CSA Weeks 7, 8, 9

Lordy, August really got the best of me. It feels like that month slipped by me and took the rest of summer with it. Two things teamed up to help August sneak past: we had houseguests for a week, and then Jeff and I went back to Hawaii for vacation for 10 days. Life back home is obviously vastly different from the daily grind here in New York. That fact, coupled with mindbogglingly, legcrampingly long flights, makes trips to Hawaii seem like strange ruptures in time. Once again settled into a pretty dull work routine in New York, I can hardly believe that I was hiking along gorgeous ridgelines in the middle of the Pacific less than three weeks ago. My body voiced its unhappiness by promptly getting sick upon its return to the East Coast. The one factor about life in New York that brought me hope of sanity was our lovely CSA. With glowing produce like this, I might just make it.

Week 7

I worked another shift this week, so got a little bit of excess loot at the end. I really do love this CSA setup.

Green Beans, Potatoes, and Apricots... Oh My!

I think the best way to eat green beans is just barely blanched or steamed so that they are a slightly brighter green, retaining a shocking amount of crunch, and then dabbed with good butter and sprinkled with salt. We ate them in precisely this fashion.

The potatoes also enjoyed simple preparations. I boiled them all, but picked out the little guys for more skillet smashed potatoes--this time spiced up with a healthy amount of Old Bay (see comment #1 from yours truly). The larger tubers went with the just barely visible chard into (Modified) Kale Olive Oil Mashed Potatoes. We made this dish, realized we were late for a surprise party, packed it up into some tupperware and brought it with us on the train! Despite the fact that people find it strange when you bring your own food, the other partygoers were quite jealous. For good reason: this recipe is killer.

Chard, close relative of bok choi, red romaine, two cucumbers,

two heads fresh garlic, five onions, two cabbages

The best way to tackle the monstrous amount of produce we get from our CSA is to eat the dainty things first, and let the hardy root vegetables, alliums and cruciferous delights wait until I can figure out what to do with them. Thus, we ate a quick salad of red romaine and vinaigrette on pickup night and let the cukes and cabbages sit around a bit.

I don't know what this pretty thing is called, but it's like a slightly tougher, more bitter-in-a-healthy-tasting-way bok choi. I sliced the stalks into thin rounds to avoid an unpleasantly fibrous meal and chiffonaded (French for "ribbonate," to make into ribbons) the leaves. Steamed with a little bit of oyster sauce, it was very tasty.

We ate about half of the apricots straight up and then I churned the rest into apricot sorbet which was, in a word, delightful. In three words, distillation of summer.

Week 8

Two more cucumbers, three ears corn, Chinese cabbage, kale, green leaf lettuce,

two zucchinis, long eggplant, peaches, and tomatoes

Terribly unflattering light in my kitchen free of charge.

Of course, we had a light salad with the soft buttery green leaf lettuce. The Chinese cabbage augmented the ever-popular, oft-requested fried rice. Cucumbers... um sat around again.

I like to eat, eat, eat peaches and tomatoes

We made zucchini-corn fritters. They were fun and tasty, if a little crumbly. FYI, do not attempt to make fritters the size of dinner plates. These are frankly unflippable.

With just three tomatoes in our share this week (Jeff had already eaten his little golden tomato when this photo was taken), we wanted to savor every bit of tomatoeyness we could. So rather than muddy them in a cooked presentation, we sliced them up, drizzled a tiny bit of good olive oil over them, and gave them a pinch of gray sea salt. That was just the ticket.

Week 9

wax beans, more onions, gargantuan broccoli, more peaches, basil, kale, lettuce, cucumbers (!), garlic

We had two days to eat or store this produce before our trip to Hawaii. I took 2/3 of the peaches to a dinner party to give away and/or slice into absurdly strong peach martinis. Wax beans got sauteed with garlic slices and immediately devoured. The night before our flight, we had a salad with the lettuce, made kale chips, and cooked the almost forgotten cabbages from two weeks prior into "coco cabbage." I frantically froze the cooked cabbage, hoping that a short life in the freezer would mean that it would not be disgusting and slimy when I reheated it. I also steamed the broccoli trees and Jeff packed them into tupperware. We brought them on the plane along with our two tomatoes, a log of New York state goat cheese, a half roll of ritz crackers and approximately 7 peaches. We ate all this during our layover in Houston and got stares usually reserved for the deranged. That may have had something to do with me standing in line to board the plane cradling my tomato and having Jeff goad "eat it. yeah. tomato, eat it."