

Green garlic is slated to get grilled and then used to flavor a white bean dip. Hopefully that works out for us as I'll be winging it with the recipe.

Asparagus was already roasted, with a balsamic and brown butter sauce. So good. We could have roasted asparagus every day for a week and not get sick of it or run out of recipes to try.

The strawberry harvest must have been hard hit by the weather, because we got a sad little container with thirteen small berries in it. They were delicious, but we were still pretty sad to see so few. Berries are a real highlight of the summer for us.

Some kind of sprouts have already been consumed on salads.

Mint is bound for drinks (we've already used it to determine that we don't like juleps) and grilled lamb chops.

Rhubarb is getting frozen so that we can make crisp after the season. I found the good recipe after making the just ok one, so we clearly need to make it again soon.