mi csa su csa: week 4

From the farm share in week 4:

butter lettuce
new potatoes
zucchini
green beans
peas
carrots
turnips
green onions
cucumbers

I started the week with the peas, shelling them into mac and cheese and tossed with some of last week's scallions.

Next up was our favorite pork chop and peaches dish, this time with fresh peaches, which improved the dish greatly. We roasted the new potatoes with olive oil and salt—and they were some of the best potatoes we've ever made, even though we've made them the way dozens of times.

mi csa su csa: week 3

The third week of farm-y goodness includes:

zucchini
scallions
sugar peas
cucumbers
carrots
bok choy
lettuce mix
kale

There's always one item to catch up on from the week before and this week it was cucumbers, especially since we got two more in this week's farm share. So I made one of favorite childhood foods: chopped cucumbers in sour cream. Literally add some sugar to those two ingredients and you have a dish I can snack on for days.

I also went straight for the kale on night one. Mostly because it's not my favorite and likely to be one of the first things to go bad if I don't eat it right away. Also it was easy enough to just throw it in a frying pan with some sliced leftover kielbasa and have a meal ready to go in 15 minutes.

Been a little slow getting around to everything this week. Ate a bit of the lettuce mix, but wasn't as into it this week. Tossed the bok choy, zucchini and shucked the peas into a stir fry, which was probably a little overpowered by the sauce we used, but the bok choy was clearly very tasty. Saving the carrots to make a big batch of carrot latkes when we get more carrots next week. Scallions might be the only thing that don't make it into anything.

mi csa su csa: week 2

The farm freshness continues in week 2 with:

carrots
spinach
scallions
beets
cucumbers
broccoli
zucchini
arugula

Since I didn't get to the arugula last week I thought I'd start there first with a steak salad. Here's the original recipe, though it's just as good when you just pan fry the steak, reduce some balsamic and brown sugar in the pan and sprinkle in whatever cheese you've got. And this was definitely the best arugula I've ever had.

I roasted the broccoli the first night we got it, just to make sure it didn't go bad. Mid-week we defrosted some bone-in pork chops from the farm and used our steak method to cook them: a hot cast-iron pan, oiled with bacon fat and salt and peppered chops, 3 minutes a side and 6 minutes in a 400 degree oven. We then used the cast iron pan to cook down the spinach using the drippings and half a lemon to flavor the spinach. We also reheated the broccoli in the pan as the spinach finished cooking. It was all delicious!

With so much ground beef and ground pork from the farm a meatloaf seemed in order. We used our usual meatloaf recipe, though we exchanged the usual dried italian herbs with fresh parsley, oregano, thyme and basil (the rest is chopped onion, parmesan cheese, ketchup, mustard, tabasco steak sauce, eggs, salt, pepper and garlic powder). We also roasted slices of this week's zucchini and last week's peas with a little olive oil, salt and pepper for half the duration while the meatloaf cooked for 60 minutes at 400 degrees. It was the best meatloaf we've ever made.

For lunch we grilled up some kielbasa and hot dogs along with the scallions, which is my favorite scallion preparation.

We had a ton of leftover meatloaf, so we ate the leftovers with roasted carrots, golden beets and some mushrooms. We topped the mushrooms with salt and pepper, the carrots with thyme and the beets with dill - all very tasty, and a good way to use up nearly all of the rest of the vegetables.