Blueberries

What I Made – Week 12

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I tried a new recipe for these blueberry lemon scones, substituting regular milk for the plant-based and was sure I was going to regret it. The dough was so soft I dumped it in a puddle on my baking sheet for the chilling step! But somehow it baked up perfectly, and the crunchy sugar topping was a definite must. Consider adding more sugar to the dough if you don’t have any for sprinkling.
Salmon with wilted chard and a tarragon vinaigrette is a true 30 minute meal with flavor that tastes like it’s much more complex. Four salmon filets will leave leftovers for the next day, but we always eat one bunch of chard in a single meal.
These pitas are stuffed with more veggies than you might realize – oven roasted sun gold tomatoes, cucumbers in the tzatziki yogurt sauce, and zucchini in the turkey meatballs! Don’t skimp on the herbs in the meatballs, they give great flavor.
This colorful salad is just beets, avocado, and a puréed onion dressing, but is a nice light way to enjoy beets in the summer.
This dish looks veggie-free, but it hides 3 sliced and then caramelized onions! This is Adas Polo or lentil rice with chicken from the Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat cookbook. I didn’t have raisins or dates, so I used craisins. Samin would also be disappointed that my dish turned out unseasoned. She says to salt the rice cooking liquid until it’s “uncomfortable” and I thought I was probably just short of that but that it would be close enough. I was wrong and should know better than to not trust her instructions…
The recipe for these wok cooked Romano beans seems too easy to be true: char beans and dried chiles, add 1/4 c water to steam until crisp tender, then toss with garlic and ginger, soy sauce and sesame oil, and top with scallions. I’m here to say it was delicious and much more flavorful than you might expect!
This zucchini chocolate orange cake is pretty much perfection (and a great way to use up zucchini). I swap chocolate chips for the pecans and concentrate the glaze and only use about a half cup of powdered sugar since the cake is plenty sweet without it.

We also ate (more!) sunchoke gnocchi with sautéed spinach and polished off the peaches and cantaloupe as delicious lunch time snacks. We still have more onions and cucumbers to use up.

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What I’ve Planned – Week 12

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Even as hot as the days are, we’re still getting leafy greens along with our beans and squash, so I’m not in full casserole mode yet! Here’s what we are planning to make this week

Well probably eat the peaches and definitely the cantaloupe for breakfast and snack on the cucumbers throughout the week. I’m still hoping to make a chocolate zucchini cake, if I can stand to run the oven that long this week!

What I Made – Week 8

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You would have thought this week’s basket world have brought more salads, and it should have! Here’s what we ate instead.

This blueberry buckle has 4 cups of blueberries! Not on purpose, but it was an effective way to use everything up, so we’ll call it a happy accident.
Roasted broccoli is tossed with olive oil and harissa for this tofu quinoa bowl.
A salad! Lettuce topped with mozzarella, craisins, and chicken with a garlic scape dressing.
This cabbage is seared before being braised in a spiced tomato sauce. I didn’t top it with yogurt like the recipe said, so it could have used some lemon juice or another splash of something tangy.
These mini-burritos are filled with beans, rice, and chard, topped with cheese, and broiled until melty and just slightly browned.
I added a can of diced tomatoes to make this vegetable vindaloo with potatoes and carrots extra saucy! I did forget to add the peas.
And finally for birthday dinner, skillet steak with peas and asparagus, a very quick and very tasty early summer meal.

What I Made – Week 7

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Our household comes down strong on the side of waffles in the morning debate of pancakes versus waffles. With blueberries throughout and topped with butter and real maple syrup, how could you not love these?
Blueberry muffins are pretty great, too. Especially when they make use of this incredibly simple-yet-foolproof muffin recipe.
Two whole-roasted components that were later disassembled into a meal: a chicken cooked per Ina Garten, but smeared with homemade pesto under the skin, and kohlrabi, later peeled and combined with peppers and feta.
It’s not very pretty to look at, but this zucchini chicken enchilada casserole is one on my go-to zucchini recipes these days. Instead of spiralizing them, I cut the zucchini into thin rounds and dry them a bit with a quick turn under the broiler before layering it into the casserole.
This pasta with sausage and peas was great on a rainy evening, and even though we used hot it’s,Ian sausage, it wasn’t at all spicy.
I actually roasted these beets early in the week along with the chicken and kohlrabi, so the assembly of this salad just required cooking the grain (freekeh, in this case), making the vinaigrette, and chopping the lettuce for a very quick weeknight meal. Is this meal prep?
I amped up the veggies in this clam pasta with white wine sauce by adding extra carrots, but it would also be good with some wilted spinach stirred in.

We still have more lettuce to use and a bundle of garlic scapes (in addition to what we harvested from our own garden)! We’ve frozen some of the extra peas, because we’re doing the same with what we’ve been getting from our garden, too!

What I’ve Planned – Week 7

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A good mix of roots and leaves this week. I’m trying to plan a lot of quick meals good for a busy workweek with long hours, or at least with parts that can be prepped ahead of time.

We’ll probably just eat the peaches plain and either turn the scapes into more pesto, or save them for another week.

What I Got – Week 7

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Happy first week of fruit share! Unfortunately with the cold weather, the usual farms are not producing much yet, so our fruit this week came to us from Georgia!

Clockwise from left: Orange Carrots, Little Gem Romaine Lettuce, White Kohlrabi, Red Beets, Garlic Scapes, English Peas, Peaches, Blueberries, Green Zucchini

What I Made – Week 11 and Week 12

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I crammed two weeks of veggies into one week of cooking!

This is an easy Caprese salad. I quartered the cherry tomatoes, sliced little mozzarella balls in half, and topped with shredded basil, olive oil, and a generous amount of salad and pepper. A perfect lunch for when it’s 98F but feels like a scorching 112F outside.

Stewed zucchini pasta. I subbed in orzo for the penne and added several sprigs of oregano and thyme while the onions were cooking. This could have used a big squeeze of lemon at the end to amp up that tangy flavor, too.

Blueberry Belgian waffle deliciousness. To make sure that blueberries are evenly distributed among the waffles, we follow the linked recipe for plain Belgian waffles and just sprinkle a handful of blueberries on top of the batter before closing the waffle iron rather than stirring them all in at the beginning.

I didn’t notice how blurry this photo was until too late, but the zucchini lasagna tasted delicious all the same. This recipe is a go-to during zucchini seasons.

  • This Greek Bulgur Salad was a great fridge-clearing dish, featuring cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, and even the pickled banana peppers I made a few weeks back. I prepared it a few hours ahead of meal time so all the flavors would have time to combine. I added vinegar and salt to my taste instead of following the recipe exactly, but it was also surprisingly tasty, dare I say reminiscent of a certain Mediterranean restaurant.

  • Zucchini chocolate cake is perhaps one of the few reasons to run the oven for an hour on the hottest day of the summer. It’s dense and fudgy with a nice crunch from the walnuts sprinkled on top.
  • Peperonata with a pan-fried rainbow trout was good, but not my favorite meal this week. I wish I had left off the olives and parsley, both of which overwhelmed the sweet flavor of the peppers and the tangy flavor of the vinegar.
  • Thai steak with noodles and green beans (with elk instead of the steak of course) was also a first-time recipe that really delivered. I made this in my wok, first by blistering the green beans in some coconut oil, then adding the peppers. Instead of grilling steak, I very thinly sliced the elk and marinated it in some vegetable oil and about 2 tablespoons of the red curry paste. I scraped the finished veggies out of the wok, then cooked the elk, then dumped the beans, peppers, cooked noodles and sauce all back in together, tossing to combine.
  • I made this roasted carrot salad with spinach and goat cheese even simpler to prepare by buying a 50/50 baby spinach/spring mix lettuce blend. I left off the almond because I was too lazy to buy them. It would also be good with grilled chicken added.
  • The recipe for this blueberry peach cobbler said the dough was supposed to be “poured over” the fruit, but as you might be able to tell from the photo, no pouring was possible. I spooned it out like it was a biscuit topping, and even though the dough rose okay, it certainly isn’t going to win any prizes for looks. The Demerara sugar sprinkled over the topping was a nice crunch on an otherwise squishy dessert.