CSA Share #17

Let us have more lettuce. Sigh.

Oh well. I'm tackling the last of the red oak leaf lettuce from CSA Share 15. Dinner tonight? A colorful salad of crisp lettuce and raw beetroot chips topped with oven-roasted chicken. The sweet crunch of the beets contrasts nicely with the chicken. Both the beets and the chicken are low profile with a delicate flavor. The oak lettuce is light and crisp and manages to provide an unobtrusive background that allows the flavor of the beets and the chicken to shine through. Extremely simple (and perhaps plain, by some standards), but delicious. I always tend to like simpler fare anyways. Yum.

Notice that I said "crisp" and "CSA Share 15." That is not a mistake. I kept the lettuce head in the crisper and used one leaf at a time in an effort to keep it as fresh as possible for as long as possible. Last night, I took inventory of my fridge and realized the eggplant and yellow bell pepper from CSA share 16 were a bit wrinkly and the lettuce was starting to wilt in spite of my heroic preservation efforts. To revive the lettuce, I washed the lettuce and let it sit in a tupperware container overnight with a bit of extra water clinging to the leaves. Voila, re-crisped lettuce.

I did have to throw out a leaf or two though - they were so far gone that extra moisture might have led to rot, not rejuvenation. I also didn't wash the lettuce well enough...I can taste gritty sand specks here and there >.<

Oh well.

I sliced up the yellow bell pepper for a snack and sauteed the eggplant with some gorgeous opal basil, which was, incidentally, the same deep rich aubergine shade as the eggplant. I wasn't sure if it would keep its color during cooking, but it did! I also wilted the arugula with some garlic, as it was starting to yellow a little bit.

Having taken care of the veggies-in-danger, I cleaned up the 17th share and stored it away in my fridge for later use. Resplendent with rich fall-themed colors, this was a beautiful share worth admiring.

CSA Share 17
- 1 bunch beets
- 1 bunch carrots
- 2 bunches curly leaf parsley
- 1 bunch opal basil
- 1 bunch red Russian kale
- 1 bunch bok choy
- 1 head red Romaine lettuce
- 2 red bell peppers

CWTC: This might come as a surprise, but...carrots! More specifically, carrot tops! See the below post for a full explanation. I washed up the carrot tops along with the celery leaves from last week and tossed it all in a ziploc bag to freeze for later. I have a whole chicken from dinner that I'm working my way through, so I should have a nice bag of chicken bones for stock by the end of the week. I'm hoping that freezing the carrot and celery tops for a few days won't damage them too much. These will have to replace the onions that I usually throw in my soup pot, as I've run out of onions. :(
TAV: Red romaine lettuce. Lettuce is lettuce and this is the same as any other...but the color! It's so beautiful,with a dark green heart gradually shading out to deep shades of red masquerading as purple along the edges. I might cook this. I'm so tired of salads.
TAV alternate: Color isn't really adventurous. I just wanted to wax poetic about my lettuce. My vegetable adventure for the week will be another foray into herb-drying. Normally I would look at my parsley, think very hard about how to eat it, and despair. I am not very partial to the strong taste of fresh parsley. I recall feeding some to my pet rabbit years ago, but sadly, I do not have a pet rabbit anymore. I do like sprinkling dried parsley on my pasta and potatoes for a little color though.
Emboldened by my success in air drying my leftover sprigs of dill, I decided to dry my two large bunches of parsley as well. Why not? But I wanted to avoid perfuming the apartment with the smell of drying parsley, so I decided to expedite the process a bit. I washed and dried the parsley and popped them in my warmed oven on a paper-towel lined cookie sheet. I realized I needed to de-stem them halfway through, in order to fully dessicate the parsley but keep the leaves from burning. After I popped them back into the oven, I forgot about them and went to bed. I did turn off the oven before I put the parsley in, so I'm hoping when I get home tonight, that the parsley will have dried nicely instead of burning to a crisp. I hope. We'll see. This is an adventure, right? One cannot expect perfection when being adventurous.
WTF: I have plans. I am prepared. I can tackle what would ordinarily be a WTF contender (carrot tops, parsley). The carrot tops will be turned into a soup stock ingredient and the parsley is being crisped and dried. So...the WTF vegetable of the week will actually be the more mundane bell pepper. Mostly because this week's bell peppers came in a wider variety of sizes than I have ever seen before. I literally picked out one bell pepper the size of my head and another that was smaller than my fist. You could totally make Russian dolls out of these bell peppers. Or a rather plain, red Faberge egg.

Using up CSA Share #2

Wow. I am so full of vegetables, I think I'm going to pop...

So this week has been crazy work-wise, and I don't think I'll have much time to do anything this weekend either, given that I'm going to the farm all day tomorrow, have to finish up a lot of work, and also still need to pack (eek!). Which meant I had to take care of my CSA share for the week...today.

If you recall, this week's share consisted of:
- spring onions
- 1 head of bok choy
- 1 bunch salad turnips with green tops
- 1 head of escarole
- 1 napa cabbage
- 2 stalks green garlic
- garlic scapes
- 1 bunch flat leaf parsley
- 1 head red leaf lettuce

I had about two hours to cook and eat dinner and prep my CSA share, so time was key. I tried to stick to "recipes" that required very little prep time and minimal dish/pan use.

Spring onions were easy - I just chopped them up and tossed them in the freezer. I tend to do this even with store bought onions because I rarely use more than one at a time. Plus, whenever I need green onions and don't feel like running to the store for some, I can just pull these pre-sliced green onions out of the freezer and toss them into my ramen, eggs, stir fry, etc. Super easy!

I didn't have time to blanch and freeze my greens, so I figured I might as well just eat them. I washed the bok choy and turnip greens and stored them in the fridge so I could cook them tomorrow.

The turnips I snacked on as I was cooking. They were so good! Remember my moment of turnip-insecurity earlier? I'm happy to report that my turnips were delicious. I peeled them and just sliced off pieces to munch on. They tasted like an interesting combination of persimmons and radishes. The similarity to a radish, I totally get. Turnips are a root vegetable, like radishes. But persimmons?! Yeah...I don't know. But I swear, that's kind of what they tasted like...

I chopped up my escarole and sauteed it in a pan with some olive oil, green garlic, and garlic scapes. I sprinkled some red pepper flakes and salt over the top and voila! Dinner!

The napa cabbage was super easy. I sliced it in half and microwaved it for 6-7 minutes. After it was nicely steamed, I just ate it one piece at a time with some rice and gochujang. Also dinner! Om nom nom.

I sliced up the leftover garlic green stem/leaves and tried frying them up in a pan with some garlic scapes. I wasn't sure if this was going to work, since the stem leaves were awfully tough. I had to toss out the inner core, since it was as hard as a piece of wood. After the sliced garlic stem browned slightly, I added an egg and turned the whole thing into a frittata-omelette hybrid. More dinner! Turned out really good :D

The parsley I still don't know what to do with. I tossed some chopped up parsley into my eggs and added some to the escarole, but otherwise, I still have about 3/4 of the original bunch still sitting in my fridge...

The lettuce is going to have to wait until tomorrow. Maybe I'll wash it and turn it into a salad for lunch on Monday.

All in all, not bad for two hours, right? That includes time spent washing dishes that have accumulated in my apartment over the last week...haha...

Bug watch: This week was better than last week. No caterpillars! I only encountered one (already deceased) spider in my escarole as I was rinsing it. It was really small too. Not a problem, although I did make sure to wash each escarole leaf individually after that.

CSA Share #2

This CSA run, I'm happy to report, went much more smoothly than the last one. No rain, no getting lost, got back to the office in less than 45 minutes, #winning, etc.

This week:
- 1 head of bok choy
- 1 head of escarole
- 2 stalks green garlic
- 1 bunch flat leaf parsley
- 1 napa cabbage
- 1 head red leaf lettuce
- 1 bunch salad turnips with green tops
- spring onions
- garlic scapes

I've decided to do a weekly roundup of the highlights of each share...
CWTC (can't wait to cook): This week's CWTC award goes to the turnips. For some reason, I've always been fascinated by the idea of turnips and turnip greens. I think one of my favorite books had a main character that lived off of turnips and bread for a while, but I can't really remember. It seems like the most plausible explanation for my mild obsession, considering my mom never cooked turnips. I remember really wanting to eat a turnip in high school, so I convinced my mom to buy one for me. I cooked it and took a bite, but it was awfully mushy and tasteless. Maybe it was not in season? Or maybe I cooked it wrong? Oh well, I'm still fascinated by them and very excited to cook and eat them. Fingers crossed that this attempt goes better than the last one!
WTF: parsley. What do I do with an entire bunch of parsley?!? I looked up recipes, but all I could find was parsley pesto or parsley soup, and I don't own anything that can puree parsley. :( I feel like it's just going to wilt into sad oblivion in the back of my fridge, which is a shame because it looks so fresh and lively...
TAV: The adventurous veg award this week goes to the garlic scapes. To be honest, I've actually eaten these before many, many times, but I didn't recognize them in their fresh, raw form. I've always eaten them as a Korean side dish called 마늘쫑 반찬 (maneul jjong). But seriously, these are my favorite. Even when I couldn't stand spicy food, I would fight the peppery taste just to relish the texture and taste of the garlic stems. I think I like eating stems in general, because I also like eating sweet potato stems. Hmm. But anyways, fresh garlic scapes are so cute! I'll post pictures when I get a chance.

While I was picking out my produce from the crates of vegetables, I saw another bug (a fat, snot-colored, slimy-looking caterpillar) in a head of Napa cabbage. The man in front of me, who was acccompanying his girlfriend/wife/very good friend, spotted it and amusedly said, "This stuff really is organic isn't it?" Haha...

Free Bird Farm doesn't grow organically certified veg (partly because certification is a hassle, especially for smaller scale organizations and farms), but they do note that they try to stick with organic methods as much as possible. So yes, it is essentially organic. And the sad reality is that organic veg has a higher probability of ending up with frequent live protein supplements embedded in it. Yeck.

Fortunately, I don't think I have any bugs in this particular share (though I might be sadly mistaken). I'll find out when I get around to washing my produce. I just haven't had a free minute all week (thank you work), but none of the produce will go bad in a day or two, so I don't feel too bad about leaving it to languish away in the chilly depths of my fridge.

Preview for the next post: unless I get some free time to cook, my next post will probably be about the field trip to the farm! Every year, my CSA organizes a trip out to the Free Bird Farm, where we get to meet the farmers, tour the farm, help harvest a little bit, and get to know everyone. I guess this is the most visibly "community-esque" part of the CSA experience and I'm really excited. The trip is on Sunday from 7:30am (eek!) to 7 or 8pm. It's an all day trip since the farm is located about 4 hours away by car, so it'll be quite a drive. I'm looking forward to napping the whole time. I haven't roadtripped in a while and this might be just what I need. I've been feeling really closed in and claustrophobic from all the buildings lately, so a little fresh air and countryside should help with that. Plus, I'm going home (to Arizona) in a week too, so that should help as well. YAY!