thoughtful consumption

This week

Whew! What a week! Sorry it’s taken so long to post this week. Here’s what we got this past Wednesday.

• eggs
• rice grits
• spinach
• green leaf lettuce
• red leaf lettuce
• cherry tomatoes
• spearmint
• strawberries
• Ezekiel muffins…

… but you’ll just have to take my word on that last part.

The Ezekiel muffins are still my favorite muffins. I even like them better than the chocolate-raspberry ones!

The lettuce is great as usual. We’ll make lots of salad with the tomatoes. The spinach we’ll eat after the leaf lettuce is gone since it seems to last longer. I glad I got some grits. I’ll cook them ahead of time with lots of butter and salt and then heat them up for breakfast in the morning. Or in the evening along with scrambled eggs and salad. Maybe I’ll get some Canadian bacon, cut it into chunks, and toss it in the grits, too.

The strawberries don’t look as bright as the ones in the past, but my husband says they taste just as good. In fact, he likes them better because the seeds are smaller. I only eat my strawberries processed in smoothie form. Although the strawberry sauce Janet wrote up in the CSA newsletter sounds great, too.

I’m enjoying the spearmint in my tea. It’s good in hot tea, but I think it’d be great in iced tea. Next week, I’m going to take a couple of sprigs with me and put them in iced tea if I go out for lunch.

Leftovers

Fried

What do you call fried rice when you forget to make the rice? I forgot to make rice this week, but it turned into a happy accident. I started with leftover kale and chard, some onion, shrimp, and eggs. I followed my regular shrimp fried rice recipe and added some oyster sauce along with the soy sauce. I chopped up the chard stems to cook with the onions and added the leaves with the kale.

fried rice - hold the rice

When it was done, I dumped it over some lo mein noodles hidden in the pantry. It was great. I never imagined myself eating that much kale and chard in one sitting.

Caramel corn!

We finally made the popcorn we got several weeks ago. It was wonderful! And it’s so much fun when you lift the lid and there’s white fluffy popcorn. It’s like a magic trick. We followed this recipe from Zorra on Chowhound: Use 1 tablespoon of oil to ¼ cup of corn. Heat the oil in a sturdy pan with a lid. Add three kernels. Once they’ve all popped, add the rest. The hard part is you have to keep shaking the pot and trying to let some steam out with out letting any corn part out. But it only takes a few minutes. And leave the top on until you only hear a couple of pops. I had to peek, and a bunch of pieces popped right out!

The popcorn's very white in real life. Must be the butter filter on my camera.

The popcorn was delicious, but that was only act 1. Then we turned to this great recipe from Allrecipes.com. We made ¾ cup of corn, and it came out to close to 5 quarts, so we just followed the recipe with the exception of using our CSA cane syrup instead of corn syrup. The result was terrific – if eating entirely too much caramel corn in one sitting can be considered terrific.

Herbs and more

We roasted a chicken with lots of our rosemary (plus garlic, onion, and lemon).

We ate it for dinner with a nice salad, orzo pasta, and sweet potatoes.

I put salad burnet, rosemary flowers, parsley, and violets in with the lettuce.

I was really surprised by the rosemary flowers (the smallest purple ones). I was worried they’d be strong, but they were very delicate and delicious. I put one stem into some water in the hopes that it would continue to flower.

(No luck yet.)

We baked the sweet potatoes along with the chicken. When they came out of the oven, they just fell out of their skins, and we mashed them up with some butter.

I like butter.

The next day we made some chicken salad with leftover chicken and some of the herbs: salad burnet, chives, and parsley. It made really nice sandwiches.