thoughtful consumption

Charlie says, “Happy Halloween!”

Charlie made it to Halloween! His teeth are shrinking a little, but otherwise he’s fine. The coolest part is when the smoke wafts out of his eyes after you blow out the candle. Spooky!

This week I bought a couple of items from the online store: honey and butterhead lettuce.

The butterhead is our favorite so I wanted to make sure we had some this week. (As Murphy would have it, we also got a head in our bag. But the hyrdoponic lettuce lasts a long time, so I’m not worried. I know we’ll get around to it!)

Regular subscription bag

• Frilly lettuce and butterhead lettuce
• 2 sweet potatoes
• bunch of radishes
• 2 broccoli crowns
• 6 hot peppers
• sugar cane!
• 3 apples
• Not pictured: turnip greens (We gave them to our neighbors.)

Premium subscription additions

• cilantro
• spinach
• eggs
• 3 tomatoes
• Not pictured: dill (I didn’t find the bag until I was done taking pictures.)

This week’s plan

So the lettuce, spinach, and radishes all go to salads. Some of this spinach has purple stems and a definite pecan taste. It’s really good.

I can never use enough fresh cilantro so I found this recipe for cilantro-jalapeno paste. It seemed to work really well, although stemming cilantro and seeding jalapenos is tedious work.

I’ll pop out the cubes, bag them, and then defrost them as needed for chicken soup or tacos or chips and salsa.

The other hot peppers are drying in the window. This weekend I’m going to try to oven dry them, though, because last time they got moldy before they could dry.

I wanted to find out if you can eat radish greens. (You can!) Here are some more good ideas for radishes. I blanched and chopped our greens for creamy “spinach” dip.

The sweet potatoes will be baked and eaten happily with a nice salad. Mmmm.

I think I’ll steam one head of broccoli and eat the other one raw. I like raw broccoli florets with dip or in salads.

I’m excited about the sugar cane but haven’t had time to mess with it yet. Our weekly flyer had some instructions for what to do.

Don’t need any instructions for the apples – just eat and enjoy!

I think I’ll make one more tomato pasta dish with these tomatoes. I’ve still got some garlic. If I have enough  time (and energy) this weekend, I might try to do something more Mexican than Italian to use the cilantro paste.