Cooking for two is boring -- I want to cook for the entire blogosphere!

Friday, August 27

Our Summer of CSA - Week 11

It's not my fault that we skipped so many weeks. We went off and got married, so we were kind of busy. Instead of cooking from our local upstate farm, we cooked California produce and fresh fish caught in Hawaiian waters. We drank New Mexican champagne and ate Afghan food. And all the while, for four weeks, friends took our CSA produce home and made their own delicious meals.

We were also a little lazy, and in the last two weeks since we've been home, haven't been so good about cooking creative things. We've made a lot of salad - the same salad - over and over again. We ate apples and nectarines. We grilled corn on the cob. But this week, we're back in the groove. It helps that week 11 was a particularly delicious week. I filled our canvas bag with apples, peaches, potatoes, onions, fresh soybeans, corn, and a butternut squash. The soybeans were so surprising, though they shouldn't have been - they go hand in hand with corn as the most cultivated crop in America. But somehow, I don't associate them with small family farms. So, we learned something this week, as we seem to every week with the CSA!

I took the opportunity to make a bulgur wheat and edamade salad that I saw in Cooking Light ages ago. A friend and I started a little challenge between ourselves: to cook and blog one healthy meal per week and take one long walk per week. We both want to keep ourselves healthy and strong. It's not that we don't normally cook healthily, but this way we'll be able to share our best recipes of the week with each other.

This salad certainly fits the healthy criteria: soybeans, bulgur, tomatoes, herbs. And so summery and seasonal. I added half a red pepper and a stick of celery because we had them in the fridge. I also left out the dill. I've made tabbouleh before, and the recipe I use is very herby and very lemony. This is a more relaxed salad, meant to be eaten in a big bowl for lunch. It's important to let the salad sit before you eat it, as the wheat will absorb the extra moisture and get softer - it's purposefully underdone coming out of the pot.