thoughtful consumption

This week’s bag

Here is the standard subscription stuff.

• Komatsuna greens
• butterhead lettuce
• arugula
• loose leaf lettuce
• apples
• broccoli

Here are the premium add-ons.

• pretty little radishes (These might have been standard items.)
• potatoes
• eggs
• lavender goat’s milk soap
• parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme!

And here’s the honey and oregano I ordered from the online store.

This week’s plan

I was excited to get all this lettuce because I’m in charge of salad for my father’s birthday party this Saturday. I’m also going to take the Komatsuna to my parents. We’ve started liking greens now, but they love them. And I’m going to take my two acorn squashes, too, to offer them to my mother for her Thanksgiving centerpiece. Then next Thursday, I’ll bring them home again and cook them. I’ve read that you can store acorn squashes for five weeks or more. Plus, we’ve been keeping our house pretty cool, so I think they’ll still be fine eating after Thanksgiving.

So the lettuce and radishes will become salads (duh!). (I already used the radish greens in my last pasta and greens experiment.)

I’m going to use some of the arugula in salads and some to wilt in pasta. Parmesan tastes really good with arugula in salad, so I bet it will be great with pasta.

For lunch Saturday, I plan on baking the potatoes and steaming the broccoli and making some kind of cheese sauce or Hollandaise to put on top.

The apples are already gone. These were some of the best yet. They were really crisp.

The oregano I bought to dry and store. I realized I was out of dried oregano and almost bought a little bottle at the grocery store. Hah! Now I’m going to dry local oregano. Washing may be a bear, though.

My Simon & Garfunkel herb bundle makes me think of roast chicken. I think I’ve got a chicken in the freezer. I’ll pull it out and make a chicken for next week. Then we can have lots of yummy chicken leftovers like pesto chicken pizza. In the meantime, for my lunch the other day, I made some pasta with olive oil, Parmesan and fresh herbs. It was very nice.

I’ve still got some spinach from last week to use up. I’m planning on making spinach Alfredo this weekend. Depending what’s at the grocery store, I may add some chicken or shrimp. (Boy, do we eat a lot of pasta!)

The honey is cool and dark looking. I guess one of the cool things about local honey is it changes depending on what was blooming. I haven’t tried it yet. I wonder if I’ll be able to detect a difference in taste. I think I go through honey too fast, though. I enjoy it in my tea, but I think I’m going to try to cut back a little.

In the past I’ve enjoyed giving my goat milk soaps away as gifts. But I think I’m going to keep this one and give it a try. I’m not a fragrance kind of giry, but I bathe at night, so the lavender should be nice and calming before bed.

Maybe greens aren’t so bad after all.

I made three attempts to use greens with pasta. The first one I just added some kale to pasta with pine nuts. It wasn’t a lot of kale, and it wasn’t bad. I tore it in to pieces and blanched it for about 30 seconds. Then tossed it in with the pasta.

The second try was really good. I separated out the mustard greens, blanched and chopped them. Then I heated some butter and olive with pine nuts, minced garlic and lemon zest. When the butter was sizzling, but not yet brown I added some slightly thawed frozen shrimp, the chopped greens, some Parmesan cheese, and salt and pepper. I sauteed everything for about three minutes until the shrimp was cooked and served it over pasta. Supper was enjoyed by everyone!

The third try was less yummy. I tried the same thing with the rest of my mixed greens and without the shrimp. It didn’t work so well. The greens clumped up with the Parmesan and got kind of crispy. Next time I’ll add some water.

Overall, though, I think are family is making peace with greens. We’re pretty proud of ourselves.

Turnips, anyone?

Turnips, on the other hand, are still giving me fits. The Asian turnips are nice, but I can’t seem to find a good use for the regular ones. Lately, I’ve been trying different versions of roasted root vegetable recipes. But roasted turnips still taste like turnips. I’ve also tried passing them off as a substitute for mashed potatoes. That went over like a ton of bricks. So I’m on the look out for other turnip ideas.

Pizza!

I wanted to make pita crisps with this week’s herbs, so I planned to by pita bread at the store. But I came home with flat bread instead. So we made white pizza instead with olive oil, garlic, fresh Italian herbs, and Parmesan.

Later in the week, I pulled some pesto out of the fridge and chopped up some leftover chicken breast and made pesto chicken pizza. That was really good.

We’re making progress on our bag of sweet potatoes. We still aren’t tired of fresh lettuce and baked sweet potatoes for lunch. And an apple for dessert. Mmmm… fall.

Oh yeah, and we made French toast for Saturday breakfast with our eggs!

It’s really fall now…

No more straggling tomatoes or peppers or green beans. But lots of great stuff!

Here’s this week’s standard bag.

• 5 apples
• 2 heads of butterhead lettuce
• mixed greens
• spinach
• loose leaf lettuce (There was more, but we had some for supper.)
• 2 sweet potatoes
• a bag of turnips, rutabagas, and mixed carrots
• an acorn squash

And the premium extras…

• 2 heads of broccoli
• 6 eggs
• a bundle of thyme, oregano, parsley and chives
• 4 heads of garlic

This week’s plan

I’m very happy with this bag and have lots of ideas.

First, we’ll have some great salads. We’ve still got some Asian turnips to slice up and add. Recently, I’ve been preferring my broccoli raw, so the broccoli may wind up in the salads. We’ll eat the loose leaf lettuce first, then the butterhead, and then the spinach. I may mix them up some, but I want to make sure to eat all the loose leaf lettuce first while it’s nice and fresh.

I’ve gotten some good recipes to try with the greens. (Thanks, Mom and Allison!) The bag of greens is a very mixed bag. There’s some kale, some mustard greens, and some others I can’t identify. I’m going to try the kale and mustard greens in two different pasta dishes. The rest will get blanched and chopped for dip. I’ll be sure to report on our family’s next step in developing a taste for greens.

I plan on roasting the bag of root veggies with a head of garlic and some of the fresh herbs. I’ll add the little sweet potatoes from my bag of uglies, too. And I might add some browned stew beef and make it more of a pot roast.

The herbs look really nice, and I hope to make some pita crisps for a light lunch or afternoon snack.

I was really happy to see the garlic. We seem to blow through it at my house. Someday, I’ll have to go back to that stuff in a jar. But, thanks to this batch, we’re safe for a while.

We could make another pound cake with these eggs. But developing a pound-cake-a-week habit is probably not a good idea. Scrambled eggs are good with salads. Scrambled cheese eggs and salad and baked sweet potatoes and salad are both excellent last minute meals. French toast is good, too, especially since the weekend mornings are getting colder.

And my acorn squash from last week now has a friend! After they’ve had a chance to bond, I’ll make them into soup or something.

Fried Green Tomatoes!

We fried the tomatoes, and it worked really well. I dipped them in buttermilk and then cornmeal with some salt, pepper and paprika.

The sweet potatoes were so delicious that they got eaten all the way down to the skin. Here’s the proof.

I stir-fried the Komatsuna greens with onions, ginger, garlic and chicken. It was pretty good. You couldn’t taste the greens in all the sauce. That’s good and bad, I suppose.

The green beans were frozen, and the potatoes were baked. The eggs went into a magically delicious pound cake that my husband made this week. (I love my husband.)

The acorn squash is still adding charm to the kitchen for now.

We’ve been eating the Asian turnips sliced in salad as suggested. It’s pretty tasty. They are very mild.

I’m feeling braver about greens. This coming week, I may even try a recipe that isn’t designed to hide the taste of the greens!

So I caved and bought a 10# bag of ugly sweet potatoes. I’ve been so pleased with the CSA sweet potatoes; they’re like what grocery store sweet potatoes wish they could be. Here are my uglies.

Here’s my regular subscription stuff…

• Green tomatoes
• Sweet potatoes
• Chard
• Apples
• Komatsuma greens
• Acorn squash

Here’s what I think was the premium stuff. I’m not sure, though; the eggs could have been regular.

• potatoes
• green beans
• eggs
• basil

This week’s plan

The basil’s already pesto and safely ensconced in the freezer.

I’m going to take the plunge and fry the green tomatoes. My husband said something about buttermilk wash being important, so I’ll look around and see what recipes I can find.

One of the apples has already been cut up and eaten, the second soon to follow.

The two sweet potatoes will probably be lunch today along with a salad. The little ugly sweet potatoes will get roasted and eaten this weekend. The bigger ones we’ll just store and eat later.

I’ll probably roast the turnips, too. My neighbor Lucy has suggested this briami recipe. Maybe I’ll try it with the turnips and little sweet potatoes. I want to save the white potatoes for eating baked because we just love them that way.

Then again, our weekly CSA flyer suggests slicing these milder turnips into salads. So I’ll try that. Maybe we’ll come to enjoy the turnips as much as the radishes.

The smaller chard and komatsuma greens will be added to last week’s lettuce to stretch the salads.

I’m not sure what to do yet with the rest of the greens. As I’ve said before, we not a big greens family. But, when looking at the Komatsuma, even I can tell them’s some purty greens. So I’m a little hesitant to condemn them to obscurity in creamy alfredo or dip. They taste kind of like cabbage to me – maybe I’ll try a little stir-fry.  Hmm.

And the little acorn squash – too cute to cook? Probably not, in the end. But it should last for a while. So we’ll enjoy its outsides now and its insides later.

Here’s what I have to report from this week.

Charlie is no more. But he had a good long life (for a squash-o-lantern) and will be missed.

Radish greens work in “spinach” dip.

My step-son said the other night, “You know, I think I kind of like radishes.” I agree. Our salads will seem sad without radishes this week.

Oven drying peppers works! You have to keep the oven on low for a long time, so it’s better for fall.

Sweet potatoes are near the top of my list of reasons to keep subscribing. I’ve always liked sweet potatoes, but sometimes you buy them in the store, and you take a couple of bites, and then you get a stringy bite. I hate that bite. Somehow that stringy texture makes me gag and not want any more sweet potato. That never happens with these sweet potatoes. I eat them all the way to the skin, and the texture’s perfect to the last bite. It’s like everything you’ve always imagined a sweet potato could be.

The sugar cane was interesting. I think it would be fun to take on a hiking trip.

Charlie says, “Happy Halloween!”

Charlie made it to Halloween! His teeth are shrinking a little, but otherwise he’s fine. The coolest part is when the smoke wafts out of his eyes after you blow out the candle. Spooky!

This week I bought a couple of items from the online store: honey and butterhead lettuce.

The butterhead is our favorite so I wanted to make sure we had some this week. (As Murphy would have it, we also got a head in our bag. But the hyrdoponic lettuce lasts a long time, so I’m not worried. I know we’ll get around to it!)

Regular subscription bag

• Frilly lettuce and butterhead lettuce
• 2 sweet potatoes
• bunch of radishes
• 2 broccoli crowns
• 6 hot peppers
• sugar cane!
• 3 apples
• Not pictured: turnip greens (We gave them to our neighbors.)

Premium subscription additions

• cilantro
• spinach
• eggs
• 3 tomatoes
• Not pictured: dill (I didn’t find the bag until I was done taking pictures.)

This week’s plan

So the lettuce, spinach, and radishes all go to salads. Some of this spinach has purple stems and a definite pecan taste. It’s really good.

I can never use enough fresh cilantro so I found this recipe for cilantro-jalapeno paste. It seemed to work really well, although stemming cilantro and seeding jalapenos is tedious work.

I’ll pop out the cubes, bag them, and then defrost them as needed for chicken soup or tacos or chips and salsa.

The other hot peppers are drying in the window. This weekend I’m going to try to oven dry them, though, because last time they got moldy before they could dry.

I wanted to find out if you can eat radish greens. (You can!) Here are some more good ideas for radishes. I blanched and chopped our greens for creamy “spinach” dip.

The sweet potatoes will be baked and eaten happily with a nice salad. Mmmm.

I think I’ll steam one head of broccoli and eat the other one raw. I like raw broccoli florets with dip or in salads.

I’m excited about the sugar cane but haven’t had time to mess with it yet. Our weekly flyer had some instructions for what to do.

Don’t need any instructions for the apples – just eat and enjoy!

I think I’ll make one more tomato pasta dish with these tomatoes. I’ve still got some garlic. If I have enough  time (and energy) this weekend, I might try to do something more Mexican than Italian to use the cilantro paste.

We’ve had some great salads this week with chopped tomatoes, radishes, and mushrooms. We added tuna one time and another time we cut up some lunch meat to make a chef salad.

We had the potatoes baked and the broccoli steamed one day for lunch along with a box of fried chicken. (Sometimes, you just get a craving, you know?) Another day we had cold fried chicken and salad.

Sliced parmesan cheese does wonderful things to arugula. I wouldn’t have guessed it because they are both such strong tastes. But I remembered some restaurant salads that combined them – and it really works. I still have some arugula, so I may try this arugula pesto recipe.

Another thing I learned is that the hydroponic lettuce stays fresher than the loose lettuce. So make sure to use up the loose lettuce first.

I used the greens and mushrooms to make an alfredo-like pasta recipe. My mother gave me this recipe; I’m not sure where she got it. It’s pretty rich with all the cream cheese and butter. I use Neufchatel cheese to keep it lighter. You could probably also use less butter especially if you use a nonstick pan.

It’s been a strange week, and I haven’t cooked as much as normal. I’m determined to use the spaghetti squash insides by this weekend, though. Depending on what I get today, I may freeze the green beans and the squash. At the end of the season, I’m going to post a freezer inventory to see what I’ve been able to put away and how it might get used. Then I can post about frozen CSA stuff as I use it over the winter.