Chris and I are very much looking forward to our pre-season delivery this week. In the meantime, here are some leftovers.
Here’s a picture of beef stock made from local bones and scraps. I froze it in ice cube trays for later.
So far I’ve made beef stew and shepherd’s pie with it. It’s pretty good and much better than bouillon, but I wished I’d salted it more. (I made the beef stew with CSA chuck roast and the shepherd’s pie with CSA ground lamb. Both were warm and yummy.)
In addition to the long-lasting butternut squash, I’d like to recognize three veggies that kept us going through the CSA break: garlic, sweet potatoes, and green cabbage. Fresh garlic is so nice. We’re now on our last head, so my fingers are crossed that there will be some in one of our pre-season boxes.
I bought a 5-lb bag of sweet potatoes sometime in the beginning of December from CragerHager Farm. All of them were still good as of yesterday when we baked them to make a sweet potato pie. Maybe it helped that my kitchen has stayed pretty darn cool this winter. (Bet yours did, too!)
The cabbage was a surprise hit. I knew it would keep longer than the lettuce, so I didn’t hurry to eat it when it came with our last delivery of 2009. Then we lost it in the back of the fridge. The brave little cabbage was limp when we found it, but I shredded and sautéed some, and it was still delicious! We ate sautéed cabbage with nearly every meal for a week or so and never complained. (The recipe, if you can call it that, is sauté some shredded cabbage in olive oil with garlic and onion till just softened. Then add a couple of splashes of rice vinegar, turn off the heat, and let it steam for a moment before serving.) The trick is to never cook more than you’ll eat at a meal. It sounds like a pain, but it’s worth it and pretty easy to whip up – especially if you pre-shred, dice, and mince your ingredients.
And right now I’m drinking some nice tea made from dried lemon verbena and lemongrass. Perfect for perking up on a winter afternoon. These two herbs are my favorite to dry because the secret is to put them in a plastic bag in the vegetable drawer and forget about them for months. Then, in the middle of January, you get lemony tea!
Between now and Wednesday, we’ll finish up our shepherd’s pie and enjoy some pancakes made from Logan Turnpike Mill pancake mix and blueberries frozen last summer.
thoughtful consumption 
I am new to the area from California, where we would have our CSA weekly through the winter and I have really missed it. I can’t wait for our box this week either! I’m looking forward to staying tuned to your blog. It’s such a fun puzzle I think to figure out how to use the food to feed your family for the week. In some ways it’s easier than the grocery store, you at least have an inspiration point to start from!
Hey Liz,
Did you get your first CSA delivery? How does it compare to California?
I totally agree with the easier in some ways part and the fun puzzle part. (Thanks, by the way, for making me feel a little less strange!) It’s hard to imagine shopping/cooking/etc. any other way now.
But it took me a year or more to get to that point. I was not new to cooking prepared stuff but totally new to using fresh produce.
Did you experience a “CSA learning curve”?
Susan
Yes, I did get my delivery! I’ve already devoured the mini breads and the strawberries, we’ve been munching on the salad greens, and I’ve used my carrots and turnips in a pot roast tonight with a Riverview Farms chuck roast. It has all been delish! The delivery was over and above what I’m used to, we would just get veggies, with a lot of dirt and all!
And yes, I experienced just that learning curve. Sometimes it would take a long time to find a recipe that I thought my family would eat for the kale (for example) we had gotten the what felt like gazillionth time. To be honest too, when I didn’t want to fix a cabbage dish or something else, again, I would feed it to the chickens I had at the time…
Now I’ve been getting boxes for years, and when we first moved here, and I didn’t have a box, I would go to the produce section and not know where to start. Nothing to inspire me, and nothing grown locally! I feel all is right now that I’ve got local produce again. I just miss the milder CA weather that permitted 50 weeks of boxes a year (the farm did take two weeks off over the Christmas holiday).
Liz
Susan, I spelunked in the freezer and found last year’s Logan pancake mix. I cannot find a recipe on the package or the company’s website – do you have some info?
These are the pancake recipes on the Logan’s Three-Grain Pancake and Waffle Mix bag.
PANCAKES
1 egg
1 1/4 cups milk
2 tbsp. oil
1 3/4 cups Mix
Stir egg in bowl until well mixed. Beat in milk and oil. Add Mix and stir until dry ingredients are just moistened – the batter should be lumpy. Bake on hot, greased griddle, hot enough to make a drop of water dance on the surface before evaporating. Turn just once when pancakes begin to lose their gloss and bubbles begin to burst.
BUTTERMILK PANCAKES: sift 1/2 tsp. baking soda into above Mix. Substitute 1 1/4 cups buttermilk for sweet milk and proceed as above.
We have also used this recipe that has Ricotta cheese and no eggs (actually we made these today):
http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/giada-de-laurentiis/ricotta-pancakes-recipe/index.html
Mmm… pancakes.