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CSA Bounty – Week Six

CSA Bounty Week Six

This week we got a wonderful variety of vegetables in our veggie share, and some delicious stone fruit in the fruit share.  I decided to display them in a grid this time.  From top to bottom row, left to right:

lettuce, green beans, spring onions, carrots, cucumbers, plums, nectarines, peaches, mint.

I forgot to take a picture of the zucchini!  This week I got a large one, which I’ll use to put in zucchini muffins most likely.  The zucchini from last week went into zucchini fritters.  I’ll post about them at some point, after I tweak a few things.

distribution on a humid cool day

The weather was better than last week – not great, but better.  It was much cooler, thanks to thunderstorms that passed through this afternoon.  It’s still humid, though, and a heat wave is expected this weekend.  I have hopes that it won’t be as intense as last time.

I have plans to make a sorbet out of some of the stone fruit.  Perfect for hot weather!

Additionally, I got a chunk of chevre and some ground pastured beef.  Looking forward to having hamburgers tomorrow!

And finally, our dry bean and grain share was this week and the most striking thing was the oats.  I don’t think I’ve actually seen whole oats before.  They look perfect to sprout – I’ll have to look into a grain mill attachment for my Kitchen Aid.  Or, perhaps I will eat them as hot cereal.  I also came across a recipe for a sprouted oat milk, which is intriguing.

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Fresh Pea Salad

in the bowl

Last week I was fortunate enough to have shelling peas in my CSA share. Usually we get sugar snaps or snow peas in a season, but hadn’t gotten shelling peas before.  I really wanted to find a recipe that highlighted the fresh pea flavor.

peas peas peas

It was also hot last week, so I wanted to find something that involved minimal cooking.

I found this pea salad recipe on the 101 Cookbooks site, which is a great source of recipes with a true vegetable focus.  Heidi Swanson, the site owner, is from the SF Bay Area, so a lot of her recipes remind me of home. Anyway, I found the date-mint combination in the dressing to be quite intriguing, and since I have access to amazing medjool dates here in town, that was a no-brainer to make it.  The mint is refreshing, and I love how the lemon and chile give it a pleasant kick.

date mint lemon spicy dressing

Beware, though – aside from the pepitas, this recipe has virtually no protein, nor is there much fat in it.  Perhaps a little olive oil could be added, but I think even that might weigh things down.  So, this dish is best paired with something containing plenty of good fat, like pastured eggs, a selection of raw cheeses, or perhaps even a grass-fed burger!

pepitas and peas

It is a delicious salad.  So refreshing and a wonderful combination of flavors.  It also allowed me to use up some of my lettuce, always a challenge for a CSA member this time of year.

salad put together

This salad makes a lot, and I ate it for three days, almost finishing it off.  It’s a wonderful salad to share with friends and loved ones.

Fresh Pea Salad
From 101 Cookbooks

I used a hand blender and it worked great! As you add more water to the dressing, it definitely gets easier to grind up.

1 cup fresh mint leaves (just leaves, no stems)
2 dried dates, pitted
1/2 of a small serrano chile, stem removed (half a jalapeño also works)
a squeeze of fresh lemon juice and zest from that lemon

1 1/2 cups fresh peas
1 small head of romaine lettuce, cut into shreds
1/2 cup toasted pumpkin seeds
fine grain sea salt

To make the mint-date dressing, puree the mint, dates, chiles and lemon juice and zest using a food processor or hand blender. Blend until uniform in texture. Thin it out by adding a tablespoon of water at a time until it is a consistency that you can drizzle. Taste and adjust for lemon and spiciness.

When you go to cook the peas, the key is not overcooking them. Fill a big bowl with ice water and set aside. Add some salt (as you would pasta water) and the peas. Bring six cups of water to a boil in a medium saucepan. You are just going to boil the peas for a very short time. Don’t leave the stove. Somewhere between ten and twenty seconds.You want them just barely tender, so they still pop in your – mouth. Quickly drain and dunk the peas in the bowl of ice water.

Just before serving gently toss the peas, lettuce, and pumpkin seeds with about half of the dressing and a couple pinches of salt. Taste and add more dressing if you like. Finish with a pinch or two of your favorite finishing salt (I like fleur de sel).

Serves 2 – 4

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CSA Bounty – Week Five

hot distribution

Well, this week brought searing heat, wilted CSA members, and serious summer vegetables and fruit!  Peaches, apricots, and plums scream “summer” to me.

peaches

plums and apricots

All the fruit has been fantastic eaten out of hand.  It would make good sorbet, too.

The vegetable I was most excited about was the fava beans.  I look forward to them every year.

fava beans

I think they are gorgeous pods, but the beans inside are even more fantastic. I shell them and then remove each bean’s outer covering, throw them into a pan containing a little hot olive oil, and cook them till they start to brown a bit.  Sometimes I cook them with onions.   Then I eat them with fleur de sel on top.  Perfection!

We got more greens – butter lettuce and curly cress.  Not much to do with them except make a salad, which I did.

butter lettuce

cress

We also got fennel – I’ll probably braise it.

fennel

Oh, and spring onions!

spring onions

And peas! Shelling peas – I made a tasty salad with them that involved mint and dates (recipe to come).

shelling peas

Lastly, we got zucchini, which was a surprise! I chose 5 perfect medium sized squash, which I will make zucchini fritters out of this weekend. I’ll probably grate whatever is left and freeze it for zucchini bread.

zucchini

So much great produce!  I just love my CSA.

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The Heat, Energy Levels, and Saturated Fat

At least the plants like this heat!

(At least the plants like the heat!)

As you probably know, we’ve had quite the heat wave here on the east coast – Tuesday and Wednesday were back-to-back triple digit days.  Sunday and Monday were hot, up in the 90s.  This morning the news predicted temperatures in the 90s with humidity that would pump the heat index to triple digits again.  The air conditioners have been trying to cool things down at home, but it’s been oppressive, still. In a word, miserable.

Silver linings for us, though – our guest room is small and therefore the air conditioner is doing a great job in there.  We sleep there nowadays, so at least we’re getting a good night’s sleep. I work in an air conditioned office most of the day, so I am shielded from the worst of the heat.  I’m so fortunate to have air conditioned refuges; my heart goes out to those who don’t.  And today, the temperatures feel downright balmy!  It’s overcast, and a cool breeze is blowing.  Waiting outside for my lunch (a grass-fed burger, yum), it was actually comfortable.  Such a relief!

Still, I’ve found myself feeling really tired in the evenings this week.  I thought it was the heat, but like I said, I’ve only had to deal with the heat in the evenings.  I’d come home and be ready to collapse around 9pm, feeling like I normally do around 1am, drained.  Not fun.

And while I do understand that being in the heat in the evening can sap some of my energy, it seemed too extreme.   I thought, maybe I’ve just been working too hard and intensely at the office (totally possible).  Perhaps it was the sugar in the homemade gelato I ate earlier in the week?  Or not being able to run this week during the heat?  Whatever it is, it’s been a bummer.

Then yesterday afternoon I read a post by Kelly, which mentions an experience that her friend Sarah, of the Healthy Home Economist, had with her son being at camp and not eating any saturated fats, and feeling blah, tired, and anxious (I’ve been feeling a little more anxious than normal this week, too).  I reviewed in my mind what I had been eating this week and lo and behold my intake of saturated fats has been the lowest it’s been in some time.  The fat I have been eating has pretty much come from a few scoops of gelato and a little bit of raw yogurt; I ate a little pastured beef on Monday, but it is pretty darn lean and I added no fat to it when I cooked it.  Normally I have eggs a few times a week for breakfast, as well as drinking plenty of raw milk – I hadn’t had any of that this week.

Now, part of this is that since it’s been so hot, I haven’t had the desire to eat much of anything, especially in the evenings.  Mostly salad with no protein and little fat (just olive oil).

So, this morning I chose to up the saturated fat intake in the form of two pastured eggs fried in grass-fed butter, along with a glass of raw milk.  I had a grass-fed burger for lunch topped with some good cheese.  Tonight I’ll finish off the delicious fresh pea and pepita salad (recipe to come), but will accompany it with more eggs in butter, and topped with some raw cheddar, since I have no meat defrosted.

So, I’ll be curious to see the effects what I’ve eaten has on me tonight and into the weekend – I must say, I already feel better than I have all week.  Those eggs really gave me a solid foundation for the day.  I’ll be very happy if I can stay up later than 9pm.  Will report back!

This post is participating in Fight Back Friday, hosted by Food Renegade.

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Garden Update – Into the Wild

Well, my garden is coming along very well.

the garden

It’s grown so much!  These hot days are perfect for growing the kinds of things I’m growing.  My tomatoes, for one, are growing wide and tall and finally fruiting.  Clockwise from upper left:  Silver Fir, Amish Paste, and Pruden’s Purple.

july tomato collage

Can’t wait to taste them!

My ground cherries have a number of fruit on them, plus the foliage is quite robust.

ground cherry

The fruit inside the husk is still small, but it will get bigger.  I love ground cherries and am eager to taste these.

And I’m finally getting some lemon cucumbers!  This one is nice and yellow and almost ready to pick.

lemon cucumber

There’s another lemon cucumber hanging around, but it’s still unripe as far as color goes.   The cucumber patch itself has really grown!  It’s taken over its part of the garden and its tendrils threaten the leaves of my Silver Fir tomato plant.

lemon cucumber plants

lemon cucumber leaf and vine

Earlier this week I discovered some volunteers – I think they are summer squash of some kind, but only time will tell. I’d love it if this were the case!

mystery plants

Finally, the fig tree that is hanging over part of the garden is full of figs. I’m going to claim as many as I can, and I hope the birds don’t eat them all.

figs

More pictures can be seen in my flickr gardening set, too.

I keep telling myself that the 90+ degrees days are good for the plants, even if they aren’t so good for me!

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Dos Toros Update – Burrito Time

dos toros.bmp

As you may remember, I gushed over the tacos I ate from Dos Toros. Man, they were good.  And I love their philosophy of using local, sustainable ingredients, not to mention the sustainability of their overall operation.

So, at the time of said taco eating, I was also very curious about their burritos.  The other day, I got a chance to try one, though since it was a takeout burrito I’m not sure the comparison will be truly fair.  That being said…

First off, they get points for wrapping the burrito correction – in foil!

the right wrapping

Believe me, this makes it easy to handle one of these bad boys.  Keeps it warm, too.  And pretty much all taquerias in the Bay Area wrap their burritos in foil.  Dos Toros succeeds in authenticity right off the bat.

Normally, I would get a burrito with black beans; I usually find pinto beans too mushy.  My guy, who graciously brought back the burrito, chose pinto beans.  So, the burrito was a little mushy inside.  However, aside from that, it was damn tasty – lots of delicious stuff in it, including chicken and guacamole and pico de gallo.  There was rice in there, too, which is pretty NorCal authentic.  I did miss the crema, but that’s ok.

Just look at it!  Beautiful.

burrito insides

burrito half

Nom!

This is the closest thing I’ve had in NYC to a Mission-style burrito, and that makes me very happy.  It was delicious – fresh tasting and full of wonderful flavors. However, to make a true comparison, I’ll have to have the burrito in-house and with black beans.  Stay tuned for the next update!

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CSA Bounty – Week Four

This week brought us a variety of things, more than just greens (oh, they were there, too).  The vegetable that most excited me was beets!  We got some gorgeous ones.

beets

I plan to roast them and make  salad out of them with a light vinaigrette and chevre; I got a nice soft grassy chevre this week, too, which will go great with these beets.

We got a couple kind of peas – snow peas and snap peas.

snow peas

sugar snap peas

One way I really like to prepare snow peas is to grill them, add a little olive oil and fleur de sel.  They are very tasty this way.   Snap peas are great just raw, by themselves or cut up in salads – that’s how I ate some of them last night, in a giant salad.

More lettuce. More lettuce!  The common cry of the CSA member.

romaine

I’ll be eating salad all week.

The fruit share got pretty interesting this week.  We got a big pint of blueberries, and they are fantastic!  They are perfect eaten out of hand, but would be good in ice cream, or on yogurt, or even in sprouted wheat muffins.

blueberries

We also got some of the first stone fruit of the season, plums and peaches.

plums

peaches

I was actually surprised to get peaches, because I think of them as a late July-August fruit, but things have been so hot so far this summer that it’s understandable that we might get them earlier, or perhaps this is an earlier variety.  I love peaches, so I’m pretty excited about this.

Hooray for good, local, seasonal eating!