Lots of food yesterday in my CSA box!
- sweet potatoes
- eggs
- lettuce (frisee?)
- celery
- butter!
- spinach (slightly slimy)
- oyster mushrooms
- pea pods
- bean sprouts
- kale
- Pioneer porridge! I ran out of porridge last month and have been forced to eat oatmeal since. Hooray for yummy porridge!
- invisible strawberries! Well, not really…
I just froze them right away along with the extra pint I ordered from the online store. I also ordered Fran’s new herbal tea mix – spearmint, lemon thyme, and thyme flowers.
The herbs were a lot perkier yesterday, but they’ve already made two lovely pots of afternoon tea. That’s a great thing about herb tea as opposed to herb garnish: wilty herbs are not a problem.
Sorting peas
Sorting is one of those prepping steps that you kind of lose track of when you get produce from the grocery store. Most everything’s already packaged in like sizes for like uses.
Sometimes you sort to get rid of icky things – like with this week’s spinach. It may not have been ridden hard, but I think it was put away wet. Wet is the main enemy of produce. I’ve gotten in the habit of turning my plastic bags of produce inside-out every day or so. (Unless it’s cabbage or turnips or something else crazy-hardy.) The bags are always wet on the inside, so it seems like a good practice.
More happily, you can also sort for different sizes and uses. That’s what I did today with my peas.
Clockwise from the top right: tiny pods for salad, bigger pods for stir-fry, biggest pods for shelling peas.
Turns out all of these peas should have stayed pea pods. The peas weren’t really peas yet. Chris loves peas, so I wanted to try to get him some. However, I spent way too long trying to shell very green peas for this.
I ended up just adding these pealets to the tiny pods for salads. They’re crunchy and sweet, so I think they’ll be great.
Plans
Tonight’s supper will probably be kale with raisins and pine nuts plus sweet potatoes. It’s kind of silly because there are things in my fridge that won’t last nearly as long as the kale and sweet potatoes. But this menu requires very little thinking and prepping.
Sometime soon, we’ll have some sort of Asian stir-fry dish. I’d like to try a pad thai kind of thing after reading Mark Bittman’s article about it last month . I’ll use the bean sprouts, pea pods, mushrooms, and maybe some celery. Have to get somewhere to find the other ingredients like tamarind paste and fish sauce. Otherwise it’ll be plain old stir-fry. But not fried rice. I’m tired of fried rice.
Tomorrow for lunch, we’ll have a nice salad with the lettuce, celery, sprouts, and peapods plus some romaine and red onion from Kroger. I’ll probably add some tuna and romano cheese, too.
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thoughtful consumption 