I've been dealing with a nasty cold for the last few days, which means I haven't had the appetite for cooking or consuming vegetables. This is unfortunate, since I have so many of them piled up in my fridge.
I dutifully washed and froze all the carrot tops, celery leaves, and parsley that I thought might come in handy for soup-stock, along with a little pile of chicken bones, but that was all I had the energy for. I reheated frozen chicken soup for dinner instead, and hoped that the bones and stock ingredients would hold up for one more week in the freezer.
Times like these, I'm really glad I had the foresight to stockpile frozen Ziploc bags of chicken soup in my freezer. Homemade soup is always so much better than the canned versions.
Showing posts with label celery tops. Show all posts
Showing posts with label celery tops. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Thursday, October 4, 2012
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.
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.
Thursday, September 27, 2012
CSA Share #16
I can't keep up! But this week's haul looks particularly promising :) I'm very excited to pick it up later today!
CSA Share 16
- 1 eggplant
- 2 bell peppers
- 2 heads garlic
- 1 bunch arugula
- 1 pint salad tomatoes
- 1 bunch assorted braising greens
- 1 bunch green onions
- 1 head romaine lettuce
- 1 bunch purple carrots
- 3/4 lb yellow wax beans
- 1 bunch young celery stalks
CWTC: purple carrots! Actually, it's a tie between the purple carrots and the yellow wax beans. I have a thing for odd-colored vegetables and fruits. I don't know. Nom nom. Did you know carrots were originally purple until the Dutch bred all the purple right out of them? Yeah, me either. Someone should invent a produce trivia section on Jeopardy and Trivial Pursuit and Who Wants to be a Millionnaire,
TAV: Yellow wax beans. I'm going to try very lightly sauteeing them with a squeeze of lemon, a bit of garlic, and a dash of chili pepper flakes. That plus some nice braised greens sounds like a perfect fall weather dish to me!
WTF: Celery tops. What? Apparently, the farm's field team mistook the celery tops for parsley, and harvested them a bit early. Oops.
Oh well! I'm glad they're distributing them, instead of throwing them away. They'll make a wonderful addition to a hearty fall vegetable soup. I've been squirreling away bags of chicken stock for an occasion like this!
I think, with all the work and travel and life happenings that have been going on, that it makes more sense for me to accumulate a pile of post-season topics that I'll return to later. I'll continue to update with the weekly CSA share and interesting tidbits, but I'll save the meatier posts and the recipes for when things settle down a bit. That way, I'll have something to occupy myself with, even during the winter months when there's no fresh produce coming in.
I've been keeping a pretty decent photo log of my CSA adventures on facebook, so hopefully that will help. And I'll try to go back and retroactively post all my lovely pictures in this blog during the post-growing season as well. In the meantime...I will fight off this nasty little stomach bug and the aftereffects of my flu vaccine! Rawr!
It seems frosty weather has begun to nip at our heels. Free Bird Farm reported the first Jack Frost visitations and have wrapped up the summer vegetable patch. No more eggplant, tomatoes, or bell peppers for us. That's okay with me, I think I've eaten more eggplant and bell peppers than I ever thought I could in the past few months. I hope we get potatoes and more garlic!
I've noticed another upside of seasonal eating. Vegetables ripen just when they start to look appealing and appetizing. For example, I wouldn't want a lot of potatoes and heavy collard greens or escarole, winter squash, and chili peppers in the dead middle of a hot and humid summer. Shudder. I'd have to turn my oven on. >.<
Neither would I want light salad greens, tomatoes, and cucumbers when chilly fall evenings start to creep into the Northeast. I want something more substantial, with more depth and smoke and body. But boy, does a refreshing salad sound delicious in the summer! And on a crisp, cool autumn evening, a hearty dish of roasted sweet potatoes, sauteed beans, and sturdy bitter greens cooked with garlic and a bit of fried pork sounds like absolute heaven. Preferably eaten while wrapped up in a warm, cozy sweater or a fleece blanket. See what I mean? Yum yum.
Side note: I WANT A FRUIT SHARE T___T. This week, Maynard Farms is distributing Chardonnay grapes and the last of the summer watermelon. I die.
Apparently, these are very sweet grapes with 24% sugar content, that can be eaten right out of hand. To reiterate, T___________T.
Next year...I am going to sign up for chickens, eggs, and fruit. I can eat the light veggies and eggs during the summer and cook/freeze up the leftovers in soup for winter. The chickens come pre-frozen, so I can just store them away in the freezer until the winter, and then I can make all sorts of lovely dishes. A whole roast chicken on a cold, snowy December night sounds brilliant. I'll have to think about this a little more and check the past few growing seasons to see if this is feasible, but if I'm careful, I may be able to stretch out a full CSA share over a good portion of the year. Hmm...
CSA Share 16
- 1 eggplant
- 2 bell peppers
- 2 heads garlic
- 1 bunch arugula
- 1 pint salad tomatoes
- 1 bunch assorted braising greens
- 1 bunch green onions
- 1 head romaine lettuce
- 1 bunch purple carrots
- 3/4 lb yellow wax beans
- 1 bunch young celery stalks
CWTC: purple carrots! Actually, it's a tie between the purple carrots and the yellow wax beans. I have a thing for odd-colored vegetables and fruits. I don't know. Nom nom. Did you know carrots were originally purple until the Dutch bred all the purple right out of them? Yeah, me either. Someone should invent a produce trivia section on Jeopardy and Trivial Pursuit and Who Wants to be a Millionnaire,
TAV: Yellow wax beans. I'm going to try very lightly sauteeing them with a squeeze of lemon, a bit of garlic, and a dash of chili pepper flakes. That plus some nice braised greens sounds like a perfect fall weather dish to me!
WTF: Celery tops. What? Apparently, the farm's field team mistook the celery tops for parsley, and harvested them a bit early. Oops.
Oh well! I'm glad they're distributing them, instead of throwing them away. They'll make a wonderful addition to a hearty fall vegetable soup. I've been squirreling away bags of chicken stock for an occasion like this!
I think, with all the work and travel and life happenings that have been going on, that it makes more sense for me to accumulate a pile of post-season topics that I'll return to later. I'll continue to update with the weekly CSA share and interesting tidbits, but I'll save the meatier posts and the recipes for when things settle down a bit. That way, I'll have something to occupy myself with, even during the winter months when there's no fresh produce coming in.
I've been keeping a pretty decent photo log of my CSA adventures on facebook, so hopefully that will help. And I'll try to go back and retroactively post all my lovely pictures in this blog during the post-growing season as well. In the meantime...I will fight off this nasty little stomach bug and the aftereffects of my flu vaccine! Rawr!
It seems frosty weather has begun to nip at our heels. Free Bird Farm reported the first Jack Frost visitations and have wrapped up the summer vegetable patch. No more eggplant, tomatoes, or bell peppers for us. That's okay with me, I think I've eaten more eggplant and bell peppers than I ever thought I could in the past few months. I hope we get potatoes and more garlic!
I've noticed another upside of seasonal eating. Vegetables ripen just when they start to look appealing and appetizing. For example, I wouldn't want a lot of potatoes and heavy collard greens or escarole, winter squash, and chili peppers in the dead middle of a hot and humid summer. Shudder. I'd have to turn my oven on. >.<
Neither would I want light salad greens, tomatoes, and cucumbers when chilly fall evenings start to creep into the Northeast. I want something more substantial, with more depth and smoke and body. But boy, does a refreshing salad sound delicious in the summer! And on a crisp, cool autumn evening, a hearty dish of roasted sweet potatoes, sauteed beans, and sturdy bitter greens cooked with garlic and a bit of fried pork sounds like absolute heaven. Preferably eaten while wrapped up in a warm, cozy sweater or a fleece blanket. See what I mean? Yum yum.
Side note: I WANT A FRUIT SHARE T___T. This week, Maynard Farms is distributing Chardonnay grapes and the last of the summer watermelon. I die.
Apparently, these are very sweet grapes with 24% sugar content, that can be eaten right out of hand. To reiterate, T___________T.
Next year...I am going to sign up for chickens, eggs, and fruit. I can eat the light veggies and eggs during the summer and cook/freeze up the leftovers in soup for winter. The chickens come pre-frozen, so I can just store them away in the freezer until the winter, and then I can make all sorts of lovely dishes. A whole roast chicken on a cold, snowy December night sounds brilliant. I'll have to think about this a little more and check the past few growing seasons to see if this is feasible, but if I'm careful, I may be able to stretch out a full CSA share over a good portion of the year. Hmm...
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