Real Life CSA: week 22

A week of good, solid standards, plus an eggplant that's almost literally the size of my head. Week 22, here we go!

I'm not surprised to see apples from Kistaco Farm, since Whole Foods was also advertising the first apples of the season from Dawson's Orchards. We'll probably eat these as snacks, like we've been doing with most fruit this season. There will be time for apple crisps and apple chutneys when we're about dang sick of apples in March.

OK, let's talk about this eggplant. I mean, seriously. I actually laughed out loud when I opened my box and found this guy. I should have put something next to it to really give you an idea of how big it is, but let's just go with roughly almost my head. Mark's got baba ganoush plans for it. Probably enough baba for an army.

The sweet corn might be made into a Chipotle knock-off salsa with poblano peppers from our garden. I was going to make it last weekend with the last corn we had, but I ran out of time with tomatoes and used that corn to make the fritters for these monstrosities. (Verdict - delicious, but just a lot of burger, thus a calorie bomb. Excuse me while I go run 10 miles.)

You probably think I'm sick of tomatoes, and well, I kind of am. Just sick of looking at them all over my house, not eating them. And I can't help but admire how lovely these guys are. I made fresh vodka sauce for pasta last night with some of our fresh tomatoes, and it's given me more confidence about making sauces that usually call for canned tomatoes with fresh ones. (I'm not a recipe rule breaker, typically.) So maybe we'll have a rainbow tomato pasta this week.

The carmen peppers are sweet, so they might end up on salads. Though I wonder since these guys are pretty solid, if they might not make good stuffing peppers - like the way you stuff hot wax ones. Either way, peppers always find a home at our house, because if nothing else, you dump them on pizza. And I'm always ready for that.

It's ironic that we have zucchini this week - two beautiful ones at that - because at the Penn's Corner member event at Wigle Whiskey last week, we sampled the Penn's Corner hot pepper jelly on top of a zucchini cranberry bread and were amazed at how good the combination was. Mark remarked to someone that we needed to get more zucchini in our CSA so we could do that at home, and behold - zucchini! I see zucchini cranberry bread in our future.

Leeks are easy to use too, since they can be a good base in a ton of dishes. I'm thinking potato leek soup though, since we haven't had that in a long time and we have some potatoes hanging around.

I'm also really happy to see this argula. Being a regular salad eater, I love fresh salad greens and never get sick of seeing them in our box. I love arugula because it has a kick and you can't miss it when it shows up in a bite.

What's going on in your CSA? Stay tuned next week when I'll give you some resources for considering a winter share (even if you don't want to think about "winter" yet).

Real Life CSA: week 21

If our pickup wasn't in public, at the Children's Museum, I would definitely have yelled GROUND CHERRIES! in an Oprah voice when I opened my box. 

Somehow, 21 weeks into the share, we're still getting new stuff. Never ceases to amaze me. This week? Ground cherries!

I should have taken a picture of these buddies outside of their husks, but they look like tiny yellow bulbs. I think they taste like a cross between a sweet cherry and a tomato. I don't see them for sale anywhere in regular grocery stores, so I'm excited to get some in the share. I will likely pick one of the recipes from this "Five Ways to Eat Ground Cherries" article that they linked to in our weekly Penn's Corner blog post. 

This kale is already in small pieces, so I'm thinking of experimenting with mixing it in to salad greens. I usually find it too bitter, but this might be a new way for me to eat it. 

Speaking of salad. I must have been rough packing my tote bag with my share because one of the ripe heirloom tomatoes split open on the way home. No worries, because we needed tomato for salads we were making anyway, so we just used that one. And we have a bit of a tomato situation going on in our house right now anyway.  

Onions will go in storage with our others to be used in any given recipe. I do like having a stock of them at all times, so this just adds to it. Yellow beans will probably be a side dish of some kind, though we might end up with a veggie side dish buffet some night to use up a stockpile of extra items. Actually, that's not a bad idea. Why don't we do more buffets for regular dinners?

I'm happy to get some sweet peppers, because right now we have an abundance of hot. Though I've never seen such tiny sweet peppers. Typically, if a pepper isn't a traditional bell pepper, I wear gloves initially until I can taste it because I've been burned way too much by hot peppers masquerading as sweet to take chances.

The sun sugar tomatoes will probably be a snack, since I don't have enough to bother preserving and they taste so great anyway. They taste like summer, and that's fading fast. (Though not the weather - where is this heat and humidity coming from? Give me back my 55 degree running mornings!)

And last but not least, we have these carrots. For salad toppings and crunchy pizza side dishes, most likely. But I love that they come with the tops. Makes me feel like Bugs Bunny.

I've also got to mention the fun member party that Penn's Corner threw in cooperation with Wigle Whiskey last evening at Wigle's Barrel House/Whiskey Garden on Spring Garden Ave. in the North Side. Pittsburgh, if you haven't been there yet, get yourself there stat. 

We got to sample the cocktail from Wigle's September cocktail share. They have their own CSA - community supported alcohol - and one of the share options is to get all the fixings for a month's worth of cocktails. The Florodora had a fun name and was delish.

The one with the raspberry and lime below is the Florodora. The other one is Mark's, which had a cute name, but was white whiskey, lemon and earl grey tea, which is his jam. We also got to sample an experimental whiskey that's part of their experimental share.

We also had catering from Sweet Peaches using Penn's Corner ingredients. On the left is short ribs braised in smoked tomato sauce, and on the right is pork and beef kielbasa with kraut. Mark and I both had the "where have you been all my life" feeling while eating this stuff. 

I was thrilled to discover Sweet Peaches does not just catering, but BRUNCH in their Allentown location. (The Pittsburgh neighborhood, not Allentown, Pa.) Going to be checking that out for sure. Sweet Peaches also made some tasting items using other Penn's Corner products - the value-added ones that they can and process. We had rhubarb squares and a delicious zucchini cranberry bread with hot pepper jelly on it. Mark tried an egg salad made with dilly beans that he said was phenomenal as well. All in all, our stomachs were very happy. 

We even got to sign up for our winter share, since we've decided to stick with Penn's Corner. I know it's hard to think about December right now, but there's more info here. We have nothing but great things to say about our CSA, if you haven't noticed, so definitely give it some consideration!   

Real Life CSA: week 20

Here we are, 5 months into our 32-week Farmers Friend share, and we're still getting new items. At the moment, our kitchen island is being overrun by ripe tomatoes from our own garden, so you can see those peeking into the hurried shot I took last night, but here's what we're looking at this week.

Still happy to be getting any peaches at all this year, after our hard winter in this area wiped out most farms' crops. I still haven't baked or made anything special with any fruit we've had this year. Somehow it's just too good to eat on its own.

I was happy to find a bag of salsa mix this week that had tomatillos in it. (The jalapenos came bundled with the tomatillos, but I separated them since I will likely not use them together.) These will likely be made into more simmer sauce, like our first batch of tomatillos, since that was so successful. Since these aren't readily available all year, and when they are out of season, they are expensive, I want to take the time to have that same delicious meal a second time this summer.

We still haven't roasted the last kohlrabi we got, so this lovely new purple bunch will probably give us the impetus to do it this week. I guess for some reason I look at root vegetables like a fall and winter thing, so it's hard for me to face that that season is actually approaching.

I'm not sure what we'll end up doing with corn this week, since our own corn is just about ready to pick too. I've wanted to make a copycat Chipotle corn salsa since I saw a recipe in a magazine a million years ago, so perhaps that will happen with the jalapenos from this week's share.

Savoy cabbage makes me think either an Asian dish, or a mango slaw that we typically make as an accompaniment with rice and sea bass (baramundi). I also like that this head is a good size, but it's not the size of two soccer balls put together. I get overwhelmed when we have huge heads of cabbage that need to be made into more than one meal. Maybe I can only think of one recipe at a time? 

Sun sugar tomatoes will be a lunchtime snack again. I can't bear to cook with them, they're so sweet and delicious. As for the juliette tomatoes, we will likely preserve them in some way - whether that be frozen or made into fresh sauce to either eat or freeze. We are trying to stem the tide of the onslaught of tomatoes right now and hope to can some whole tomatoes still this summer, but these little ones are great to freeze if you can't eat them in time. Their skins pop right off after a dip in boiling water and a shock in some ice water!

Arugula will be either mixed in with salad greens or put in a pasta salad that I often make for picnics that is delicious. Though I can't remember the last time I went to a picnic, so to say that seems misleading. Wait, I take it back. I had a fake picnic with my niece last night. When we asked her what goes great at a picnic, she said, matter of factly, "Bobo." Which is me. So I'm great at picnics, even without the pasta salad! I digress.

Last but not least this week, is my favorite new item - baby eggplant. We don't eat eggplant very often, so I will probably need to look up the best way to use these little guys. But at the very least, they look like they'd make nice little medallions for ratatouille or eggplant parmesan (with fresh tomato sauce, heh).

What's in your CSA this week? Those of you who are first-time CSA subscribers, are you liking your peak of season items?

Real Life CSA: week 19

Another haul this week, with tons of staples, a for real baby carrot and my current vegetable arch nemesis.

Beets are going to a good home, since they are the one vegetable whose train we cannot get on. But at least we know people who like them, so they don't go to waste and we get to share. 

The potatoes will hang out in our basement with other potatoes, as we're still eating up previous stashes. Thankfully potatoes have a relatively long storage life in the right conditions.

The carrots will be eaten in salad and probably raw with pizza. (Mark likes to eat carrots as a side with pizza. We go with it.) This tiny actual for real baby carrot is my favorite thing this week. Look how stinking cute that thing is. 

I was thinking of making a corn and poblano chowder with this corn, though it's also tempting to just eat it on the cob since after all, it's still summer.

After the weekend of swiss chard harvesting, we don't have any ready to eat in our garden, so this lovely, delicate chard will probably be a side dish.

Peaches will be eaten straight up. I love how peaches straight from a farm still have their perfect peach smell. I swear grocery store peaches usually have no smell at all, or they smell so sickly sweet you know they're two seconds from rot. 

And as for the lovely tomatoes, I'm thinking fresh salsa, also incorporating the red onion and my arch nemesis: hot peppers.

It took more than 2 days and a super sweaty krav maga class for all of the pepper oil to leech out of my hands after Sunday's pepper freezing adventure. So I kept these in the bag and need to get to the store to get some sort of hazmat suit to deal with them. (OK, probably nitrile or plastic dish gloves, but humor me.)

But I do want to make crockpot chalupas this week (the idea brought on by a Taco Bell craving, and since you won't get me within 10 feet of a Taco Bell, I satisfy the craving at home). So a fresh salsa might go nicely with that.

We also have about 7 very large red tomatoes from our own garden (one of which you can see peeking out in the camera frame in the first photo). Mark will likely make those into fresh tomato sauce.

Lots going on here at the end of summer - how about you? What are you making? How are you keeping up on your shares?

Real Life CSA: week 18

Another haul this week, with some of my favorites - and nature's sugar everywhere.

We're holding our own right now, keeping up with the produce coming in and trying to incorporate it into as many meals as possible, and preserve it when necessary. 

It's easy to get frustrated when you're dealing with an onslaught of produce, but I try to remind myself that it won't be too long before the ground is frozen and I'm both grateful for the time spent canning and longing for the spring to come again.

I love getting garlic and onions in the CSA, since they always taste so good and store well. Though to be honest, they don't last long in our house anyway because we cook so much and they are staple ingredients in most dishes.

This watermelon and the nectarines will just be eaten straight up. Typically in the summers I like to make things with fruit - like berry muffins and stone fruit crisps and jams. But this year, I've just wanted to eat it plain. I don't want to mask the flavors with extra sugar and grains. 

I'm thinking maybe a bolognese sauce of some type with the celery this time. I've been wanting some hearty red sauce for pasta and bolognese is one of my favorites. I saw parsley and thought I'll use up some previous weeks' red potatoes and do a standard boiled parsley potatoes side dish.

This kohlrabi looks awesome, and I love the colors and shapes. I get a kick out of the endless variety of nature, if you hadn't noticed. I think Kohlrabi would also be an awesome band name. Someone get on that. As for these two, I think we'll likely roast them.

Cucumbers will probably go on salads - we've certainly seen enough of them around our house this year. Same goes for green beans. I'm on green bean overload at the moment, but hopefully these will stay fine for a few more days so I can develop a desire to eat them again. 

Last but not least are these sun gold tomatoes, which I lovingly refer to as crack. I impulse bought them at my last Penn's Corner Farm Stand pickup, and am excited to get this pint. (Plus I ordered two more from the farm stand. Gotta feed the habit.) They are so sweet - they taste like candy. I eat them like candy, too. Makes me realize how much more fulfilling it is to satisfy a sweet tooth with nature's sugar instead of a candy bar. 

What's in your CSA this week? What are you cooking? Do tell!

Real Life CSA: week 17

Lots of new stuff this week - more and more flavors of summer are showing up, and our kitchen is overflowing!

I've said it before, but I'll say it again. The variety we get with our Penn's Corner CSA has been fantastic. It hasn't allowed me to be sick of any one item, and it really gives us variety in our meals. I know people who eat the same things all the time - like literally the same lunch every day of their lives - and that is just not me. At all. Thankfully this CSA doesn't let you get in a rut with your cooking.

I've also started this week just making up some vegetable side dishes to have as snacks or extras to accompany my lunches at work. You don't have to make a fancy dish to get those veggies in. I bought a pint of golden cherry tomatoes from the Penn's Corner Farm Stand when I picked up my order of Crack (bread and butter jalapenos and honey puffed corn from Clarion River Organics). I ate half the tomatoes as a post-krav maga workout dinner and the other half pint as a snack the next day. Best impulse buy ever (so thanks, Penn's Corner lady who suggested them). 

So let's get to the goods.

When I saw the tomatillos, my first thought was salsa. But because we get such great tomatillo salsa through the winter from the Penn's Corner value added products, I thought I'd look up something else. So we will likely make a tomatillo simmer sauce from Marisa McClellan's Preserving By the Pint cookbook, which is for small-batch canning. Perfect for CSA amounts of vegetables. (Also, I met her at the Pittsburgh Canning Exchange's Rhubarb Social and she's lovely. Check out her other cookbooks if you're interested in canning, or her great website, Food in Jars.)

Lettuce will be the tried and true salad base for this week. Green peppers will likely go on salad, but since we have an abundance of peppers in our house right now from our own garden, my grandparents' garden and the CSA, I might have to figure out another option for those.

These peaches are a welcome treat, since peaches in western PA mostly didn't survive the winter. These peaches were obtained from a farm in West Virginia through the CSA, so I am grateful for them, fuzz and all. Speaking of which - do you eat the fuzz on peaches? I am a lover of the fuzz, but Mark hates it. 

We're going to try something new and make jalapeno poppers - complete with oozy cheese and probably bacon - with this bag of giant ones. We typically don't make junk food out of our vegetables, but there's a first time for everything right?

As for the baby beets, they will be finding a new home, because they are pretty much the only vegetables we just don't dig. Thankfully we know people who love them, so they don't go to waste.

The potatoes will be a side of some sort. I've been craving roasted potatoes with crisp skin for a bit, so I need to make that happen.

Last but not least, these leeks. Which are already gone. I made Mark Bittman's recipe for Chicken Not Pie from the Runners World cookbook last night for dinner. Great recipe to use up whatever vegetables you have around and the leeks really give it good flavor. I threw in some corn that we had and almost dumped green beans in too, but the pan was getting a little crowded. Pro tip if you make the recipe - add more seasoning than it calls for. A pinch of thyme isn't enough by far.

What's going on with your CSA? What are you making? 

Real Life CSA: week 16

Continuing the trend of super full CSA shares, week 16 did not disappoint. We got so much this week that I had to get out a Star Wars dry erase board and start taking inventory of what we have and how we're going to use it, especially since we're getting another load of produce from my grandparents' garden this week.

Corn and zucchini will definitely be made into this delicious looking Sweet Corn, Zucchini and Fresh Mozzarella pizza from How Sweet It Is (a local food blog - check it out!). Mark's been experimenting with making pizza dough using his sourdough starter, so we'll likely use his crust. Have I ever mentioned how amazing Mark's homemade pizza is? Honestly, with the exception of Beto's on Banksville, it's probably my favorite pizza ever. (And Beto's is only up there because of the unconscionable amounts of cheese.)

I saw these red onions and immediately thought salsa, since we are getting peppers in our own garden. They have a lovely, vibrant purple color.  

Cucumbers will be salad toppings and also refrigerator pickles this weekend. I have something like 13 cucumbers in the fridge right now, and I'm hoping they can hold on until I have 2 consecutive, uninterrupted hours to deal with them. 

Blueberries will just be eaten by the handful, because we're classy like that.

Mark wants to make fried green tomatoes with our green tomatoes, since he's never had them before. Come to think of it, I haven't either. Anyone have a good recipe? 

At first I thought these guys were some sort of pea, but upon closer inspection realized they were beans - roma beans to be exact. Penn's Corner linked to a recipe for braised roma beans that sounds delicious. I saw "red chili flakes" in the ingredient list and I was IN.

With this being the second bunch of kale in my fridge right now, it's time to use it up. We enjoyed the zuppa toscana so much a few weeks ago that I might make it again, since we also still have a little bit of Clarion River sausage left.

New this week was celery, which I thought actually was the first appetizing looking celery I've seen in, well, ever. We're not usually celery people and only eat it when it's part of a mirepoix or some larger dish, but I'm going to be honest. I am kind of tempted to make ants on a log with these, like I'm back in elementary school with a Care Bears cookbook. (Yep, we had one of those growing up. I still have it somewhere, I believe. It would make an interesting experiment to see if I can use CSA ingredients with Care Bears recipes...)

Is your fridge filled with produce right now? What do you have cooking?

Real Life CSA dinner: swiss chard tacos

I mentioned in last week's Real Life CSA post that I was thinking of making Rick Bayless' swiss chard tacos for dinner this week. I finally did - and got to use not only swiss chard from our garden, but the last of the CSA chard as well as the fresh garlic.

You could also use kale, collards or chard - or any green, really. I used chard because we had a lot, and it's my favorite.

This fresh garlic was great. I have never cooked with fresh garden garlic that hasn't been cured. It was actually easier to peel and work with than the cured stuff. I hope this comes up again in the CSA!

One of the parts of these tacos is a simple hot sauce, made by blistering cherry tomatoes in a dry skillet and then blending them in a food processor with some chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. I added an extra pepper, and hoo boy, was it spicy. We have some leftover, which will make a tasty hot sauce for other dishes as well. Also, observation: my stovetop REALLY needs to be cleaned.

Before you cook the chard, you cook down the garlic, onions and some red pepper flakes.

Once you add the chard, it reduces pretty quickly. I add greens in batches when I need to cook a lot, so it's easier to stir. I also kept the stems in because they are delicious and not at all chewy.

This filling, plus some hot sauce, some feta cheese (or queso fresco) and a tortilla is a delicious, easy dinner. I will be taking leftovers of it in my lunch over rice - another great way to eat Bayless taco recipes. (Try this zucchini one - it's fabulous.)

Delicious food - probably the best part of a Real Life CSA!

Real Life CSA: week 15

The first word I think of when I consider this week's share is HAUL - a big share this week, with lots of the basics.

At the moment, we have beans coming out our ears. Not only do we have this produce coming in, but we have bags of produce from my family's garden that isn't quite enough for canning but is a lot for my fridge. I might make a summer salad with the extra beans, and possibly freeze the rest.

New this week is basil, which made my car pretty fragrant yesterday. Fresh basil is delish, and since mine is still only barely surviving after the great scorch of 2014, this will be a welcome addition. Of course there's a million ways to use basil, but my favorite is pasta. (Let's be honest, my favorite is always pasta.)

Carrots, cucumbers and lettuce will be salad elements, like usual. We also have an abundance of cucumbers, but I'm planning on making a batch of refrigerator pickles to use some of them up. 

Swiss chard is typically a side dish in our house because I adore it. Probably my favorite green and one of my favorite vegetables. But this week, since we have some in the CSA and some coming up in the garden, I am up for trying something new. Probably these Rick Bayless tacos. (We are big Rick Bayless fans in this house. His enchilada sauce is amazeballs.) That recipe can also be used for kale and collards, if you have an excess of those!

But meanwhile, enjoy the lovely colors.

Blueberries will be eaten straight, and likely right away. Berries never sit long in this house. The onions will hang out and be ingredients in various dishes. Before I started cooking, I never dreamed I'd be the type of person who always had onions and garlic in the house, ready for cooking. 

Speaking of garlic, we got a head this week of fresh garlic. Because it hasn't been cured (like the garlic you'd get in the store), it needs to be refrigerated. It doesn't store as long as cured garlic, but it stores long enough for it to be used up this week in various preparations.

Zucchini will join more zucchini from my family as well as some yellow squash for a lot of roasting - most of it in foil packets over a camp fire (!) I also found this recipe yesterday that Smitten Kitchen just posted for a zucchini and squash gratin, which looks fantastic and will likely be made next week if we continue to have an abundance of them.

Potatoes will likely be a side - maybe even par-boiled and grilled? At least with potatoes, the possibilities are endless!

What's in your CSA this week? Any good recipes to share?

Real Life CSA: week 14

Once strawberry season has passed us by, the next best thing is blueberry season. And guess what we got this week? A pint!

The berries are from Dawson's Orchard, which also has a stall at our farmer's market. We get peaches from them every year, but sadly they lost their crop this season because of the harsh winter we had. I'm glad they still have blueberries! 

These will likely get eaten straight up - they're that good. Don't get me wrong, I love fruit IN things, like blueberry pancakes or cobblers. But sometimes I just love fruit for itself.

Cucumbers will be salad toppings this week, and might even be a snack, since I find cold, crisp cucumbers to be really refreshing. The onions go in everything - we never have a problem using them up, since they are the base of a lot of recipes.

This cheese. I have no idea what it will taste like, but it's called Temptation, so I'm assuming once we open it, we won't want to stop eating?

Parsley will likely end up in some dish - I often keep the fresh herbs in the fridge to pull from before I take from my outdoor pots (which is a good thing considering some of my herbs croaked).

I made a delicious version of zuppa toscana this week from last week's kale, thanks to recipe from my friend T who discovered the recipe after getting kale in her own CSA. It was so delicious and it made great leftovers. I'm pretty sure I was the envy of my office with the smell coming out of the microwave. That will definitely be put on the rotation.

As for this week, perhaps another soup - possibly the one that SOLE for the Soul left in the comments last week - miso soup with tofu and kale.

I'm no stranger to wax beans because my grandparents grow them and we typically can from their crop every year. But these little guys will make a good side dish this week.

What's in your CSA? Any recipes to share?