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.