thoughtful consumption

It’s really fall now…

No more straggling tomatoes or peppers or green beans. But lots of great stuff!

Here’s this week’s standard bag.

• 5 apples
• 2 heads of butterhead lettuce
• mixed greens
• spinach
• loose leaf lettuce (There was more, but we had some for supper.)
• 2 sweet potatoes
• a bag of turnips, rutabagas, and mixed carrots
• an acorn squash

And the premium extras…

• 2 heads of broccoli
• 6 eggs
• a bundle of thyme, oregano, parsley and chives
• 4 heads of garlic

This week’s plan

I’m very happy with this bag and have lots of ideas.

First, we’ll have some great salads. We’ve still got some Asian turnips to slice up and add. Recently, I’ve been preferring my broccoli raw, so the broccoli may wind up in the salads. We’ll eat the loose leaf lettuce first, then the butterhead, and then the spinach. I may mix them up some, but I want to make sure to eat all the loose leaf lettuce first while it’s nice and fresh.

I’ve gotten some good recipes to try with the greens. (Thanks, Mom and Allison!) The bag of greens is a very mixed bag. There’s some kale, some mustard greens, and some others I can’t identify. I’m going to try the kale and mustard greens in two different pasta dishes. The rest will get blanched and chopped for dip. I’ll be sure to report on our family’s next step in developing a taste for greens.

I plan on roasting the bag of root veggies with a head of garlic and some of the fresh herbs. I’ll add the little sweet potatoes from my bag of uglies, too. And I might add some browned stew beef and make it more of a pot roast.

The herbs look really nice, and I hope to make some pita crisps for a light lunch or afternoon snack.

I was really happy to see the garlic. We seem to blow through it at my house. Someday, I’ll have to go back to that stuff in a jar. But, thanks to this batch, we’re safe for a while.

We could make another pound cake with these eggs. But developing a pound-cake-a-week habit is probably not a good idea. Scrambled eggs are good with salads. Scrambled cheese eggs and salad and baked sweet potatoes and salad are both excellent last minute meals. French toast is good, too, especially since the weekend mornings are getting colder.

And my acorn squash from last week now has a friend! After they’ve had a chance to bond, I’ll make them into soup or something.