CSA Week 21 - The Last of the Season

The only left over veggie I had in the crisper from week 20’s share was a bell pepper. That was a very good thing because the last week for the Gorman Produce Farm Community Supported Agriculture was quite a lot:

• 2 green bell peppers
• 2 pounds sweet potatoes
• 3 garlic
• 2 baby lettuce
• 1 butternut squash
• 1 bunch kale
• 1 bunch chard
• 1 bunch watermelon radishes
• 4 snack peppers
• 1 bunch turnips

The turnips and watermelon radishes were about the same size. I’m going to cook the green tops too!

The garlic and peppers are pretty enough to be a centerpiece.

And the lettuce is a melding of gentle green curves.

I am going to miss the weekly trek to the CSA and the bounty of fresh veggies. It is going to take some focused attention when I go grocery shopping next week to buy a similar range of vegetables in the produce section of the grocery store; the CSA has broadened my palate. Now it is up to me to sustain the improved eating habits that have developed over this summer and fall.

CSA Week 20

Sigh….Next week will be the last week for our CSA. I’ll miss the creative meal planning to use up the weekly share; I’ve enjoyed it. I’ll have to shift the way I shop in my grocery’s produce section to achieve a similar result. In past years, it has been too easy to slip into the purchase of the same fresh veggies week after week.

We managed to eat the entire week 19 share so I had both crispers clear for the week 20 produce. That has worked out well. The pac choi is huge! I traded the hot peppers for arugula (someone getting a full share had put it on the trade table) but otherwise cheered for the variety and quantity of peppers: green bell peppers, sweet pepper mix and colorful bell peppers. There were the slender Japanese eggplants in the mix; they are my favorite for stir fries.  I used one in the stir fry last night along with stems and leaves from one of the kohlrabi, some arugula, and some pac choi.  I am trying to decide if I want to use the broccoli in soup or salad!

I have a few things that will last for quite a while from the CSA: garlic, sweet potatoes, and butternut squash. I’ve added the sweet potatoes from the CSA to the ones I harvested from by deck garden. The pile is in the glass bird bath that I recently brought indoors for the season.

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 16

I finished everything from the week 15 CSA share….and harvested my own sweet potato leaves for good measure. They make nice green bouquets in multiple vases of water in my kitchen.

Then the week 16 share included sweet potato leaves as well. I’ll eat them first because they are more wilted looking.  They are with a lot of other greens: chard, lettuce, Portuguese kale, and Pac Choi.

The peppers, 2 types of eggplant and the butternut squash are the non-greens for the week! Hurray for fresh veggies!

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!

CSA - Week 13

Wow - the warm days are flying by! We are in in week 13 of our CSA’s season. I don’t have much left from week 12: half a jalapeno pepper (which I will use in a stir fry tonight), garlic, and potatoes. The last two will last for a long time so I’m not worked about any waist.

I discovered that I like carrot tops both as an added green in salads and in stir fries. They are not as strong tasting as parsley more a bit more than spinach. Since carrots were included in the share again this week, I checked the tops as much as the carrots!

The small purple potatoes are being savors two or three at a time - diced and used in stir fry. It’s a great color addition to already colorful food.

I managed to get to the CSA pick up early enough to get some yellow tomatoes! Four pounds is a lot of tomatoes and I ended up getting red ones too. And then there were the roma and mountain magic tomatoes too. My plan is to eat the yellows ones sliced for a snack (maybe with dabs of garlic hummus), the mountain magic in salads, and the rest as tomato soup or sauce that I may end up freezing.

Hurray for the inclusion of pac choi again! It was in a share early on but it’s been too long. I like it it both stir fry and salads. The kale will work well in the same things….and I can’t resist making kale chips again.

Butternut squash is one of my favorites too. I usually just prick the skin and put it in the over for an hour….then cut it after it is already cooked (i.e. soft) and scoop out the seeds. If I have enough left over, I might make butternut squash custard (using the pumpkin custard recipe).

This is going to be another great week of good eating.

CSA Week 12

It’s hard for me to fathom that we managed to eat the entire week 11 share from the Gorman Produce Farm CSA except the potatoes and garlic - which will easily keep. I even cleaned out some things I had frozen from the weeks I was not in town earlier in the month: the squash, cucumbers, and fruit beety.  I was surprised at the amount of tomatoes we consumed. The large yellow ones looked beautiful and tasted excellent atop chili.

Now we have another week - another large crop of tomatoes (there were no yellow ones in the bin by time I got there….but the large red ones will be just as good). I traded the 2 poblano peppers for 2 banana peppers. I did get 2 jalapeno peppers and plan to make homemade salsa.

CSA Week 10

I started out Wednesday morning making tomato sauce with all the tomatoes left in the crisper since I knew there would be more in this week’s CSA share. I ended up cooking all the red round tomatoes and about half the cherry tomatoes with onions (also from the CSA) and garlic and dried parsley (dried from the CSA share early in the season).  I even added some orange peel I’d dried from organic oranges from last spring!  My husband commented that the concoction smelled good.

I did pretty well clearing out everything else. The only items left from last week were a few potatoes.

As I expected there were a lot of tomatoes in the week 10 share. The heirloom tomatoes have become such a favorite that I swapped the jalapeno pepper for two more! They are delicious sliced and lightly salted. I got the black cherry tomatoes rather than the sun golds I had selected in previous weeks. And the poblano peppers were swapped for another eggplant.  Half of one of those eggplants was grilled with orange ginger sauce last night.

The potatoes were purple skinned/white flesh and small enough to be great for roasting.

The watermelon was big enough to require a second trip to the car! My daughter has been getting watermelon from her CSA in Tucson for weeks and the newsletter for them this week had some advice for using watermelon rind - either marinating it or using it in stir fry. I’ll post about my experiments in a week or so.

Lots of good eating in this week 10 CSA share!