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CSA Bounty – Week Nine

Well, this week we got a fantastic selection of summer vegetables.  I was really excited when I saw the share menu for the week!  I was so excited that I forgot to take pictures of my share before I dove in, d’oh.  It’s been a hectic week, too, so I haven’t had a chance to do a share photoshoot.  Still, I’ll tell you what we got this week:

tomatoes
cucumbers
bell peppers
summer squash
eggplant
parsley (mint was another option)
peaches
plums
blackberries

Fantastic!!!  You can’t ask for a more summery selection than that.

I took the tomatoes, eggplant, and peppers and stewed them all together and topped it with a little grated parmesan.  I have a lot to learn about cooking eggplant, I think.  It is one of the most challenging vegetables to cook well.  I have a white eggplant that I will work with over the weekend.

I also peeled the cucumber, sliced it, and combined it with the tomato, cut into wedges.  Add a little extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper, and perhaps some sherry vinegar, and that makes for a delicious summer salad.

As for the summer squash, not sure what I’ll do with them exactly.  I am overloaded with summer squashes of all kinds right now. One thing I could do with them is simply grate them and freeze them for use in zucchini bread or sprouted muffins over the winter.

As for the fruit, I’ve eaten most of the blackberries and am enjoying the yellow plums a lot.  I think I’ll make a peach crisp this weekend, too.  I would like to see if I can adjust the recipe for the crisp topping to accommodate rapadura/sucanat and coconut sugar. Yum!

Pictures next week, promise.

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CSA Bounty – Week Eight

week eight collage

So far this season, this week has been my favorite week with the CSA.  The share was quite varied, as you can see.  From the top left, clockwise:

Basil, cherry tomatoes, blackberries, peaches, yellow plums, radicchio, fennel, cucumbers, apples, and summer squash. Not pictured: lettuce.

Last night I made a salad of the tomatoes, cucumbers (from the CSA and the monster lemon cucumber from my garden), basil, scallions, all dressed with olive oil, salt & pepper.  I added sherry vinegar to my serving, as T does not like vinegar.  It was a fantastic salad.  I ate it with eggs and goat cheese for protein.  Such a lovely summer meal.

csa salad

The weather has calmed down some, and for the past couple of days it’s felt like a normal NYC July.  People seemed in a better mood, in general.

distribution week eight-2

I mentioned above including my lemon cucumber in the salad, and I just have to say, what a delicious cucumber!  It actually tasted a little lemony and not at all bitter.  The flesh is really tender, too.  These cucumbers are a winner in my book.  No wonder my grandfather grew them every year.

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CSA Bounty – Week Seven

CSA Week 7 Collage

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!

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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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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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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!

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CSA Bounty – Week Three

Wow, this week is like Christmas!  Everything is green and red.  Well, except for the lavender.

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!

chard

We got a couple of spicy greens – cress and green mustard greens.

cress

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.

bags of 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.

cherries

apple

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.