thoughtful consumption

Summer colors!

This week, I wish I had the room  to take a picture of my whole CSA order. It was so colorful. Instead, here are the individual pictures, which you can combine into a CSA collage in your mind.

arugula and beets

Along with some local goat cheese, these two make an awesome salad. I’ll roast the beets and chill them. Then I’ll slice them and add them to the arugula along with the cheese. No salad dressing required, although a sweetish vinaigrette applied with a light hand is nice.

okra and summer squash

This is the prettiest okra ever! I should probably do something besides chop, bread, and fry… nah. This week we’ll have fried okra breaded with flour and some Riverview Farms corn meal. I like veggies fried in plain old, non-virgin (less pricey) olive oil. So tasty!

The squash will get sliced, breaded, and fried, too. Maybe not deep-fried, though. Something more like this. (more…)

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I’m really excited about this summer season and the presence of beets and potatoes. (Last year, we got lots of rain at the wrong time, and there weren’t any beets or potatoes to be found. )

The potatoes are Yukon Golds. They are not overly happy potatoes…

but they seem friendly enough.

(They’re also delicious cubed and roasted with olive oil, rosemary, salt, and pepper.) (more…)

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Here’s what I got last week in my CSA box from Farmers Fresh:

blueberries, peaches, and strawberries - oh, my!

dill, Mexican tarragon, par-cel, and thyme

(soft and mild) radishes, (sweet) onions, and (enormous) carrots

eggs and spinach

lettuce and tomatoes!

The tomatoes were terrific, and early summer’s so nice because you get tomatoes and lettuce. For me, one of the shocks of eating local, seasonal produce was that lettuce and tomatoes really don’t overlap that much – even though we eat them together all the time conventionally.

I also ordered some stuff from the store:

strawberries, sorrel, and beets

(By the way, sorrel and roasted-then-chilled sliced beets is the world’s best combination.)

Not pictured: crunchy sprouts.

Lots of salads!

Lettuce, tomatoes, spinach, sorrel, beets, radishes, onions, sprouts, and carrots call for lots of salads. Here’s one:

And here’s another:

The funny thing about this salad is its tiny-ness. This is a 6” salad plate, and those eggs are a half a dozen quail’s eggs, scrambled. It made a perfect little late-night supper. (The quail’s eggs were kind of neat. They’re frustrating to open, and the taste – at least, for scrambled eggs – is not that different from chicken’s eggs. Still, they was cool to try, and they’re supposed to be really good for you.)

Monday, I made fried rice with lots of local stuff. We started with leftover Carolina Gold rice and then cooked up some local eggs and a handful of sustainably-harvested Georgia shrimp. Then we added these veggies:

snap peas, sprouts, onions, beet stems, radishes, and carrots

For sauce, I combined some soy sauce, sherry, dark sesame oil, and some homemade chicken broth. The broth and the Carolina Gold rice made for some rich-tasting rice.

which I forgot to take a picture of until we were almost done eating.

We’ve been eating lo mein for so long that this fried rice was a really nice change of pace.

What’s left over

I still have some beet greens left to sauté with raisins and local pecans. We’ll probably have that tonight for supper. I have some dill left, which is great because I ordered more beets from the store. Fresh dill is really tasty with beets.

I also have some thyme and blueberries. Maybe we’ll have a summery cocktail this evening.

It’s Wednesday, so I’m off to get more CSA-goodness. Enjoy your food!

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