thoughtful consumption

This week’s bag

Here is the standard subscription stuff.

• Komatsuna greens
• butterhead lettuce
• arugula
• loose leaf lettuce
• apples
• broccoli

Here are the premium add-ons.

• pretty little radishes (These might have been standard items.)
• potatoes
• eggs
• lavender goat’s milk soap
• parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme!

And here’s the honey and oregano I ordered from the online store.

This week’s plan

I was excited to get all this lettuce because I’m in charge of salad for my father’s birthday party this Saturday. I’m also going to take the Komatsuna to my parents. We’ve started liking greens now, but they love them. And I’m going to take my two acorn squashes, too, to offer them to my mother for her Thanksgiving centerpiece. Then next Thursday, I’ll bring them home again and cook them. I’ve read that you can store acorn squashes for five weeks or more. Plus, we’ve been keeping our house pretty cool, so I think they’ll still be fine eating after Thanksgiving.

So the lettuce and radishes will become salads (duh!). (I already used the radish greens in my last pasta and greens experiment.)

I’m going to use some of the arugula in salads and some to wilt in pasta. Parmesan tastes really good with arugula in salad, so I bet it will be great with pasta.

For lunch Saturday, I plan on baking the potatoes and steaming the broccoli and making some kind of cheese sauce or Hollandaise to put on top.

The apples are already gone. These were some of the best yet. They were really crisp.

The oregano I bought to dry and store. I realized I was out of dried oregano and almost bought a little bottle at the grocery store. Hah! Now I’m going to dry local oregano. Washing may be a bear, though.

My Simon & Garfunkel herb bundle makes me think of roast chicken. I think I’ve got a chicken in the freezer. I’ll pull it out and make a chicken for next week. Then we can have lots of yummy chicken leftovers like pesto chicken pizza. In the meantime, for my lunch the other day, I made some pasta with olive oil, Parmesan and fresh herbs. It was very nice.

I’ve still got some spinach from last week to use up. I’m planning on making spinach Alfredo this weekend. Depending what’s at the grocery store, I may add some chicken or shrimp. (Boy, do we eat a lot of pasta!)

The honey is cool and dark looking. I guess one of the cool things about local honey is it changes depending on what was blooming. I haven’t tried it yet. I wonder if I’ll be able to detect a difference in taste. I think I go through honey too fast, though. I enjoy it in my tea, but I think I’m going to try to cut back a little.

In the past I’ve enjoyed giving my goat milk soaps away as gifts. But I think I’m going to keep this one and give it a try. I’m not a fragrance kind of giry, but I bathe at night, so the lavender should be nice and calming before bed.