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.

Naansense

It's summer, which in Chicago means heat and humindity -- hardly bread baking weather. Still I do love bread and since we had soup for dinner tonight, I decided to look up a recipe for grilled bread. I found a promising looking one for naan and decided to give it a go.

The dough is fairly straightforward. There's no real fancy work or a pre-ferment so I was able to do it the day I decided to take it on, which is nice. It is a very soft (wet) dough though, so it might be a bit of a test of patience when kneading and shaping. I found that for the shaping into portions, I was much happier if I kept my fingertips oiled and kept the dough moving a lot.

After the first rise, you punch the dough down and knead in garlic until it's distributed. I used green garlic from the CSA, which had a pretty mild flavor. Next time I'll be more careful to get it evenly distributed: As it was, I ended up with some pieces having very little garlic and some having a lot.

The dough is then divided into golf ball sized pieces, shaped into balls, and risen again.
Once the grill is hot, you stretch the dough balls and place them right on the grill. The recipe doesn't specify how thin the dough should end up, and I started with some pretty thick pieces. With practice I found that the thinner you can stretch it, the better. If you can see the gluten, toss those suckers on the grill. The dough does not stick as it would to the side of an oven (where the bread is usually baked) so it does contract a bit in the cooking.
Once the first side is done (which only takes a few minutes, depending on the heat of the grill) you brush the naan with melted butter (ghee would probably be more traditional, but plain ole melted, unclarified butter worked great too) and flip them over. They puffed up a lot during the cooking on the first side, even when they had been stretched extremely thinly during the shaping. At this point, you brush the just cooked side with butter as well. Mmmmm...so much butter.
The recipe made quite a bit, but it was so good that volume was not a problem. The 'loaves' were not huge, and were amazingly delicious. Of the twelve pieces that came off the grill, seven were eaten within a few hours.
The resulting crumb for the bread was very nice. The puffed up parts had nice large holes, and the bread was pleasantly chewy throughout. The early loaves that I had not stretched as thinly were very slightly undercooked, but even those were excellent and not at all doughy. In reality, the dough seemed very forgiving of cooking time and temperature, and loaves ranging from very lightly colored to deeply browned were all wonderfully textured and endowed with great flavor. I had been concerned that the melted butter brushed on the done side of the bread might make it greasey, but it didn't.

Overall, this was an excellent recipe and one that we will certainly add to our normal rotation. Being able to cook the bread on the grill rather then baking it in the oven makes it a great summer option, and the quality of the resultant bread means you really aren't missing anything by going that route.

Update: Yesterday I read some of the comments on allrecipes for the original recipe, and it seemed like some folks had complained about the toughness of the bread. I realized that while I had measured out the full amount of flour, I used way less than it called for. This lead to a much softer dough, which probably explains the difference. It makes it a little harder to knead and shape, but I would certainly repeat this decision, based on the quality of the final bread.

CSA Week 1

It's CSA time again! After enjoying last year's biweekly shares despite not having a kitchen for a chunk of time there in the middle, we decided to take a chance on a full share this year. That means weekly veggie shares and a whole lot of not ordering in for us.

It also means I have to update here at least once a week, or I'll fall hopelessly behind. On to the veggies!

For a first delivery, we actually got quite a bit of variety this week.

Button Mushrooms are destined for salads and omelettes.

Two heads of lettuce (one red sails, one romaine) will keep us in salads for the week.

Spinach is going into our favorite spinach and kale pie.

Pear Butter may just get spread directly on our tongues. We've already had most of it on bread or toast, and it is so very delicious. Nice pear and apple flavors, with some caramel background. Super tasty.

Asparagus was born to be roasted.

Green Garlic is new to us, but we plan on using it as we would normal garlic. It'll probably make it's way into the mushroom omelettes.

Rhubarb is destined for an odd lentil soup recipe (yes, rhubarb and lentil soup) as well as the ever delicious crisp.

A small bundle of chives will likely get snipped onto anything we can think of.

Mint will be used to flavor ice tea, probably in the form of a syrup (which is also convenient because the sugar is pre-disolved.)

Radishes will be snacked on and eaten in salads.

The newsletter and emails this week have all commented on how hard hit the supplying farms are by the recent storms, so we're curious to see what the share looks like next week. Hopefully there aren't too many ruined crops, since that would stink all around.