I forgot a picture of my cheddar squash bread, which collapsed in the center like a cheese soufflé but was excellent warm!
What I Made – Week 13
Week 13
What I’ve Planned – Week 13
A true summer basket this week! I couldn’t be more excited about corn (all 8 ears!), but won’t say the same for all this squash! Let’s see how many recipes I can hide it in this week.
- Roast chicken with carrots
- Cheddar zucchini bread
- Thai style tofu fried rice
- Squash crust pizza
- Corn salad
- Orzo and squash
We’ll eat all our fruit as snacks. I may have to make some additional squash breads to use up everything we got this week!
What I Got – Week 13
What I Made – Week 13
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.
What I’ve Planned – Week 13 2019
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.
- Sichuan cabbage and noodles with tofu
- Rosemary peach chicken
- German bean salad with green and wax beans
- Beet and carrot salad with curry dressing
- Hot stuffed banana pepper pasta
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?
What I Got – Week 13
Top Row: Little Baby Flower Watermelon, Banana Peppers, Nectarines, Green Savoy Cabbage
Middle Row: Slicing Cucumbers, Red Beets, Orange Carrots, Jalapeño Peppers
Bottom Row: Mixed Cherry Tomatoes, Yellow Peaches
What I Made: Vinegar Glazed Beets with their Greens
Past my toddler years, I have not historically been a big consumer of beets. However, I have received a TON of beets in my CSAs baskets this year, and usually take the boring route of steaming them and eating them as a side. This recipe, however, uses both the beets and their greens, so I was actually very excited to get fresh beets and have an opportunity to try this out.
The beets and the greens are both steamed, but then the beets get heated with butter in a pan. Then, balsamic vinegar is added and cooked down. It’s an easy way to add a twist to the run-of-the-mill steamed beets. Full instructions are below.
What I Made: Pear Pie
Pears are not my favorite fruit to eat raw. For folks like me who don’t care for the texture, baking is the perfect way to break down the pears, and of course, the addition of all that sugar and dough certainly doesn’t hurt anything either.
This pie recipe is really quick if you use a pre-made pie crust like I did, with all the flavor of the delicious Bartlett pears and not much of the weird texture. If you cut the pre-made crust to make a pretty lattice top like I did, it looks extra fancy! (Perfect for impressing all your Instagram followers.) Full instructions are below.
What I Made: Tomato Sauce
My freezer is constantly stocked with a few staples: pork chops, homemade chicken stock, and ice cream. (Just being honest here!) I also try to freeze servings of soups or stews I make for quick meals when the fridge is empty and there’s no time to cook, like the dumplings I made previously. With the abundance of roma tomatoes, I decided to add another item to the freezer stash. Whether heated over spaghetti and meatballs or used in place of canned sauce, this is great to have on hand. The fact that it’s based on a recipe from my Grandma guarantees that it’s going to taste great, though not as good as she would have made it!
Start by dunking the fresh roma tomatoes in boiling water until the skins split. After they cool, the skins can be removed. Afterwards, add to a big pot with some onion, green peppers, tomato paste, garlic, and some herbs and simmer for a few hours.
Not the most photo-friendly dish, but trust me when I say it tastes better than it looks.
If you’re looking for a meat sauce, simply brown the ground meat of your choice in the pot along with peppers and onions in the second step below!
What I Made: Buffalo Roasted Cauliflower
Hot wings are a favorite snack of mine. I used to buy those big bags of frozen wings, but all that completely changed when I found a recipe to make them at home. The wings are tossed in salt and olive and and roasted in the oven until the skin is nice and crispy, then tossed in a buffalo sauce, made of melted butter and your favorite brand of hot sauce in a 1:8 ratio.
This recipe for roasted cauliflower in buffalo sauce takes the chicken recipe and adapts it with a healthy twist: roast the cauliflower until browned and then toss in hot sauce. Now it’s the perfect vegetarian and lower fat snack or side!
CSA in the Suburbs 