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!
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.
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!
We did a good job using up our ingredients this week. The only thing still hanging around are the beet greens and lots more rhubarb!
This week’s basket offers a nice, though I assume temporary, break from salad greens. We had a beautiful warm weekend, but there’s another drizzly, cool work week ahead, so my menu definitely leans towards comfort foods!
I’m hoping to be a bit more ambitious with my breakfast and desserts this week, too. I found two recipes to help use up my rhubarb that look delicious.
That’s a lot to do! I better get baking!
This box brings a real mix of spring and summer veggies to start our Spring/Summer CSA season
Clockwise from left: rhubarb, green kale, green cabbage, red beets, red radishes, greenhouse tomatoes, green garlic, little gem romaine lettuce
This Labor Day weekend involved a lot of chores for us: staining the deck, doing yard work, and drying or canning our bounty of fruits and veggies (including the peaches, tomatoes, and jalapeños we got this week!).
I also shredded and froze the last of our summer squash, and made a curried corn soup to freeze so we can enjoy its bright flavors in the depths of winter!
In addition to a few recipes I didn’t get around to last week, here’s what I’ve planned for the week ahead.
Elk barbacoa and grilled peppers and onions
Chicken, bok choy and cabbage stir fry (with my go to stir fry sauce)
Clockwise from left: Jalapeño Peppers, All Blue Potatoes, Yellow Peaches, Baby Green Bok Choy, Red Tomatoes, Concord Grapes, Purple Garlic, Red Beets, Carmen Peppers, Yellow Doll Watermelon, Red Onions
This wasn’t a super impressive cooking week since I’m still playing catch up with most of my ingredients, but the variety of different flavors in these dishes was definitely one aspect I appreciated.
Sweet corn brightens up this very brown plate. The potatoes are from the grocery store but the no-recipe recipe is probably my favorite way to make them: toss with olive oil and any seasoning (I like garlic, salt, and pepper), spread on a baking sheet and roast at 425 for 45 minutes or until browned, flipping every 15 minutes to make sure each side gets its turn in contact with the baking sheet.
This Asian noodle bowl with cabbage and carrots is infinitely customizable. I used konjac noodles for the first time ever. They smelled terrible coming out of the package but cooked up very much like rice noodles. I liked the instructions to drain the noodles over the cabbage and carrots, just softening them slightly. Of course the spicy scallion sauce from this recipe would taste good on a brick, but I wish I had let the noodles and veggies cool a little so they didn’t add quite so much water to the sauce. I topped the bowl with some of my go to pan fried tofu.
The award for prettiest meal of the week goes to these crab cakes with German bean salad. The beans are blanched, then tossed with a mustard shallot sauce and topped with basil, hard boiled eggs, and cherry tomatoes. Even though I got cherry tomatoes in my basket this week, the ones in this picture actually came from my very own garden! Meanwhile, the crab cakes came from the freezer section…
I bulked up this recipe for carrot and beet salad with curry dressing by putting it on a bed of mixed greens and adding some goat cheese. The recipe didn’t call for cooking the beets, but I did anyway since I prefer that texture. The curry flavor of the dressing was pretty subtle when mixed with the salad greens. I think I would have preferred feta instead of the goat cheese, though.
If the crab cakes and bean salad were this week’s eyecatching Miss America of dinners, the rosemary peach chicken in a white wine pan sauce is Miss Congeniality. The salty bacon! The melt cheese! The creamy wine sauce! All wrapped around tender chicken and sweet peaches. I even left out the lemon zest and honey, and this one pan(!) dish still became a new favorite.
We’re at the point in the summer where I’m not only trying to use what I got in my basket this week, but also from the last week (or two)! There’s nothing too exciting on the menu this week since I can eat many of the fruits and veggies on their own – think cucumbers and watermelon – without making them part of a larger meal.
I’m also going to try to pickle the jalapeños, maybe turn the cherry tomatoes into ‘sun-dried’ tomatoes in the dehydrator, and hopefully do something with the yellow squash, maybe those cheddar biscuits again?
CSA in the Suburbs 