parsley

Boxing Day, August 19

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A garden bounty this week.

Dear John,

Beach day. Swimming pool. Garden time. Church. Faire.

Pesto. Fig jam. Preserved eggplant.

It was an exhausting weekend. It was wonderful.

Today’s Box

  • Nectarines
  • Red Seedless Watermelon
  • Yellow Peaches
  • Mixed Carmen Italian Peppers
  • Mixed Heirloom Tomatoes
  • Orange Carrots
  • Italian Eggplant
  • Yellow Straightneck Squash

Things in the fridge

  • Sunchokes
  • Roma tomatoes
  • Cabbage: Red Cabbage, Green Cabbage,
  • Nectarines, Plums, Pears

In the Garden

  • Basil by the bundle
  • Parsley
  • Mitsuba yanked from the ground because I saw the flowers and thought weed before I remembered it was intentional planting. Ooops
  • Handful of cherry tomatoes and ground cherries
  • Figs
  • Few peppers that I don’t remember anything about
  • One eggplant
  • One radish
  • One tomatillo
  • Collards
  • Sunflower! Dahlia! Basil Flowers! Zinnias! Feverfew! Okay, some of those are from the yard. Pretties!

Open Preserves

  • One day we might organize the cabinet.
  • Another day we might organize the fridge.
  • Then we might know.
  • Fig jam

Pantry Beans

  • Split Red Lentil
  • Good Mother Stallard
  • Rio Zape
  • And more tucked on other shelves…

Can we cook this week? Maybe!

  • Ratatouille! It’s happening! The temperature is cooler and we can turn on the oven for three hours. If we can find a day where chopping and then stirring every so often over three hours is reasonable. Plus side, ideally it will use a surplus of veggies, be yummy, and freeze well. I’m hearing the siren call of a polenta/grits base.
  • Bacon, Basil, and Tomato sandwiches using the basil leaves that are as large as lettuce leaves. Small lettuce leaves, but still.
  • While the oven can be on, I want to make pizza too. Pesto pizza? Maybe. Tomato sauce pizza? Not opposed.
  • Also while the oven is on, roast eggplant and make a baba ganoush. Or the eggplant dip from the Indian cookbook.
  • I keep looking at the parsley vase and thinking of soba eggplant noodles topped with parsley. Or tabbouleh made with fonio.
  • The plums that haven’t been eaten should just go on the dehydrator. She says as if the processing step is easier. (It is not.)
  • More curdito. It’s been delicious on tacos and quesadillas and crackers. And hey, we just got carrots and we still have cabbage.

Love,

Sarah

PS Freeze more pesto.

Boxing Day, March 30

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Lettuce and spinach and dandelion greens and parsley.

Dear John,

The equinox has come. Easter is quick on it’s way. Garden scheming time is here. This weekend we pulled out our box of seeds to start scheming. I’m surrounded by slips of paper scribbled with notes. Trying to decide what goes where. This year we’re going to try planting the tall plants on the north end of the garden and the shorter on the southern end.

Currently in the north end of the plot, it turns out the plants that we thought were the garlic that we sowed but then never figured out when to harvest are actually garlic chives. Which can take over as much space as we give them. So maybe let’s give them less space? And harvest a bunch? Which means cooking a bunch. Make some compound butter. Dehydrate some and make into a salt. Try some egg noodles where the chives are the noodles. Or just some eggs. If we ever make it to the Asian grocery, pick up some dried shrimp and try these or see if the spiced tofu is gluten free and we can make this stirfry.

Today’s Box

  • Italian Parsley
  • Jerusalem Artichokes
  • Little Gem Romaine Lettuce
  • Purple Daikon Radishes
  • Spinach
  • Yellow Carrots
  • Yellow Onions
  • Green Dandelion

Things in the fridge

  • Cranberries
  • Chioggia Beets
  • Purple Daikon Radishes
  • Robins Koginut Squash
  • Shallots
  • Jerusalem Artichokes
  • Red Beets

In the Garden

  • Garlic chives
  • Rosemary
  • Dahlia bulbs
  • Sunchokes

Open Preserves

Goes well with garlic chives (or not)

  • It feels like a stir-fry week. Mix up some sauce, put some rice in the pressure cooker, chop some veggies, and play.
  • We have beans in the freezer that are waiting to be cooked with dandelion greens. Let’s pick up some sausage and see if we feel comfortable pinching sage leaves from the herb plot in the garden. We have some dried if not.
  • Salads! We’ve been talking about adding more fish into our diet, perhaps we try a variation on a salmon salad? The ladolemono dressing sounds yummy! Or in for a vegetarian, but add oil, approach time to top with smashed sunchoke. I’m wondering if there’s a way to use the sunchokes instead of artichokes in a quinoa salad dish like this. Maybe easier to try adapting a pasta salad that’s halfway there first? (Use last summer’s pesto from the freezer!) Or just a straightforward green salad.
  • We haven’t been eating risotto as much recently, probably because we ate it so much for required diets previously. This sunchoke risotto intrigues me.

Sarah

Boxing Day, February 9

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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.

Today’s Box

  • All Purple Carrots
  • Chioggia Beets x2
  • Purple Daikon Radishes
  • Purple Sweet Potatoes
  • Onions
  • Parsley
  • Green Cabbage

Things in the fridge

  • Cranberries
  • Half a parsnip
  • Robins Koginut Squash
  • Black Futsu squash (from the farmers market)
  • Shallots

Open Preserves

Home meals

  • Sweet potatoes topped with celery and shallot and cheese. You know what, we have grocery store celery. We could totally make this again. It’s good. And so simple. Reminder that we could use the 8 minute sweet potato trick if we want to do this before we get the oven fixed.
  • 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.

Love you,

Sarah

Boxing Day, March 3

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End of day photo means the greens look a bit wilty. It’s okay. Water will perk them up.

Heya John,

After two years of pandemic, a flood, a rebuilding, a death, and I don’t even remember what else, we made the trip to visit your parents at their home. The snow was timed perfectly for us to be able to go skiing. (Though my rental skis resisted sliding so it was somewhere between skiing and snow-shoeing in long, narrow shoes.) You provided tech support. We both considered which furniture might be worth making the cross-country move. And, we mostly let your mom do the cooking.

There are more unused veggies this week than sometimes. I think we’re making a dent in them, but it might be time to make some meals to freeze.

In This Week’s Box

  • Beauregard Sweet Potatoes
  • Broccoli
  • Celery
  • French Breakfast Radishes
  • Italian Parsley
  • Purple Top Turnips
  • White Mushrooms
  • Green Kale Hearts

Still in the Fridge

  • Cranberries
  • Greens: Red Cabbage, Green Cabbage
  • Kohlrabi
  • Carrots
  • Parsnip
  • Black radishes, Red radishes, Winter radishes
  • Turnips
  • Squash: Butternut
  • Potatoes: Sweet, Purple
  • Onions
  • Jerusalem Artichokes

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
  • Plain pickled banana peppers
  • Pickled fennel stems with orange
  • Spicy pickled fennel stems
  • Radish kimchi
  • Sunchoke relish
  • Green tomato chutney
  • Freedom berry jam
  • Cranapple
  • Probably still more uninventoried

Can we talk about that sweet potato?

That is seven pounds + nine point two ounces.

In the back of the veggie pile, the potato looks large. But then you actually see pick it up and realize that is closer to the size of my head than a baby’s head.

It’s a lot of sweet potato.

My plan is to wash it, prick it, and then put it in the instant pot for, oh, let’s start with an hour. It should go quicker if I cut it up first. But it looks a bit unwieldy for the cutting.

Anyway, later today we should have much sweet potato mash. Once it’s cooled, I’ll put it in the freezer. We can use it for sweet potato waffles/kofkas/crème brûlée/whatever. Presumably for quite a while. (Especially considering we have other sweet potatoes to use between now and then.)

Meal-spiration

Love you,

Sarah