CSA Wednesday, Week 4

Oh, goodness, today couldn't come fast enough! I've been scrounging around for veggies in the fridge for meals for two days now, and that's after buying a bag of carrots and a couple cucumbers--but more on the cukes later.

This week's share includes...
1 (huge) head of green leaf lettuce
1 bunch broccoli
1 bunch kale or chard (I chose kale again)
1.5 pounds summer squash (I took all zucchini)
1 bunch mint or parsley (there wasn't mint when I was there)
1 head of garlic
2 baskets of strawberries
1 basket baby plums
1 brownie and 1 chocolate walnut cookie, courtesy of Feel Good Bakery

I'm going to start with my complaint to get it out of the way, and then onto the good stuff... One cookie and one brownie? What am I supposed to do with these? We're touchy about our chocolate here (sweets in general, really, since I don't make/buy them too often anymore), so how are we supposed to split this between three and a half people? I wonder how the mother of three boys who came in as I was leaving dealt with the chocolate rations... I don't like walnuts either, so there should be an interesting discussion happening at the dinner table tonight...

Alright. Got that off my chest... I'm happy to see more lettuce on the "menu," and have a yummy salad dressing from the How to Cook Everything Vegetarian book involving my new food fascination, caramelized onions. I wanted to try it last week but couldn't since we didn't get lettuce. I can't wait to make it. I'm also really happy to have broccoli for the first time through our CSA, and in over 5 weeks! It's a staple veggie here, and it's been missed. Those heads should supply us with two dinner sides. I also found a couple recipes for kale so I picked it up instead of chard. If there's chard next week I'll get that just to say I tried it, hehe.

There were several kinds of summer squash like smooth and bumpy crooknecks, scallop, and zucchini. I went with all zucchini to try remaking zucchini bread. See, I made zucchini bread with that very large zucchini I picked out last week which, shredded, gave me 2.5 cups worth. My recipe called for 2 cups, but I thought, "What the heck," and threw it all in. Ooops! I ended up with two dense loaves of bread with squishy bottoms. The top halves tasted great LOL. So, I'm trying the recipe again because I know I can make it work!

Challenges: There are a lot of greens this week, but I think I can manage to use it all. Garlic. Boy, the garlic is starting to add up. I need to either come up with a way to use a lot of it in a recipe, or a way to preserve it. Is there such a thing as garlic pie? Pies always use a lot of filling... We're still trying to finish up the sweet & sour plums from last week, so finishing the ones we picked up this week may take some time.


Speaking of last week...
What's left:
1/2 a basket of sweet & sour plums
1 Torpedo onion
2 apriums
a little thyme

What I made:
I had a lot of fun with food last week. As I noted above, I made zucchini bread, which I've never made before. It tastes a lot like banana bread, minus the banana flavor. Boy Wonder didn't like it, but I can't blame him this time since the bread was so extremely moist--it was fully cooked, just overly moist. I also used the huge onion along with the red onion I picked up the first week to make caramelized onions. I think I mentioned it before, but I'm in love with caramelized onions. I found this great tutorial on how to make them correctly.

Here's some on a pita chip with Boxer Cheddar. Forget the pita chip! I liked it better with only the cheese!

The basil I shared with you as a part of my Harvest Monday, along with a couple apriums went into an Apricot Basil Dressing that I found here. This was... different... Not a bad dressing, but I think it needed to be paired with a more bitter green than the lettuce I served it with. Adding Boxer Cheddar to the salad helped.

I used thyme throughout the week in meals, but my favorite was this roasted chicken dish.

I also used some thyme to make my first ever batch of chicken broth. I used the carcass from the above chicken, and another two from the freezer. This was so easy to make, and I hope I never have to buy store-bought broth again.

Now for the pride of my experiments... Refrigerator pickles. I used the little pickling cucumbers, and a torpedo onion in this recipe. I also bought extra cucumbers so I could use up all of the brine (Is that what it's called? Pickle juice?). There are a million and one pickle recipes out there, but I decided to go with this one mainly because I had all the spices on hand.

These taste really really good. I've only tasted the store-bought cucumbers because the cucumbers from the CSA are really wrinkly, and I don't know if they're ok to eat like this, or if the pickles were too old by the time I got to them...

Alright. I'm off to the store to pick up a few items for this week's meals. Cheers!