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.

Our summer of CSA - week 2

This week's CSA bounty included a lot of greenery: collards along with swiss chard, parsley, and something I finally identified as watercress. We also received some lovely raspberries and a small paper bag full of cherries. The fruit was easily dispensed with, but we pondered how to handle the rest in this hot weather, which doesn't make one like to turn on the stovetop, let alone the oven.

First up was tackling the watercress, since we learned via the Internet that it's fairly delicate and wouldn't last a terribly long time. Luckily I still had some radishes left from last week, and these, along with butter and some incredibly creamy goat cheese from Formaggio Essex, made a terrific foil for the tangy cress in a baguette sandwich. Serve with some sparkling water and - voila. Very French. We also found that buying a nice head of lettuce made watercress and radish salad an appetizing option as well.

Next we tackled the collards. A variation on this recipe, previously posted on the blog, was a great way to keep the stove use to a minimum. In the variation, from my new cookbook Fast, Fresh and Green, you make a little dressing with honey and cider vinegar and pour it over the top of greens cooked with garlic and pepper flakes just as they're finishing (not unlike this recipe).

Finally, one of my favorite soups, and one I usually cook in the wintertime: chard, potato, and white bean ragout. I just can't think of a better way to eat chard, so we braved the hot kitchen and cooked up a storm.

Next week, I'm hoping for some more delicious fruit, and we'll finish off our parsley in some lemony tabbouleh.

Starting our Summer of CSA

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.