CSA Week 17

The CSA week 16 produce was packed in ice chests and taken with us on a trek to Newport RI where we have been tourists this week. We knew we would have a kitchen so planned meals around the veggies. We ate well!

TheCSA  week 17 share may be the last of the tomatoes….but we have cauliflower! The collection of veggies each week always prompts meal ideas. My challenge this week might be how to use all the poblano and padron peppers!

CSA Week 15

Week 15 of the Gorman Produce Farm CSA - it’s another week of great food!

There is a little bow wave of garlic, potatoes, and winter squash from previous weeks - but those foods keep for weeks and months. I did make a fabulous custard with leftover baked butternut squash this past week; mixed up in the smoothie maker with just a little honey, baked into a light consistency custard, and then drizzled with maple syrup just before being eaten. Yum! I’ve also enjoyed the small purple potatoes in stir fries (only 2 at a time to not get too overwhelmed with calories. We made a bit batch of spaghetti sauce to have made good use of some frozen tomato sauce I’d cooked when I was overwhelmed with tomatoes a few weeks ago.

The big surprise to me this week is that sweet potato leaves are edible!  Evidently they can be used raw or cooked.  I’ve going to try them both ways and, if I like them, go ahead and cut the leaves from the sweet potato on my deck to enjoy; supposedly it is a good thing to do a few weeks before the sweet potato harvest.

I traded the poblano pepper for an additional bundle of Dinosaur Kale since I enjoy kale chips so much.

Notice that I got all yellow tomatoes too!  They’ll look beautiful with the red leafed lettuce.

Note that I’m using my own bags rather than bringing any plastic produce bags into the house. It feels good to avoid items that will become trash (or recycle if they stay clean).

CSA Week 14

On the morning before the pickup of the week 14 share, I had a few things left.

• I made a slurry of carrot tops and poured it into an ice cubes tray. The cubes will go into soup makings this fall.
• The butternut squash was something I completely forgot about. I decided to cook it for dinner; I’m sure I’ll have left overs to use in soup…or maybe I’ll make a small honey laced custard.

The week 14 share was very colorful: 2 pounds of tomatoes (I got yellow ones!), 2 snack peppers, 2 Japanese eggplant, 1 bunch of Swiss chard, 1 bunch parsley, 1 head Napa cabbage, 1 head lettuce, 1 pound of green beans and an acorn squash.

What a wonderful amount of color! The stems of the Swiss chard are my favorite.

The oranges and yellows of the peppers and tomatoes say ‘summer’ - maybe even more than the traditional red tomatoes (that I have from my own plants on my deck).

And the purple of the eggplant nestled in the greens of beans, lettuce, cabbage and chard leaves - the deepness of the color always surprises me.

I’m thinking stir fry (chard, green beans, cabbage…garlic and onions from earlier weeks), salad (tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage, peppers, green beans, a little parsley). I am already planning for the parsley to be processed into a slurry and frozen like the carrot tops; I don’t want to go over the top on vitamin K!