Natural food, sustainability, and delicious living.
All about Harmonious Belly and the Hellgate CSA.
This week the share seemed quite large to me. From top to bottom row, left to right:
Beets, tarragon, scallions, lettuce, green beans, zucchini, red and yellow plums, mutsu apple, nectarines. Not pictured: cucumber.
So much deliciousness! This is my favorite time of the year for fruits and vegetables. Summer makes for such beautiful produce.
Not much else to say, but…. YUM!
So last week I was a little lax with the posting. It was my birthday on Friday, and I had a bunch of plans with friends, so I ended up being offline from Friday afternoon through the weekend. It was a nice break, and a little odd not turning on the computer, but I think it’s important to unplug from the laptop a bit for a few days from time to time.
Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to reconnect with old friends, as well as with some newer friends, and that made the weekend really special. So good to be with the people you care about, and who care about you.
As far as what I ate… well, I admit that overindulged in the rich, sweet food category a bit, but hey – it was my birthday! But on the bright side, what I ate was made with quality ingredients. I had some cake from a local bakery that uses real food – butter, eggs, cream; none of this shortening or veg oil business. And I did make a peach sorbet from my CSA peaches, which came out great. Had a few cups of fair trade coffee and tea. Sharing it all with friends made it even better.
So now I’m back on my favored eating path, and expect to feel amazing over the next couple of weeks! I’ll have some recipes, a garden update, and another CSA report this week. Stay tuned!
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.
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.
Well, this week brought searing heat, wilted CSA members, and serious summer vegetables and fruit! Peaches, apricots, and plums scream “summer” to me.
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.
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.
We also got fennel – I’ll probably braise it.
Oh, and spring onions!
And peas! Shelling peas – I made a tasty salad with them that involved mint and dates (recipe to come).
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.
So much great produce! I just love my CSA.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We also got some of the first stone fruit of the season, plums and 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!
Wow, this week is like Christmas! Everything is green and red. Well, except for the lavender.
As gorgeous as it is, I have lavender growing on the back deck. So, I traded mine with a woman who loves lavender, for more chard!
We got a couple of spicy greens – cress and green mustard greens.
I’ll need to find a recipe for these greens – on an initial search I came across a recipe for balsamic-glazed chickpeas and mustard greens, but I’d need to make a number of adjustments, as fat-free is not my kind of thing. I could add some of my pastured chicken broth, naturally fermented tamari, and use coconut sugar. I’ll definitely post about it if it turns out well!
We also got a bag of sugar snap peas.
I ate a bunch tonight, all raw and some dipped in homemade mayonnaise – so good! It’s a nice lemony mayo, which tastes great with these peas.
This was the first week of the fruit share! We got cherries and apples. Haven’t tried the apples, but the cherries are divine.
We weren’t sure we’d get cherries, as at this growing season has accelerated a lot of the traditional spring fruit. I’m so grateful there were cherries for us!
Can you tell that I like cherries? Heee!
I look forward to good eating this week.
We had another week without radishes, but with plenty of lettuce. Last year we got a head each week for almost the entire season; I wonder if this year will be the same. I will eat a large salad tonight. This week we got:
The strawberries were better this week than last week, I think, which is kind of like saying we got 12 oz of gold this week over last week’s 11.5 oz. Both weeks have brought us amazing strawberries. We ate them for breakfast this morning with some cantaloupe I cut up last night.
This week’s lettuce head was a leaf lettuce in a very unusual color – kind of the color of manzanita wood.
We got cilantro this week! Also dried black beans. I’m thinking of making a black bean salad tonight with them both.
I have a share of beans and grains from Cayuga Organics, which grow the best beans I’ve ever had. Their grains are also amazing.
We also got asparagus – I think we are at the end of the season.
Last night I had some of it and it was so good. Simply pan roasted with some salt. I ate it with a quesadilla I fried in coconut oil, made with raw pepperjack cheese (also from the CSA), some cilantro and Tortilleria Nixtamal tortillas. We had stopped in over the weekend and picked some up on our way home from touring the Louis Armstrong House in Corona (fabulous). They really are the best tortillas around.
In addition to the veg, berries, black beans and grains (farro!), my meat and dairy order came in – my freezer is now full of grass fed/finished beef, organic chicken breasts and turkey sausage, and I’ve got a nice goaty chevre to look forward to tonight, too.