Friday, June 26, 2009

SUMMER CSA: WEEK 3

This week, the lovely Grover Cleveland will undertake the Vanna White role in showing off our CSA bounty:


My share of the box contained:
1 leek
4 carrots
½ bunch rosemary
3 Yukon Gold potatoes
4 Valencia oranges
½ bunch arugula
½ bunch spinach
½ head celery
1 cucumber (I took this in exchange for P getting the cauliflower)
1 jar honey! (I was super-excited about this, so P was generous enough to let me have the whole jar)

Grover is a particular fan of the spinach (he actually took a tiny bite right after I snapped this photo):


Beyond the honey, everything here is pretty tame and should be easy to use up. As usual, the carrots, celery, and oranges will be snacks. I plan to use the arugula in a salad with corn and bacon, the potatoes in a new pesto-potato salad, the leek in some pasta with bacon and mushrooms, and the cucumber in fattoush. The spinach will just have to be a salad or something, and I guess the rosemary gets left out again—I’ll probably throw it in the freezer. As for the honey, I can always use it in granola (I go through a lot of honey that way), but I’d like to use at least a little in something special, where you can really taste it. I’m thinking honey ice cream!


That’s right, Grover; I said “honey ice cream.”

Here’s how we dispatched the last CSA box:
  • Onion: Used in pizza sauce
  • Celery: Snacked upon (a little too skinny and bitter, though; would have been better in soup)
  • Spinach: Used on pizza bianca instead of arugula (which was really good!)
  • Lettuce: Used on BLTs and as salad
  • Leek: Used on pizza bianca instead of onion
  • Strawberries: Eaten straight up
  • Round zucchini: Eaten in vegetable tortilla stacks (They might have been better stuffed, after all—they were a little disappointing texture-wise, with the dry mealiness typical of zucchini that grow too large, though they tasted fine mixed up with other ingredients.)
  • Italian flat beans: Eaten with shallots and lemon (These beans were a wonderful discovery—so tender, velvety and delicious! I’ll definitely look for them at the farmers’ market in the future and hope they show up in future CSA boxes.)

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