I’m going to get cooking rather than write a forward this week. We didn’t take a photo when the Community Produce box arrived on Tuesday. We have eaten cantaloupe, roasted seeds, stewed plums and put them on top of Dutch babies, made a cabbage curry, and I think eaten some other produce.
CSA Box
Skipped
Community Produce still in the fridge six days later
Collards
Cabbage
Potato
Zucchini
Other Lingering Produce
Sunchoke
Spring onions
Cabbage
Freezer Items in Focus
Corn stock
Fennel pesto
Beet puree
Roasted jalapeños
Hot peppers
Frozen beans
Summer stock bag
Garden
Sunchokes harvested
Dahlia tubers divided which means some are good for baking?
Open Preserves
Fridge still organized!
Fridge still not inventoried!
Fig jam
Preserved eggplant
Pickled banana peppers
Pickled fennel
Pickled peach
Curdito
Cran-kin-kraut
Fermented green cherry tomatoes
Pantry Beans
Yellow Split Pea
Split Red Lentil
Black Caviar Lentil
Garbanzo Bean
Buckeye Bean
Pinto Bean
Christmas Lima
California Corona
Large White Lima
Midnight Black Bean
Rojo De Suelo
And maybe one more on the shelf?
Meals to get us through the next few days
Cook up the greens and mix up some rice and the last of the peas for crispy hoppin john. (Actually, going to go get rice cooking while I write this.)
Repeat some of the recent cabbage recipes? The romanesco sauce was delicious. As was the curry.
I want to do the crispy potatoes but they really benefit from being eaten hot and I’m not sure when we cook them. So to consider. Honestly, also considering boiling up the summer stock bag, and make a corn and potato chowder. Potentially with buckeye beans mixed in? Think about it!
I’m talking good game about meal prepping on weekends, about eating leftovers, about using the instant pot for rice pilafs, the slow cooker for soups, about scrambling eggs. But I still don’t know how to have dinner on the table ten minutes after walking in the door on a routine basis. And I think that’s what life needs right now. It’s a yet another shift to how we approach meals to adapt to our shifting needs.
I feel like I used to have a small arsenal of meals that I could quickly deploy. I remember stocking up on the Taste of Thai noodle boxes, basically a side shuffle away from ramen. Which, honestly, maybe something to consider if there’s a version that fits the other diet constraints. I’m afraid it’s meal prepping sauce or flavoring packets or full jarsourselves the weekend before. (And now I miss the fancy ramen restaurant across the street from where I lived once upon a time.)
Please share if you have specific inspiration for gluten free, allergen adaptable, vegetable forward meals that are super fast, make leftovers all week, or cook while we’re out of the house.
Today’s Box
Bartlett Pears
Honeycrisp Apples
Kiwiberries
Baby Green Bok Choy
Green Romaine Lettuce
Lacinato Kale
Mixed Heirloom Tomatoes
Yellow Wax Beans
Community Produce
Green bell peppers
Onions
Potatoes
Sweet potatoes
Apples
Oranges
Things in the fridge
Sunchokes
Muscadines
Green tomato
Peppers
Fennel stems
Greens: Lettuce, Red Cabbage, Green Cabbage
Onions
Peaches
Pears
Watermelon
Fingerling potatoes
In the Garden
Who knows! We’re overdue for a visit
Probably collards, dahlias
If we’re lucky cherry tomatoes, ground cherries, tomatillos
Open Preserves
Fridge still organized!
Fridge still not inventoried!
Fig jam
Preserved eggplant
Pickled banana peppers
Pickled fennel
Curdito–just a little left
Pantry Beans
Yellow Split Pea
Split Red Lentil
Black Caviar Lentil
Garbanzo Bean
Buckeye Bean
Black Calypso
Good Mother Stallard
Pinto Bean
Flor De Junio
Christmas Lima
California Corona
Royal Corona
And maybe one more on the shelf?
Cook something. Somehow. Somewhen. Again.
First, buy carrots. Second, make more curdito!
These tomatoes look gorgeous and should be put to yummy use. The Six Seasons tomatoes and chickpea and za’atar and yogurt dish? We haven’t make it yet this year. This weekend!’
I do think Taco Tuesdays. Taco Thursdays. Taco Wednesdays, Mondays, Fridays, might be our new life. Cause we can have rice and beans ready to go. We can roast a veggie (still have beets and butternut squash in the fridge and a cilantro sauce to top). Those can be microwaved while the tortillas warm on griddle. Or maybe we skip the tortillas and go the burrito bowl route.
Pasta is also quick. More than ten minutes from door to table because we have to turn the water on to boil. I’m eyeing the fennel stems as a pesto-yogurt sauce that could be made in advance.
Use the kale or collards or even the bok choy to make these tofu bowls. (Is bowls our new lifestyle?)
The recipe card suggested a southwest sweet potato salad. Maybe try that. Maybe just chop the sweet potato, roast, and have on hand for salads or tacos or bowls of other varieties.
Stuffed bell peppers in the slow cooker? This seems very doable. And could let our beans and rice feel different for a day.
You know what. Microwave baked potatoes don’t take that long. And are a yummy non-rice canvas for toppings. Maybe we experiment. Or stick with chopping, roasting, serve as hash.
Love,
Sarah
PS We learned yesterday that we are eligible for a community food distribution program. I asked if our participation makes the program stronger or stretches resources for others. And now we have a bonus box of produce coming in. I am glad I had already started thinking about food to make before the influx of produce to avoid being overwhelmed. We should think about what donations we make with the money we aren’t spending on food. Local food bank? World Central Kitchen? Other Food for Gaza efforts?
I pressed publish on last week’s post. Then peeked at the predicted contents and went right on meal planning.
Today’s Box
Bartlett Pears
Mini Red Seedless Watermelon
Yellow Peaches
Butternut Squash
Green Beans
Green Cabbage
Green Romaine Lettuce
Russian Banana Fingerling Potatoes
Things in the fridge
Sunchokes
Muscadines
Peppers
Beets
Fennel stems
Cabbage: Red Cabbage, Green Cabbage
Onions
Peaches
Pears
Cantaloupe
In the Garden
Handful of basil
Parsley that turns out to have swallowtails growing on it
Pint of cherry tomatoes and ground cherries
Another pepper
Few tomatillos
Green tomatoes
Sunflowers! Dahlias!
Open Preserves
I organized the fridge.
But have not inventoried
So off the top of my head
Fig jam
Preserved eggplant
Pickled banana peppers
Pickled fennel
Curdito
Pantry Beans
Yellow Split Pea
Split Red Lentil
Black Caviar Lentil
Garbanzo Bean
Buckeye Bean
Black Calypso
Good Mother Stallard
Pinto Bean
Flor De Junio
Christmas Lima
California Corona
Royal Corona
And maybe one more on the shelf?
Cook something. Somehow. Somewhen. Again.
Green beans and potatoes means I want to make the Smitten Recipe. Do we have the time for it in the middle of the week? What if we use pesto from the freezer?
Butternut squash! I wish we had the cilantro from last week to make mole verde. Do I remember some in the freezer? Or are the leftovers? Any case, I’m thinking roasting and taco-ing.
On second thought, yes roast. And save some of it to go on salads! With the lettuce! And pears! Toss in some nuts! Chevre! Dried cherries or cranberries. Salad season returns!
Ha! More cabbage. Swap this if there’s something interesting in the box. Otherwise, let’s see how those fridge salad approach is working for us.
Our current CSA is the combined efforts of dozens of farms. Which means we often don’t have an overwhelming amount of a vegetable in a season. I think the last was the fall and winter of large sweet potatoes. (I’m still waiting for the month of watermelon this year.) Though, I think we also started getting smaller boxes after that and maybe that is a contributing factor?
I finally used the last leaves of the Napa cabbage. Which means with this delivery we have three heads of cabbage, all different varieties, in the fridge. Clearly we are not making enough slaws. Or okonomiyaki. Or balsamic cabbage noodles.
I think it’s time to ferment. Saurkraut here we come. ‘Tis the wrong season to make cran-kin-kraut. But we have new carrots. Let’s make curtido! Maybe one day we’ll make pupusas to go with them.
Today’s Box
Shiro Plums
Yellow Peaches
Athena Cantaloupe
Gold Zucchini
Orange Carrots
Pink Chard
Red Cabbage
Red Tomatoes
Things in the fridge
Sunchokes
Lettuce
Cabbage: Napa Cabbage, Green Cabbage,
Onion, Garlic
Peaches, blueberries
In the Garden
Basil by the bundle
Pinches of parsley
A few cherry tomatoes
One eggplant, that was still on the green side, oops
Collards
Blackberries enough for a cobbler
Sunflower! Dahlia! Calendula!
Open Preserves
One day we might organize the cabinet.
Another day we might organize the fridge.
Then we might know.
Pantry Beans
Split Red Lentil
Good Mother Stallard
Rio Zape
And more tucked on other shelves…
Keep the meals coming
I wish I knew what our tomato harvest was going to look like. Right now, I’m feeling pessimistic. Let’s savor these tomatoes in slices on BLTs; with pesto and mozz; maybe on grilled cheese though I’m not sure I want even that little heat applied to them. Later in the month, I bet I’ll go for salads. By September, maybe, I’d choose to cook these to the tomato risotto. Now, I want the burst juices of red sunshine.
It’s not a year to make pie. I want pie. The crust is work though and storebought doesn’t have the top crust and it’s not a year to make pie. We made a blackberry cobbler–batter 50/50 rice and buckwheat flours. Had some for breakfast with yogurt. Would repeat. First though, let’s try a blueberry-peach crisp.
We have so much basil coming in. I think that means we have to use the chard in the peanut butter + basil + banana + chard wrap. As weird as it sounds. I remember it being good? Also, make more pesto. And then more pesto.
It is hot. Too hot. And feeling hotter. Boiling water to cook noodles or, maybe, presoaked beans is about all the heat I want to add to the kitchen.
Speaking of the kitchen. Since I last wrote, we had a rumble, crash, shatter as the cabinet that holds our dishes detached from the wall and fell to the floor. I am so grateful that we didn’t need to go to the hospital with injuries (though I don’t think your arm would agree that you are unharmed). Hopefully we’ll meet with contractors soon and start figuring out what our next steps are.
In the meantime, let’s think through foods that are easy prep, few dishes, and minimal heat.
Today’s Box
Blueberries
Cherry Plums
Broccoli
Green Cabbage
Red Butterhead Lettuce
Yellow Straightneck Squash
Things in the fridge
Sunchokes
Cucumbers
Fennel
Green Garlic
Napa Cabbage
Broccoli
Radishes
In the Garden
Hopefully something comes after the heat. Poor plants.
Open Preserves
Still to be done.
Pantry Beans
Jumbo Peruvian Lima Bean
Mayocoba Bean
Split Red Lentil
Good Mother Stallard
Rio Zape
And more tucked on other shelves…
Quick and Cold. Or at least cool.
Veggies in a dip. Hummus. Ranch. Elote dip. Yogurt sauce. I don’t know what I’m thinking most, but that is how we consumed broccoli last week and I think we should be prepared to do it again.
Do we have a cabbage salad with black beans? Cumin dressing? Is this something my dad served? Maybe I’ll ask him. I am assuming we’re going to be shaving the cabbage for salads and slaws.
The squash is what I would normally turn the oven on for. The tuna casserole is our standard! The taco filling is a favorite! I might just cook them down in butter and serve on grain bowls? Maybe add some to some eggs and do an instant pot frittata dish?
Maybe it’s time to check out Grains for Every Season and see if there’s some particular inspiration for grain bowl salads. I cooked quinoa today, so we have that on hand. Maybe try amaranth soon? It’s more of a porridge. Sounds like something I’d fry an egg on? Maybe? This is why I should look at recipes! In the meantime, I’m going to try to channel the fast casual salad bar places and prep different bits to mix and match. Today’s lunch was quinoa + leftover Indian curry + feta + radishes + raisins. And I liked it. So, room to experiment for sure.
Lasagna is a lot to put together, I know. I’m so glad you made it last week because it was delicious. (And also, I’m glad that I told you to stop that one evening because actually eating dinner was good.) The combination of crunchy and soft noodles. The layers of flavor. The using up a lot of veggies and having leftovers.
All that said, the time commitment is substantial. And while I would like more crispy pasta soon, I have had the realization that maybe we could do baked pasta instead of full on lasagna? I’m definitely partial to Smitten Kitchen for these–I think I imprinted on Deb’s mushroom marsala pasta bake our first winter with this CSA. Perhaps using that gluten free ravioli you found for a skillet chard-ravioli (with broil time). I bet the broccoli rabe could be switched for any number of heavy duty greens. If you’d rather make it a mostly pantry meal, tomato sauce + pasta +cheese sounds pretty good; though, I bet you could reference this recipe too and add roasted veggies to use up whatever we have on hand.
So polish up your bechamel skills and figure out a favorite tomato sauce. It’s cool enough to turn on the oven and bake that pasta.
Quick note. Last year our ginger went moldy before we used most of it. We can mince it, freeze it, and have ginger handy for smoothies/stirfries/soups.
The roasted apple salad from Pulp was delicious. More of that please.
And try to remember to add radish and turnip to salads when appropriate.
Stuff those peppers! Rice and beans and tomatoes and spices.
The beets have been hanging around for a while. Maybe time to roast, puree, freeze. And use for all the beet yogurt dips and beet hummus dips I want a whim.
Speaking of beet yogurt. I’ve been making an open faced sandwich recently with almond butter, beet yogurt, and thinly sliced apple. It’s good. Feel free to mix in chevre and celery. Maybe some craisins.
Time to cycle through the peppers on the dehydrator. It’s amazing how much they shrink between getting halved and getting their water removed. The fridge full of peppers no longer feels obviously sufficient to make enough chili powder for everyone’s presents. We’ll just have to stretch things with one more batch of hot sauce.
We are having pepper success this year! Maybe we bought more plants? (I’d have to go back to the garden journal to check.) But more importantly we have them in an area where they aren’t being overshadowed by the taller plants.
Maybe we can add eggplant to that section in the future?
Cooking things down, before we leave town
So, with lots of hot peppers, comes lots of hot sauce? I have a pint jar with ~cup of peppers fermenting on the table. I made a serious eats hot sauce. And we still have a five cup container of peppers in the fridge.
It’s a lot of green beans. I’m copying from last week. Maybe the usual way with tofu. Maybe a variation. Oh! Maybe in a curry. It’s been a while since we’ve done a curry and now I want that. Add some peppers and some squash?
I was wondering how to do the corn and then looked at smitten kitchen and now I know. (Though corn enchiladas sound good too.)
I grabbed an extra spaghetti squash. You know how I like the baked spaghetti squash bowls. Bet we could do one with chard?
Saturday we had a garden workday–focusing our efforts on the communal areas instead of our plot. We did a quick harvest before we left. (I didn’t pick a bouquet, nevermind deadheading for the flowers.) When we got home from the garden, we weighed the produce we picked from our plot. Not quite ten pounds! The water from the tomatoes and tomatillos adds up. Good thing some of our cooking shrinks it way down.
Cooking things down, before we leave town
I made twotypes of salsa this weekend. Please note that when they are pulled from the freezer, they would both benefit from some cilantro.
I also made this ratatouille over the weekend. We got more eggplant today and I intend to make more ratatouille tomorrow. That should make a dent in our tomatoes and peppers and zucchini as well. Last time I added one habanero that was threatening with some bad spots. The oil was surprisingly spicy. Do it again!
We’re just about to finish off the last cabbage in lunchtime salads. Hurrah! Let’s do it again with this one.
These are the plums to dry for prunes. Because we have plenty of other fruit and enough other veggies that I’m not buying cauliflower to try out the recipe I want to test from Pulp.
At the beginning of the box life there are more “wait, what is this?” moments. Learning all the different greens that are given, for instance. A decade of on-and-off, but mostly on CSA–half of which we’ve also be gardening in one community or another–three of them with this particular set of farms, that feeling is pretty rare. But I saw blue hyssop on the predicted contents list this week and the only thing I could think of is “Purge me with hyssop and I shall be white as snow.”
I know the Bible is a compilation of many different types of texts, but I generally think of Psalms as the poetry/music collection. Not a cookbook.
Masterclass mastered the SEO. So…..I dunno. Use as one of our herbs of the week? Toss in a salad with the cabbage? Blend with yogurt or hummus for a dressing? Sneak into the morning smoothie?
Today’s Box
Blueberries
Yellow Peaches
Watermelon
Blue Hyssop (unless it’s mint. Or sweet basil. But it doesn’t look like either of those.)
Celery
Gold Zucchini
Malabar Spinach
Red Cabbage
Things in the fridge
Cherries
Peach
Red Spring Onions
Fennel bulb
Greens: Cabbage, Chard, Collard, Beet
Carrots, turnips, beets
Green plums
In the Garden
Rainbow chard
Basil leaves getting pinched with flowers
Dill flowers
Calendula flowers still getting dried by the trayful
A few beet reds snuck into a smoothie and I think I liked it? Expect a repeat. After I finish my cucumber innards muesli (made with the seeds scooped out of cucumbers before making a salad last week).
We haven’t used those collards for too long. How about a salad?
The days where it rains, those are fine. We can sit on the porch and still feel a bit of space from being outside. The days when we’re sick, not great. But being inside feels appropriate then. And we can sit on the porch and feel sun on our face. (Can you tell I like having a porch?)
But these days where it’s smoky. When the haze obscures the view down the street. When we put on masks to go outside, and try to stay indoors. They get hard.
The concerns of climate change continue to mount.
We advocate for change at a structural level. We have conversations and try to model small shifts at a social level. And we do what we can to care for each other. To share abundance with it comes and to buffer blows as we are able.
Today’s Box
Red Seedless Watermelon
Yellow Peaches
Fava Beans
Green Cabbage
Iceberg Lettuce
Thumbelina Carrots
Sugar Snap Peas
Things in the fridge
Blueberries
Watermelon
Cherries
Radishes
Peas
Fennel bulb
Greens: Cabbage, Chard, Collard
Green plums
In the Garden
Rainbow chard
Turnips + greens
Beets + greens
Peas for the sampling–snap, snow, and shelling
Lettuce, when we’re ready
Basil leaves getting pinched with flowers
Dill flowers
Calendula flowers getting dried
Rosemary
Oregano
Calendula and cosmos and oregano bouquet supplemented by Black Eyed Susans someone tossed in the compost
We’re wrapping up the turnip and radishes from the spring plantings. They’ll be back in a couple of months. Expect we’ll be pulling the pea plants soon, so we can be a second batch of beans in the ground. (The first batch have all sprouted! And there was rain so I think we’re looking promising.)
Meals to consider and pickles to prep
Good news. I pickled a pint of cherries and that salad only used a cup, so we get to have the snap peas and pickled cherries salad again.
Last week’s watermelon rind + dill flowers + garlic have started a slow ferment down in the basement. It was so easy! The hardest part was peeling the rinds. They taste like dill pickles! Expect more experiments all summer long.
Toast + almond butter + chevre + cherry halves
I snuck a leaf of the iceberg lettuce that had fallen loose in the box. And promptly spent the whole walk home day dreaming of a wedge salad with a good blue cheese dressing. Maybe we can roast some beet lardons to be a topping instead of bacon?
At a party this weekend, I passed on a bag containing the last of the dahlia bulbs we thought were likely viable. To be fair, there’s still a package left to be taken to the post office. And the package to your brother is puttering around the postal system–at least now it looks like it’s in the right zip code. I am late sending my parents the last of the calendula seeds. But also thrilled to have grown things to the point of sharing no only the produce but hopefully some future plants.
Guess the next test is if any of it actually grows for anyone.
In the days when the sky is eerily orange. When the rain is too little, or far too much. When the heat keeps me inside with air conditioning (that helps me now, but maybe only makes everything worse?). When I find another dead bee as I water the plants. It’s hard not to obsess about the challenges of creation.
So we care for our flowers. And try to share a bounty of blooms. Continue the work. Share life’s glories.
Today’s Box
Blueberries
Dark Sweet Cherries
English Peas
Green Cabbage
Green Kale
Red Leaf Lettuce
Red Chard
Things in the fridge
Breakfast radishes
Fennel stems waiting to get pickled
Lettuce
Collards
Zucchini
Green plums
In the Garden
Lettuce, still pretty, still with slugs. And earwigs
You found cucumber starts! We got more stakes! So there’s now a mound with bush pickle cukes where the turnips and a couple of calendula plants used to be. And a mound with a trellis and burpless cukes where the edamame was. I attempted to transplant the edamame to the center of the new bean tent. Soup beans by the thick poles, volunbeans by the thinner ones.
So….I think we’re done planting for a little bit. Time to let things grow. Hope for rain. And tend what we can in the meantime.
Meals to consider
So much chard getting thinned. Let’s consider the chard and PB banana wraps. They’re a curiosity to me.
The snap peas and shelling peas got shelled, zapped in the microwave. There was enough for us each to have a spoonful. We don’t have much more of the snow peas, but maybe we can add them to a stirfy.
Summer rolls with lettuce or chard, and all the other veggies?
Psst, photographer…hide the twist ties/rubber bands. Or at least make them less prominent?
Hi John,
My parents texted this morning that they’re on the road. They’ll arrive tomorrow and be here through next Tuesday, when we switch from the one-size winter box we split to the small-size summer box that’s just us.
It turns out that the parsley I picked up as a bonus last week is actually cilantro. And we got more cilantro today. And rotted cilantro is a heartbreak. So, let’s use this. Cabbage and peanut slaw with cilantro on breakfast tacos and maybe in spring rolls. Roasted beets and carrots in a Thai-inspired curry. Ginger-garlic-not-quite-pho. Note: all of these should also use up the scallions.
Usually we’ve cooked up dandelion greens with beans. But we have pizza dough left from earlier in the week. Dandelion greens, garlic, and goat cheese?
The cilantro slaw will presumably be our main salad of the week. But let’s have spinach + turnip + carrot as our go to side salad.
I feel like we missed an opportunity here. If only it’d been red onions and red cabbage (aka the purple kinds). Maybe even the standard beets. Purple basil! Ah. The purple CSA box will just have to reside in my dreams.
Dear John,
The oven died and took too long to fix. I kept delaying posting until we got an appliance repair person here. Hindsight, not the most helpful way to plan.
But it is fixed and we have the next box now. So I will hit publish on this one. Thank you to the repair person and to the neighbors who passed along the phone number to text.
Chioggia Beets are the pretty striped ones. They begged to be mandolined into paper thin slices for salads. Probably pair with some citrus and some of the cheese that we need for topping the sweet potatoes. Toasted hazelnuts, warm from the oven. Top with some parsley if you’re feeling fancy farm-to-table restaurant style.
That said, when we grow tired of raw storage beets (because, that is what these are, right?), maybe we try a beet tartare. (Totally inspired by me doing cntrl+f for beet on the menu at an old favorite farm-to-table restaurant. Their description is “avocado / radish / capers / egg.”)
I do tend to use the cabbage for salads. Crispy and crunchy and feeling fresh.
Last week went remarkably according to plan. Black Futsu was stuffed with artisan (gluten free) bread cubes, Gruyère, Emmenthal, four strips of bacon, thyme, garlic, pepper, nutmeg, cream. It really was, oh so good. A couple of days later Kabocha with wild rice, mushrooms, cranberries, carrots, celery, shallots, raisins, rosemary, oregano, thyme. Still delicious, if not quite as decadent feeling.
Cabbage was shredded with carrots, apple ginger dressing, and the seeds for the squash that was on the table. Later more was shredded, doused with garlic-lemon-anchovy dressing, topped with toasted hazelnuts and sourdough croutons (for those who could partake).
Those who would miss turkey, missed the turkey. Those who are mostly vegetarian, surely didn’t. Except, it would be nice to have the carcass to make broth for all the soups of the season. Ah well, that’s what the veggie stock bag is for.
Leek and Potato soup! More with Less has a recipe as does Good Food Cook Book. Combine those for fun.
We have radishes. With greens! Carrots. With greens! Arugula! And, of course, cabbage. Let’s have fun with the greens that won’t last before settling into the months of cabbage and storage greens. One more batch of carrot top pesto. Salads with arugula and pear and blue cheese. Or arugula with roasted beets and goat cheese. Breakfast of roasted potatoes, fried eggs, and sauteed radish greens.
I’m proud we finished the last cabbage before this one arrived. (Barely.) We did cabbage and butter pasta this weekend. May be time for okonomiyaki. Or the Polish Potato Casserole of my childhood.
We have some left over stuffings that’ll go in the squash. Make the Thanskgiving cooking last.
But, let’s work on the cranberries. I think we have ~15 cups in the refrigerator right now. (To be far, about 10 came today.) We might have to candy some or string them with popcorn. Until then, more sauce? Newtons? Make cranberry curd and freeze it? Cranapple pie?
The leaves have (mostly) fallen. The hard frost has arrived. And the single bronze dahlia bloom from the plant outside has been cut and brought inside.
Today’s Box
Cranberries
Goldrush Apples
Granny Smith Apples
Carnival Squash
Celery
Fennel
Green Cabbage
Onions
Things in the fridge and counter
Pears
Apples
Carrot (but not their greens)
Celery
Radicchio
Lettuce
Green beefsteak tomatoes, but baby-sized
Roma tomatoes, mix of green and reddening
Sweet Dumpling Squash
Stripetti Squash
Potatoes (purple and gold)
Garden Finale
Green tomatoes! Ours and ones other people had put in the compost *gasp*
Basil
Dahlias and marigolds and cosmos (gather seeds as we go!)
The cabbage is gorgeous. It will also keep. Let’s use the few outermost leaves that are falling off for a salad now. Stir fry?
Time to make some apple date chutney, adapted for the freezer bags of apple and pear cores and cranberries that had been in the fridge for far, far too long. And apple scrap jelly.
More of the Six Seasons celery salads. With apples! And dates! And nuts!
Stuff the stripetti squash this week. Top with the leftovers from the cauliflower steaks last week. (That topping was so good. I can’t wait to make it again.)
Missing: peaches. But this week we got all the bread!
Hi John,
In the heat wave that’s been happening, I have not wanted you to turn on the oven. Last night, the temperature came down enough that we finally got to use the pizza dough that’s been sitting in the fridge, make those candied nuts I’ve been asking for, and refill my crouton stash.
I’m a bit nervous about how we’re going to use the produce this week. A cousin is bringing dinner tomorrow. Your parents are here this weekend. On the one hand it’s more mouths to make a dent in the burgeoning list of things in the fridge. On the other hand, I’m ceding the meal planning to all y’all and I don’t know your intentions. Letting go of control is hard, even when I desperately want to.
Supposedly in Today’s Box
Peaches
Watermelon
Cantaloupe
Carmen Peppers
Green Beans
Green Zucchini
Mixed Heirloom Tomatoes
Things I think are in the fridge
Blueberries (farmer’s market)
Peaches
Fennel
Cucumber (farmer’s market)
Cranberries
Lemon squash
Green bell pepper
Celery
Greens: Napa Cabbage, Savoy Cabbage, Kale
Black radishes, Purple Daikon radish
Sweet potato
Jerusalem Artichokes
Coming in from the Garden
Edamame
Basil
Kale
Tomatillas (just a few, but they’re here!)
Tomatoes (only two so far, but again, they’re here!)
Occasional ground cherries
Peppers? Soon?
Garlic? Perhaps
Dahlias and marigolds and nasturtium
Rosemary for remembrance
Open Preserves
Preserved eggplant
Lacto-fermented green cherry tomatoes
Lacto-fermented blueberry jalapeno hot sauce
Pickled banana peppers with oregano, basil, and black pepper
Meals that probably won’t get made because of that aforementioned letting others plan the meals scheme
I’ve dissected the cantaloupe into its various parts. Already mixed up the muesli-like cantaloupe-pulp oats from Lindsay-Jean Hard‘s book. Seeds are drying and can be roasted the next time the oven is on. Fruit is chopped up in the fruit drawer for snacking, and freezer for a papaya-melon-dragon fruit smoothie. But…if the bounty of summer fruit overtakes us, I am very intrigued by this risotto.
You’re making peppers stuffed with lemon squash (adapted from the Moosewood New Classics cookbook) for dinner tonight. I’m considering the Enchanted Broccoli Forest’s green pepper and zucchini enchilada filling for later. Bet it’d go well with a tomatillo-tomato salsa.
Missing: green peppers and cabbage that were forgotten in the backpack. (Which is one step better than the bread forgotten at the pick-up site. Memory is not our strong suit these days.)
Hi John,
The predicted contents for today’s CSA included corn, so I was all excited for the annual eating of Half Baked Harvest’s Grilled Corn and Basil Salad (with Blueberries). Then today’s email arrived and instead of corn we’re getting green bell peppers. Womp womp.
Maybe we’ll have stuffed bell peppers soon? (Help! My Apartment Has a Dining Room has a couple of recipes as do many other of the books on the shelf I’m sure.) And maybe we’ll buy corn at the market this week.
Supposedly in Today’s Box
Peaches
Blueberries
Celery
Green Bell Peppers
Green Kale
Green Savoy Cabbage
Malabar Spinach
Things I think are in the fridge
Blueberries (farmer’s market)
Peaches
Fennel
Cucumber
Cranberries
Lemon squash
Gold zucchini
Neighbor’s garden zucchini
Greens: Napa Cabbage, Kale
Black radishes, Purple Daikon radishes
Sweet potato
Jerusalem Artichokes
Growing in the Garden
Edamame
Basil
Kale
Tomatillas (surely ripening soon?)
Tomatoes should start to come in this month
Occasional ground cherries
Peppers? Soon?
Garlic? Perhaps
Dahlias and marigolds and nasturtium
Rosemary forever
Open Preserves
Preserved eggplant
Lacto-fermented green cherry tomatoes
Lacto-fermented blueberry jalapeno hot sauce
Pickled banana peppers with oregano, basil, and black pepper
Meals that you can maybe make in the coming days (slash weeks)
Noodles with veggies! Peanut noodles + edamame and radish. Noodles with zukes.
We’ve somehow managed to stock up on eggs. Crustless quiche to the rescue! But maybe a veggie shakshuka is in order soon. Or maybe we should boil eggs for the snacking.
I’m intrigued by the popcorn on a salad idea. More purposes for that corn we’ll buy…
Continue with the beans and greens. (But maybe freeze some of the beans we cooked last night.) Also consider bean salad (compare to bean salad recipe in Simply in Season).
So many greens! (All the more so because we gave up this week’s sweet potatoes. We got dandelion greens and lettuce last week.)
Dear John,
Happy Easter! We walked to the cemetery this morning for Sunrise Service. As we snuck out of our house, a neighbor was across the street scattering eggs for a hunt. (Kid is two, you don’t really hide them yet.) The sign at a church we passed illuminated a “Happy New Year!” message, and while I know it hasn’t changed in months, spring really does feel like a resetting of the calendar. We found our place in the gathering crowd. The trees had confettied the graves with pink petals–a celebration of life in the midst of death. The promise that life continues, beyond all our fears.
In This Week’s Box
Cilantro
Green Cabbage
Green Kale
Green Romain Lettuce
Mixed Winter Radishes
Red Scallions
Rainbow Chard
Still in the Fridge
Asparagus (farmer’s market)
Strawberries (farmer’s market)
Cranberries
Celery
Greens: Dandelion, radish, kale
Black radishes, Purple Daikon radishes
Turnips
Potatoes: Sweet
Jerusalem Artichokes
Open Preserves
Preserved eggplant
Dill pickle juice
Lacto-fermented green cherry tomatoes
Lacto-fermented blueberry jalapeno hot sauce
Pickled banana peppers with oregano, basil, and black pepper
I bought asparagus and strawberries at the farmers market and will probably be buying more strawberries. We’ve made the asparagus lemon pasta from Simply in Season, which needs to be done at least annually. Maybe easiest to roast the rest? Maybe use on flatbread/pizza? Maybe a quiche?
We used up the last cabbage in okonmiyaki. And, while it feels weird to do the same thing immediately, it was a successful enough meal series that I’m absolutely okay with a repeat.
Beans and greens. Let’s do the dandelion + miso + beans from Cool Beans. And maybe also a version of the Hoppin’ John Pilaf.
I tempted to try a preserved daikon radish recipe. I didn’t buy any on my latest run to Hmart, but I did get goji berries and the recipe uses them both with congee.
Debating the favorite chard and cilantro soup. It’s known and good and I have plenty of stale bread at the moment. May be convinced to switch to a lentil version though.
We got some potatoes from the store. Twice bake’em, stuffed with kale and scallions and cheese?
We took mushrooms last week and left beets and turnips this week. Sharing!
Hi John,
We have not made the shepherd’s pie, yet. So it feels like a lot of last week’s veggies are still hanging around. But! I did use the spaghetti squash (from October?). The seeds inside had almost universally started sprouting and the whole thing tasted bitter. Maybe it shouldn’t be stored for months and months at room temperature? (And we should probably prioritize that butternut squash too. Pizza with goat cheese?)
We also, finally, made the sunchoke veggie burgers and used up the Jerusalem Artichokes. I know. Those have been sitting in the back of the fridge since before I started keeping track of what’s still in the fridge. So of course this week’s box replenishes our supply.
I’m excited about it though. Despite what one might think from them being our lingering food, I’ve found I like sunchokes. Those veggie burgers are amazing! (They take a while to make. But the serving size on that post is way off. I made a half recipe and we got 6 normal size patties and 1 small one. And they freeze well! Once a batch is made it’s easy to make into a meal.) I like putting thin slices on a pizza. I liked Bryant Terry’s sunchoke cream for when we’re cooking a creamy vegan dish (though would use real cream if I wasn’t trying to serve a vegan meal). I like artichoke relish when we have sausage in the summer. And smashed sunchokes with siracha mayo.
All to say, there are plenty of ways we can use the new ‘chokes. I think one of them might need to be looking for eyes on the tubers we got and putting them in a five-gallon bucket. I don’t want to curse anyone, including ourselves, with a plant they can’t get rid of. And the tubers have a reputation of proliferating. So contain. And then see what happens.
In This Week’s Box
Collards
Garnet Sweet Potatoes
Green Cabbage
Jerusalem Artichokes
Purple Carrots
Red Onions
Still in the Fridge
Cranberries
Greens: Red Cabbage
Kohlrabi
Carrots
Parsnip
Black radishes, Red radishes, Winter radishes
Turnips
Squash: Butternut
Potatoes: Sweet, Purple
Open Preserves
Preserved eggplant
Dill pickle juice
Lacto-fermented green cherry tomatoes
Lacto-fermented blueberry jalapeno hot sauce
Lacto-fermented habanda jalapeno hot sauce
Pickled red onion
Pickled banana peppers with oregano, basil, and black pepper
We’ll cook up the collards. How’s the peanut and greens stew sound? It uses sweet potato too!
While I was looking for that recipe, I saw a coconut carrot curry soup. I think I’m intrigued. I haven’t tended to try these before because I didn’t like cooked carrots when I was a kid. But we’ve got carrots accumulating, so now is the time. And this recipe also uses a sweet potato! (Which means we will either use two of our sweet potatoes OR we will weigh a potato and use half of it in each recipe.)
Cabbage + carrots + onion does sound like we might make okonomiyaki again. Check Scraps, Wilts, and Weeds for recipe guidance.
And please, let’s make that shepherd’s pie. We have all the ingredients! Just need to decide to do it on a cooler day instead of one where we’re feeling the warmth of spring.
We don’t have a great place to take photos of food at the moment. What with our coffee table being a pile of boxes and all.
Hi John,
Our CSA doesn’t do small boxes in winter, and we’d gotten behind enough in consumption that we very nearly didn’t participate for the season. Then someone asked the listserv about splitting a box. So now, we have a box every other week.
Meanwhile, we have very, very many boxes in the house. Someday, we’ll retrieve our car from the shop and head to a store in search of some extra kitchen storage. Until then, the dining room will be a jumble of boxes and piles of plastic containers and pictures that haven’t yet been hung on the walls. Someday, we’ll find a dresser that suits me and then there will not be a stack of boxes holding clothes in the other bedroom. Someday, we will decide which bookshelves need replacing and, maybe, which books we no longer need. Of course, plenty of boxes are unpacked and collapsed and waiting for someone to respond to our Freecycle post. It’s just that moving is a process and it still feels
In This Week’s Box
Beauregard Sweet Potatoes
Black Radishes
Green Kale
Parsnips
Red Beets
Red Cabbage
White Mushrooms
Yellow Popcorn
Still in the Fridge
Apples: last of the season
Cranberries
Greens: Mustard greens, parsley
Celery
Carrots
Red beets
Squash: Spaghetti, Butternut
Potatoes: Sweet, Purple
Sunchokes
Open Preserves
Preserved eggplant
Dill pickle juice
Lacto-fermented green cherry tomatoes
Lacto-fermented blueberry jalapeno hot sauce
Lacto-fermented habanda jalapeno hot sauce
Pickled red onion
Pickled banana peppers with oregano, basil, and black pepper
Dishes that will hopefully yield leftovers so we have fewer cooking days
Earlier this week you made the peas and the rice for the Hoppin’ John Pilaf in Cool Beans. One day we will actually make the pilaf. And that day we will cook up the mustard greens.
Parsnip soup with celery leaf relish, also from Six Seasons
We’ve been eating sweet potato on pizza with last summer’s pepperonata pulled from the freezer. That can be repeated another time or two. Maybe another round of the sweet potatoes stacked with chevre and celery. (I’m not certain how much celery we have though.) Maybe baked and stuffed with black beans, or as filling for enfrijoladas?
Oh gosh, we need to use beets and I am just not in a beet mood recently. Maybe try that beet and pear salad but with apples instead of pears. Beet gnocci? Roasted beet and citrus salad (adapting from Six Seasons)? Beet risotto to dehydrate for future camping trips? I dunno. I expect these will be with us a while.
I’m similarly uncertain about the black radishes. After the winter of radishes (Was that 2016 or 2017?), I actually enjoy radishes. Black radishes are my least favorite though–I don’t love the sharper flavor or the rougher exterior texture. Maybe that’s a reason to try pickling them? I don’t think I’ve tried pickling black radishes before. And I do like a pickled radish for tacos.
Here’s hoping that by the time I write again the kitchen will be more functional and the boxes will be a bit fewer!
Missing an apple that I ate on the walk home and cranberries that are still waiting to be eaten.Cranberries off screen.Too tired. You took the photo instead. Thank you!
Hi John,
It’s been a busy month, and the next few weeks are forecast to be even more chaotic. Holidays, and conferences, and packing, and travel, and cleaning, and testing, and vaccines, and exhaustion, and ickiness, and packing, and laundry, and painting, and chores. And…well…we’re taking this week off of the delivery, but I’m still not sure we’ll catch up on the vegetable consumption.
Rather than see what was in the boxes, let’s just review what we have available to work with over the next week.
Still in the Fridge
Apples: Many apples, many types
Asian Pears, Bosc Pears
Cranberries
Greens: Cabbage, Green Romaine Lettuce
Celery
Peppers: Bell
Baby Hakurei Turnips
Carrots
Red beets
Squash: Spaghetti, Butternut
Potatoes: Sweet
Sunchokes
Open Preserves
Preserved eggplant
Dill pickle juice
Lacto-fermented green cherry tomatoes
Lacto-fermented blueberry jalapeno hot sauce
Lacto-fermented habanda jalapeno hot sauce
Pickled red onion
Pickled banana peppers with oregano, basil, and black pepper
See what I mean? I think it’s more than we’re actually going to eat. (Especially if my hunch is right and we end up with take-out for a meal or three.) The lettuce is only enough for one or two more side salads. And we have a plan for the peppers. Honestly, half the trick is excavating the fruit from the bottom of the drawer instead of the most recently added apples on top. The good news is most of these are the hardy fall vegetables that will keep lasting in the fridge. (Though really, we should use the sunchokes some day. Make the burgers whenever!)
The cranberry curd tart is so pretty. I’m not sure it’s for us right now, but it is what I want to use the cranberries for. Maybe we should toss the cranberries in the freezer until we’re ready for them.
Fried rice with lots of peppers and some turnips and carrots
Have a few more squash ribbons to put on a pizza. Out of ricotta though.
Really, the big question is how we should use the cabbage. (Translation: what form of cabbage sounds most likely to be eaten?) Probably the braisedcabbage noodle favorite. But maybe we do Singaporenoodles to mix it up? (And to not necessitate a trip to buy more glass noodles.)
I’d love to make sweet potato gnocci. But this is not the week with the energy or the time for that mission. Perhaps after the move? If not, the potatoes will keep until the new year. Probably.
It is not that the squash is that small. It is that the apples are that big.
Dear John,
We returned to the apple orchard on Monday. It’s the first time this year, and the first to this orchard. But we missed 2020, because, well, 2020. I’ve been finishing off the last of our 2019 apple butter and apple sauce in anticipation of new jars being put up. That might have been a mistake
I’m going to pause here to say that, although we did not have the excess of apples obtained from trips to pick many, many apples, in the past couple of years I have extended the trick of my veggie stock back to also include an apple stock bag. When I cut an apple (or pear) in half, I’ll core it with a melon baller. Drop that core in a bag that lives in the freezer. When it’s full, they all get cooked down and I make a jelly or a mostarda or a chutney. I might not have made applesauce or apple butter in two years, but had many successful cannings of apples. So it’s a bit of a surprise that my attempts this week have been disappointing.
First attempt, I was multitasking with the laundry and ended up burning the bottom of the applesauce pot. The bitterness from the burnt flavored everything, so I added sugar and spices and cooked it in the crock pot until it was thick. I think the caramelization process of making apple butter succeeded in muting the badness. And yet, it’s underspiced compared to the 2019 version. I must have been too nervous about already having ruined it?
Second attempt, I decided not to use the pot that I’d failed with the day before. Cooking everything in the crock pot from the start and avoiding burning things. But that is a slow way to get apples to turn to mush and by the time I processed it, the sauce was well on the way to thickening. To be clear, it’s not the flavor of apple butter. But it’s also not the consistency of applesauce.
Super Side Salad! Use peppers liberally. Add carrots, celery, cherry tomatoes, broccoli as you wish.
First instinct is to make the carrot top pesto from Scraps, Wilts, and Weeds that I really like. But there’s a salsa verde on the same page that uses pickle juice and the dill pickles are pretty much consumed. Just a cucumber skin, a sprig of dill, and the garlic in brine. Let’s try this recipe to use both the juice and the carrot tops!
Simply in Season has a recipe for Sweet Potato salad that would use up our celery and make a dent in the peppers. I’m not sure how excited I am about it, but it’s on page 191 if you want to try.
Apple cabbage slaw. I thought I had a recipe saved from years and years ago. I do not see it in my bookmarks. RIP Delicious that was beyond the 1,000 that were exported?
Curdito if we feel like we have excess carrots. But don’t use the savoy cabbage for it. Green cabbage.
Now that we have broken into soup season, I anticipate the fridge continually having a jar of one leftover or another. (Currently it’s the squash-collards-peanut combo I suggested last week.) I have so many tabs open with soup recipes from threads where people share their go-to faves. It may be time to follow the crowds to Roberto.
This week I curled up with a storybook. Layers of tales, echoing past each other. Before the hardback was returned to the library, I’d downloaded the audio reading.
The next book I picked up is for book club. It is not a book for Sarahs. At least not yet. We discuss it in a week and I’m thinking there’s a good chance I won’t finish it.
That switch, from the story that I want to rehear over and again to the story that I struggle to get in, is so familiar. I think it’s why the beloved stories are treasured so. Their power to imagine a world that I want to experience, to explain a part of existence, to create the actions required.
In This Week’s Box
Bartlett Pears
Empire Apples
All Blue Potatoes
Collards
Edamame
Green Beans
Green Cabbage
Mixed Yummy Peppers
Spaghetti Squash
Sungold Cherry Tomatoes
Garden Potential
Starfish pepper
Deciding how long to wait on the final jalapenos
Lombok peppers if we want them
Few tomatillos, hopefully
Volunbeans
Maybe a tomato?
Dahlias
Still in the Fridge
Apples: Honeycrisp?, Gala
Greens: NONE. We ate them all.
Herbs: Fennel tops
Peppers: Yummy, Lombok, Starfish
Squash: Delicata, Red Kabocha, Carnival
Sweet onions
Garlic
Fingerling Potatoes
Celery
Sunchokes
Open Preserves
Preserved eggplant
Pickled cucumber skins
Lacto-fermented & Lacto-fermenting green cherry tomatoes
Lacto-fermented blueberry jalapeno hot sauce
Lacto-fermenting habanda jalapeno hot sauce
Pickled red onion
Pickled banana peppers with oregano, basil, and black pepper
I pulled up the cucumber a few weeks ago. Then you helped turn the compost and rescued some volunteer greens.
They tried, but they didn’t survive.
We took out a basil and a tomato that were done. Stopped by the store to get some seeds.
And now we have sprouts!
Radishes. Carrots. Spinach. Stir-fry mix of greens.
I’m not sure what will make it. The soup beans we planted mid-summer are dying instead of climbing. I put a second batch of radishes in the center of their tent-poles. Willing the roots down deep.
I’ve been thinking about Rachel Held Evans’posts on Madeline L’Engle’s reflections on planting onions. L’Engle was talking about planting onions in the spring being an act of faith in the future when she was afraid for our planet. But I’m considering planting them this fall, and the faith it requires that we will come through winter to more growth. (Confession: I did not heed the warnings in the emails and did not reserve shallot bulbs. Maybe we see if we can plant from the garlic the CSA sent last week? Maybe we let it go for this season.)
I’m trying to save seeds, even though we can’t do the isolated crops that are recommended. Beans are obvious, easy. Just don’t eat them all. Cilantro was straightforward. Basil’s proving fiddly to separate, since we don’t have a screen. I’m currently fermenting seeds from our volunteer cherry tomato. Doing the action that faith calls forth.
I’ve held off on decreeing it soup season. But consider making a sweet potato, peanut, and kale soup only with squash instead of sweet potato and collards instead of kale.
Similarly, is it risotto season? Because a squash risotto is always yummy. Can use Six Seasons recipe, but be mindful about the fat if we want to dehydrate for backpacking meals.
Cabbage season is starting up again I see. Using the cabbage is low priority, it’ll keep. But consider the braised glass noodles when we do.
It might be time to quickle the fennel stems. Though maybe that’s next week’s project. There are still a few fronds to adorn salads.
Lots of green veggies, with hints of yellows and golds. And then there’s the blueberries.
Hi John,
This weekend we took our picnic to the local fireworks display. We found a spot on the grass, spread out a blanket, unloaded our bikes, and took off our masks. In a crowd. It felt normal and weird and like the kind of thing that shouldn’t be noteworthy but it absolutely is. I felt mostly safe? Mostly because we were outside. And because blankets make easy boundaries and everyone was still giving each other a bit more space than we would have two years ago.
It was a better viewing experience than two years ago, when we tried watching from the apartment’s roof. And better than last year when we watched the show as reflected in the windows of the grocery store across the street while eating sausage with JerusalemArtichokeRelish by our window.
I confess to mixed feelings about fireworks. They’re pretty and can be fun to watch. They’re loud and keep me up and we don’t even have pets or small children or PTSD to have extra reasons to hate them. The environmentalist side of me will be glad when they’re gone and not adding to fire risk or traumatizing birds. And there’s still the awesomeness of sitting with your group, part of a larger crowd, all looking up together and saying, “Wow.”
In This Week’s Box
Blueberries
Yellow Peaches
Celery
Dill
Fennel
Green Savoy Cabbage
Green Zucchini
Pickling Cucumbers
White Spring Onions
Yellow Wax Beans
Garden Potential
Occasional ground cherry
Red onions
Basil! Thai or lime or purple or Italian
Some apricots and blackberries from the communal area (I even snuck some into the photo.)
Still in the Fridge
Cherries
Herbs: Fennel, Dill
Greens: Dandelion, Cabbage, Lacinato Kale
Radish: Red and French Breakfast
Baby Hakurei Turnip
Onions: white and red
Gold Zucchini
Beets
Sunchokes
Considering the options
Pickling cucumbers + dill = Probably time to try making pickles. There’s just three cucumbers, so I pulled out Joy of Cooking and went with a recipe from there. They’ll be curing in the fridge, ready to eat in a week’s time.
Dandelion greens and white beans from Cool Beans. They’ve been here for two weeks. They need to get used. If we don’t feel like eating the dish, I bet it’d be a good one for dehydrating for a future backpacking trip.
I expect we’ll do more of the Six Seasons celery salads. They’re quick and don’t require heat and right now both of those are winning propositions.
Peanut, tofu, and wax beans! That’s my first thought. But then I’m also remembering the Smitten Kitchen salad with green beans and fennel and red onions. And wouldn’t you know that I tossed the last of the garden plot’s inherited onions in the brine yesterday. We’ll get more green beans for the tofu dish in a week or two. I spied some on our volunbeans earlier today.
Zucchini pasta? The zucchini pie/pizza/quiche thing from Simply in Season?
Do we want to make more of the sunchoke burgers? Or use them on pizza with the zucchini?
Flower and baby pepper!
I’m not sure what I’m feeling with the cabbage and kale right now. They feel mostly too heavy for the salads I want right now (though it hasn’t stopped their appearing with chickpeas and parm for a meal or two over the past week). I don’t really want the soups that I associate with them. Maybe spring rolls? Maybe in a stir-fry? Maybe I should think more about grain bowls? I bet that beet yogurt would be pretty on a bowl.
Planning Inside The Box 