thoughtful consumption

The goods…

Delivery was a day early this week, but that worked out fine.

Here’s the standard bag (more or less).

• 8 pretty apples (I’d already eaten 3 by the time I took this picture!)
• kohlrabi
• butternut squash
• arugula
• Swiss chard
• sweet potatoes (There are more sweet potatoes hiding in the arugula, too!)

Here are the premium additions.

Shitake mushrooms loose leaf lettuce beets 1 dozen eggs

I also ordered another bag of oregano to dry in the oven at its lowest setting for no more than an hour this time.

The plan…

Since I’m posting so late this week, I can already tell you some things I’ve done. First, we’ve eaten a bunch of apples and lettuce. I think the lettuce is the best yet.

I cooked some pasta with half of the Swiss chard. This did not go over so well, I’m afraid. I’ve pushed my husband about as far as I’m willing to with the greens experiments. So I made dip with the rest of the chard and took it to Thanksgiving as an appetizer.

Unfortunately, some of the mushrooms were also in the ill-fated Swiss chard and pasta dish. And they looked like such nice mushrooms. I’m going to saute the rest in butter and onion or add them raw to salads. I want to do better by them somehow.

The arugula will be added to pasta. (This is fine with the hubby.) Or I may grind it up with Parmesan cheese and olive oil and make pesto. Then it is safe and can be added to pasta later.

I’m going to roast the beets, chill them, slice them up, and add them to salads. I’m pretty excited about that. Fresh, young beets are tasty.

If you’ve got arugula and beets, you might want to try this salad recipe with arugula, beets, goat cheese, and raisins.

I like butternut squash, too. I think part of this squash will join the recently repatriated acorn squash in a creamy blended soup. (The squash have been at my mom’s house all week as part of the Thanksgiving centerpiece.) But my favorite way to cook butternut squash is to bake it and then slice the end and bake the slices again with some brown sugar until they caramelize a little. I first had squash like this at Gabe’s, a restaurant in Villa Rica. We don’t eat out a lot (especially at nice places like Gabe’s), but when we do,  I always try to scan the menus for local produce to see what the chefs are doing with it. Even if you don’t end up ordering it, the menu descriptions or the servers’ descriptions can give you some good ideas to try at home.

I’m psyched to get all the eggs. We’ll scramble some and bake with some. It’s a good time of year to have lots of eggs.

The sweet potatoes and apples are always welcome. We’re getting through our 10lb bag of sweet potatoes. They’re always great baked. We bake the little ones as side dishes and the bigger ones as the main part of a meal. And the apples are so easy to snack on. I hope they keep coming for a while!

I’m a little worried about the kohlrabi. It looks like it needs to be eaten quickly, and I don’t have a good idea yet. The best I’ve come up with is fried rice with stir fried kohlrabi and onions. Maybe it would be a nice break from all the traditional food.

We didn’t end up with a lot of leftover turkey from Thanksgiving, so I’m going to roast a chicken with some of my leftover herbs from last week. Then I can use the chicken to make a bunch of different dishes.

• pasta with wilted arugula, sauteed mushrooms, and roasted chicken.
• chicken and herb roasted potatoes and steamed broccoli (both leftovers from last week)
• pesto chicken flatbread pizza.

All of these will come with delicious salad, too. Pretty much all of our meals come with delicious salad.

We are happy campers.