This summer I signed up for a CSA share. I thought it would be an awesome way to support small farms, and it turns out that it's quite exciting, too. Every Tuesday I'll pick up a bag of mystery fruits and vegetables and have to figure out a way to cook with them. It's like Christmas every week!
This week we received strawberries, apples, radishes, lettuce, spinach, and cilantro. First, we made strawberry popsicles. We had a whole basket of tiny, ripe red berries and couldn't eat them all on cereal, after all. We mashed about a cup of berries together with a tablespoon or so of sugar and let them macerate for a bit, then added a half cup of plain yogurt and enough milk to thin it out. After a splash of lime juice, we added them to our popsicle molds and voila! They taste like strawberry frozen yogurt.
Dealing with our other ingredients required a bit more ingenuity. I haven't cooked much with radishes, and never with their fuzzy green fronds. A bit of research proved they were indeed edible and in fact tasty. So tonight, we made a pretty straight-forward salad: fresh green lettuce, paper-thin radish rounds, slivers of radish greens, and a mustard vinaigrette. It tasted fresh off the farm.
So far, CSA - thumbs up. Later this week we'll make a spicy tomato soup with lots of cilantro.
