red onions

Boxing Day, July 4

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Dear John,

The fireworks are echoing down the street. I’m wiped from watching parade in the summer heat. You’re in the kitchen making everything neat.

Today’s Box

  • Blueberries
  • Dark Sweet Cherries
  • White Peaches
  • Fennel
  • Red Beets
  • Red Spring Onions
  • Slicing Cucumbers
  • Yellow Patty Pan Squash

Things in the fridge

  • Cherries
  • Watermelon
  • Peaches
  • Fennel bulb
  • Greens: Cabbage, Chard, Collard
  • Carrots
  • Green plums

In the Garden

  • Green beans from neighbors
  • Rainbow chard
  • Turnips + greens
  • Radish + greens
  • Beets + reds, beet + greens
  • Sad looking ending the pea season
  • All the lettuce (17 slugs, 1 earwig)
  • Basil leaves getting pinched with flowers
  • Dill flowers
  • Garlic chives weeding forever
  • Calendula flowers getting dried by the trayful
  • Rosemary
  • Oregano
  • Calendula and cosmos bouquet

Open Preserves

Garden glimpse

We pulled the peas, and planted beans to take over the tent. Two volunbeans, four from the soup pack. Harvested the last of the spring planted radish and turnips. I’m debating if we plant something else short there, or wait for the cucumber and strawberry to spread as they grow.

The beans we planted (two weeks ago?), have all popped up. The chard keeps getting thinned, so even though it’s growing, I feel like we might not be totally overwhelmed. Nevermind how loaded the bike was before we left.

I checked the internet’s horticulture wisdom and realized we needed to prune all of our tomatoes – it’s an indeterminate year.

Meals to make to celebrate summer

  • Internet browsing brought me to a newsletter with a series from Pandemic Part I. There’s this salad that looks great for cleaning out bits and ends. I made it last week and it was a hit. Not sure it’s calling me again so soon, but wanting to save.
  • It’s been so long since we made smashed cucumber salad. I miss it. We are making it this week. (I spied the first baby cucumber fruiting today. Maybe we’ll have some of our own to harvest.)
  • And the patty pan squash means it’s time for my annual making of the roasted squash and herbed chickpeas from chocolate & zucchini.
  • Green beans and tofu?
  • We just tossed fennel pesto that had gone moldy. So we can make some again. But learn from our mistakes and FREEZE it. Also, toss fennel on a salad of lettuces + peaches + toasted pecans.
  • How to use this week’s beet greens? (The beets will keep. Fine dice and roasted. Sliced on pizza. I’m not worried about them.) And what about the supply of chard? Last week brought a quiche with a mix of parm, cheddar, and gouda. Another quiche, but this time with chevre sounds potential. Honestly, it’s been a bit since we had pizza. That sounds kinda good. So does having it with pasta in a tomato sauce.
  • Last thought, if we have extra cucumbers, maybe this salad but with fennel.

Love,

Sarah

PS The wedge salad was as good as I dreamed and makes me want to get iceberg lettuce again. The toppings we used–roasted beets, toasted nuts, green onions, parsley, blue cheese dressing–feel so similar to my autumnal salads. But those are served with kale and that makes all the difference.

Boxing Day, February 17

planorcanLeave a comment
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
  • 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

Dishes to dine on (that aren’t mentioned above)

  • 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.

Sarah