Blog

Oh, geeze… Week 3 of our CSASummer is almost over, and I still haven’t posted the rest of our creations from Week 2!

Remember when I was worried that we weren’t getting as much produce as I had hoped for? Let’s just pretend I never said that…We get more veggies on Wednesday and our fridge is still full of green bags! For those of you who wanted to know if $20 a week was worth it…IT TOTALLYIS!

Since I don’t have nearly as much time as I do produce, I don’t think I’m going to be doing a step-by-step how-to for all of these dishes…I’ll be sure to give some general directions, though. If, however, you see something you’re interested in, just post in the comments and I’ll give a more detailed description of the process!

One of my favorite things to make is Quiche. It’s easy to prep and only takes about 35 minutes in the oven. I found a general Easy Quiche recipe that I love to adapt to my ingredients, which in this instance was asparagus. We got a beautiful purple and green bunch of the stuff, so I decided to make cheddar, asparagus, and onion quiche. So, to get started, I roasted my veggies for about 7 or so minutes in olive oil and salt and pepper, just to give the cooking process a little head start.

This recipe calls for pre-made crust, which I have no shame in saying I love, and offers a great tip: Pre-bake the crust about ¾ of the way, so that the crust isn’t mushy on the bottom of the quiche. I just threw it in with the veggies to prebake. Mix all the remaining ingredients together and throw em’ in the crust.

Now all you have to do is pop it in a 375 degree oven for about 35 minutes. To check it, I stick a toothpick in the middle to make sure it’s clean. When you pull it out of the oven, the center should just be barely jiggly, as it will finish cooking as it sits.

This is great for supper, and the leftovers (if there are any) are awesome for breakfast!

I promised some creative uses for greens, didn’t I?

Now, I love salads, I do. I also enjoy sauteed greens…but I have a feeling we’ve got a few more weeks of Green abundance, and I don’t want to get sick of them. Luckily, I have found a delicious and, more importantly, versatile option.

Pesto.

There are plenty of recipes for lettuce pesto out there, and they all look great. But I decided to make up my own. The result? Local Lettuce, Basil, and Pistachio Pesto.

Ingredients?
Lettuce (Butter and Romaine to be exact)
Basil
Olive Oil
5 or so cloves of Garlic (depending on how serious of a vampire problem you have)
Salt and Pepper to taste
Parmesan Cheese
Pistachios

Roughly chop the garlic and pistachios up in the food processor first, throw in your greens and cheese a few handfuls at a time, then blend till creamy while drizzling the olive oil in through the spout.

This pesto isn’t quite as sharp as regular all-Basil pesto, but it’s still delicious, and there are so many things you can do with it. I made a quick lunch by adding pesto to some noodles and veggies, and we also made a light and flavorful pesto pizza for a stress-free dinner.

I used Pillsbury pizza dough, pre-baked it for a few minutes, and spread on some pesto. All you do after that is throw on your favorite pizza toppings, continue baking at the dough-recommended temperature, and pull it out when the crust gets golden.

Paul and I have a good time making elaborate meals, but most of the time, we appreciate the easy stuff. Hopefully you guys will find these ideas helpful, and I’d love to collect suggestions! Remember, if you’d like more details, just let me know!

It’s taken us awhile to actually get crackin’ on this week’s vegetables! Thank goodness forGreen Bags! Seriously, though. We’ve got some friends who are a little more seasoned in thisCSA business, and they suggested using Green Bags. With our first batch of veggies, we bought the bags, but didn’t think it was necessary to get them in them right away. So, we threw the veggies in the fridge, thinking, “Oh, we’re going to use them tomorrow…they’ll be fine.” And fine they were, but we’ve since found out that if you put them in green bags as soon as you get them home, they will look almsot exactly the same as you did when you first picked them up. Moral of the story: Buy the green bags.

Here’s what we got (June 1st) last week:

From left to right, that’s: Baby Bok Choi, Asparagus, Carrots, Butter Lettuce, Oak Leaf Lettuce, Fennel, and a nice salad mix.

The whole point of blogging is being honest, so I’m going to just go ahead and say it: That’s a lot of lettuce. When we first got the produce, I looked at all of those greens, and thought: “I can’t possibly eat this much salad.”

What I should have been thinking was: “Hey, self! That’s what eating in season’s all about! Let’s find some creative uses for lettuce!”

So, without further ado, here is one of the ways (other than a salad) we’ve decided to use our ample harvest of greens. I promise I’ve got a much more creative use coming…but that’s for an upcoming post.

What’s better for a summer evening than a wrap? We decided to make Panko-Breaded Chicken Strip Wraps with roasted carrots and turnips.

To start it off, I cut our CSA carrots in half; they’re not giant carrots, so they look really pretty just split in half. I then cut up some beautiful turnips I got from the Old Cheney Farmer’s Market (I forgot which vendor…I’ll find out this Sunday and add it in the comments.) into pieces that were similar in size to the carrots, and threw them in a bowl. Next, I mixed up about a Tbsp. of honey with about a Tbsp. of olive oil, a splash of water, and some salt and pepper. After it was all mixed up, I tossed the honey/oil mixture in with the veggies and swirled them around in the bowl to coat them. Finally, I laid them out flat on a baking sheet. You can go crazy trying to keep all the carrots and turnips from touching…or you can just spread ’em out and call it good.

Here comes the chicken… I’d never used Panko breadcrumbs before, but I’d watched enough Iron Chef to know that they’re awesome. So, in order to coat my chicken strips, I set up a breading station that started with seasoned flour, then a bowl of 3 eggs with a splash of milk, then a bowl of Panko. I know this sounds like a lot of steps, but it all turned out to be pretty delicious…so you should probably just trust me.

I had my lovely husband cut three chicken breasts into strips (because…well, chicken goo…), then began the dipping process. It’s pretty easy. Coat with the flour, dip in the egg, coat with Panko, lay on a baking sheet (or pizza pan covered in tin foil…do what you’ve gotta do).

Once all of the chicken and veggies were coated, I put them in a 400 degree oven for 20 minutes. You can fill this time with hugs and kisses, baby snuggles, playing with your favorite pet, or watching Ally McBeal. Or all of those at the same time. That would be pretty awesome.
Once the 20 minutes are up, take the chicken out and begin assembling your wraps. We used spinach wraps, Farmers’ Market tomatoes, red onions, a big pile of our Robinette Farms salad mix, and some garlic-and-herb mayo. Once your wraps are assembled, your veggies should be lightly golden and singing angelically to you from the oven. This was our result.

I don’t know if I need to add this, but it was delicious. So far, CSA, week two has shaped up quite nicely! Do you guys have any unconventional uses for greens? I think we’ve got another big round of them this week, too!

I have to admit that my idea to blog about our CSA adventure this summer didn’t come to me until after we had started chopping vegetables, so for this first episode, I don’t have a picture of the whole spread. Here’s what we got in our firstCSA box:

Baby Bok Choy (Chinese cabbage)
Romaine and Butter Lettuce
Spinach
Harukei Turnips (an early, Japanese variety)
Carrots
Green Garlic

It’s only our first box, and it’s already obvious that we’re going to be trying new things this summer. We kicked off the season by having a little dinner party with some super-cool friends. My usual go-to move with vegetables is to roast them in the oven with a little olive oil, salt, and pepper. It makes a yummy and healthier side dish, but we decided to do things a little differently. (I still did some veggie-roasting, but switched it up a bit.)

Inspired by the Bok Choy, we decided to go Asian. We made veggie-fried rice, using cashews, tofu, mushrooms, onions, and the CSA carrots, Bok Choy, and green garlic.

Green garlic, you say? Why, yes, I did say. I had never heard of green garlic before. Basically, it’s garlic that has been harvested before the bulb gets a chance to form cloves at the base. It’s got a great, mild garlic taste, and looks like a small onion. Not too mild, though. My fingers still smell like garlic…which I’m okay with.

Paul sauteed all the veggies first, removed them from the pan, scrambled up some eggs(if you don’t already know this, Paul is the Egg King), then threw in the rice (made beforehand) and veggies with some soy-sauce. I made a dipping sauce out of soy sauce, Sriracha, and honey to pour over the rice for some extra flavor.

To go along with our fried rice, I made some Vegetarian Hot and Sour Soup. I started out with vegetable base and water. Once it heated up, I added vinegar, soy sauce and cayenne pepper. Unfortunately, I don’t measure when I do this…let’s say a good splash of vinegar, about the same amount of soy sauce, and a few shakes of cayenne. It all depends on your taste. Before I started the soup, I chopped up carrots and turnips, tossed them in olive oil, salt, and pepper, and roasted them in the oven…then I put them in the soup along with some onion and mushroom.

I have to tell you about these turnips…I had never had a turnip before and these wereAMAZING. Let me say it one more time. AMAZING. The only way I can describe the flavor is that they tasted like a radish and a parsnip had a scandalous rendezvous, then produced beautiful, sweet, tender turnip babies… Yeah. That’s what they taste like…and they gave a great all-around flavor to the soup.

Needless to say, with the addition of some spring rolls our friends brought over, we enjoyed our dinner thoroughly.

We also got some greens: spinach, Romaine, and (I think) butter lettuce.

Do you guys remember Rapunzel? In the story, while pregnant with Rapunzel, her mother lusted after this lettuce-like herb (Rampion, or, locally, Rapunzel) in a garden behind their house. It was so delicious-looking, she decided she’d probably die if she didn’t get any.

That’s what these greens looked like to me. They ended up tasting delicious and not getting me or anyone I love thrown up into a tower, so it was pretty much a win/win situation. I’ve been having quite a few yummy salads this week for lunch:

So that was our first week in CSA-world… I would have liked to have gotten more produce than what we got this time around, but it’s early in the season. I’m sure within a few weeks we’ll have more than will fit in our apartment! One thing’s for sure: the flavors of the veggies you get in the grocery store aren’t even in the same realm as the ones we got to eat this last week, and on that front, I couldn’t be happier.

I’ll be writing again in a few days with our next round of produce!