My Seventh Communitty Supported Agriculture (CSA) Box - What I Got

I picked up my produce box at Teter Organic Farm, and on the way home, it started to rain - a real frog strangler!  I was glad I got my stuff loaded into the car before all THAT started.  We've had a lot of rain the past few days, and I'm tired of it - UGH.

So this week, we got some mixed salad greens (two bags!), some assorted small sweet peppers, more new potatoes (YAY!), slicer tomatoes, cherry tomatoes (I didn't take any since I'm not a fan), beets (double-YAY!), and some bonus bell peppers.

I'm looking forward to making wilted lettuce again - break out the bacon!!!  And more roasted potatoes.  Or, I have a recipe to try for roasted chicken breasts, potatoes, and carrots that sounds REALLY good.

And the beets - one of my favorites.  I'm afraid that when I cook these, they'll bleed all over the place and look pale and washed out.  To prevent that, you're supposed to leave a couple of inches of the stems on, but alas, there are no stems on these lovelies.  Maybe roasted they won't do that.  I'll need to do some research!

This is also the first week of  EGG SHARES!  For the next eight weeks, I'll pick up a dozen eggs every other week.  The new chickens have finally started to lay, so now we can not only provide eggs to families who attend the free Thursday night dinners at the church and donate eggs to a local food pantry, but we can sell shares.  The idea is for the shares to cover the costs of keeping the chickens, making them a sustainable part of the farm.  Of course, I'm super excited to get my paws on some "fruit of hen" because I help care for the lovely ladies.  Some of their eggs are beyond jumbo, so it will be fun to watch for double yolks!

My Fifth CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) Box - What I Got

Here's this week's haul from Teter Organic Farm!

Slicing tomatoes, onions, assorted sweet peppers, carrots, cherry tomatoes (traded for an additional slicer), and (wait for it)...NEW POTATOES!

I am SO EXCITED for the potatoes!  I will probably do something wonderful with them tomorrow - maybe roasted...YUM.

I still have so many onions that I'm going to chop them all up and freeze them.  I use a lot of chopped onions when I cook, but right now, I'm not cooking much because it's hot outside, and raw onions and I don't see eye to eye most of the time.  So, they will be chopped up and put in cold storage.  Sounds like Mafia hit to me.

I also have an abundance of tomatoes from my CSA boxes, PLUS my backyard tomato plants are on the verge of ripening.  There are boatloads of huge green tomatoes, but three of them have started to get a little blush to them.

You know what that means.

Soon those plants will bury me in mountains of tomato-ey goodness.  I've already been eating tomato sandwiches and Caprese salads (watch for them to be featured on upcoming Wednesdays), but I won't be able to keep up just by doing that.

Most of them will end up canned.  Tomatoes are easy to can, and they are pretty in the jars - like red jewels on the shelf.  I sometimes have a hard time bringing myself to open them because it seems such a shame to spoil the display, but I manage to overcome my aesthetic sense, raid the larder, and actually USE THEM.

I'll give some away, too.  I've already had a couple of requests, so...!

How do you use up a bumper crop of tomatoes?  Let me know in the Comments!

My Second Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) Box - What I Got

I neglected to take a picture of my second CSA box - sorry!

This time I got scallions, more zucchini, spring onions, cherry tomatoes, roma tomatoes, and cucumbers.  I passed on kale (traded for extra zucchini and roma tomatoes) because I still had some left from the previous box.

I sliced up the largest of the tomatoes for bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches.  I made zucchini bread (YUM).  I sliced up the cucumbers, chopped up the largest onion, and made refrigerator pickles.  We ate some of the cherry tomatoes with a meal as a salad.  Another roma tomato was chopped up for burrito garnish.   I made wilted lettuce again, using some of the scallions, chopped kale from the first CSA box, and store-bought lettuce.  The rest of the tomatoes and some basil went toward caprese salad, one of my favorite summer treats.

I expect I'll roast zucchini again - there's so much of it - LOL!  And I'll probably make ratatouille, since I haven't, yet, from the CSA zucchinis.  Maybe some pickles, too.

It's been fun so far!  I'm looking forward to the next installment this week.

My First Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) Box - What I Got

A couple of weeks ago, I picked up my first installment of the church's organic farm's CSA!!!  The box included radishes, kohlrabi, scallions, kale, pac choi, lettuce (Bibb or leaf), zucchini, and herbs (thyme, sage, chives, and lavender).  Everybody gets a box to use for the entire summer.  You sign in, look at any recipes that might be available, try any samples put out, then start down the line.

Each item has a sign indicating how much you are allotted.  So, I could get one bunch of radishes, four kohlrabies, 0.3 pound of scallions, two bunches of kale, three bunches of pac choi, two bunches/heads of lettuce, 2.5 pounds of zucchini, and whatever herbs you wanted to snip.  At the end of the line, you could dump stuff you don’t want to either donate to a local food pantry or trade with something already left there.  I dumped my radishes and picked up a couple more zucchinis.  I didn’t take my full allowance of kale, lettuce, or pac choi.  It was a LOT of vegetables!!!  I had a hard time getting them all into the refrigerator, and I only have a half share!!!

Now, what to DO with all that produce?

I made a couple of tried and true (for me) recipes - zucchini bread and wilted lettuce.  That Girl says the name "wilted lettuce" sounds disgusting, so, if that bothers you as much as it does her, you could say it's leaf lettuce (or use spinach instead, if you prefer) with hot bacon dressing.

The kohlrabi was totally new to me.  They look like slightly flattened green softballs, but are actually the swollen stems of a plant related to cabbage.  I got online, searched for recipes, and found one to try.  I warned That Man and The Boy that I was using them as guinea pigs in a culinary experiment.  The Boy opted out, the coward, but That Man gamely gave it a try.  He gave it a solid thumbs up for him ("pretty good"), and went for seconds.

I did the unthinkable and made wilted lettuce for the same meal.  Again, The Boy opted out (he's not much for adventures in the vegetable realm), and That Man ate seconds.

For another meal, I made roasted zucchini.

As for the rest of the haul, scallions are easy.  Pak choi - I don’t know - stir fry?  Moo goo gai pan?  Kale - hmmmm…  I’ll have to think about that.  I guess I could substitute it for the spinach in my Rustic Totellini Soup.

Getting the CSA box every other week is forcing me to try some vegetables I would normally pass up for the easy, familiar stuff.  It's FUN!

If you’re interested in the recipes I used, I’ll be posting them the next few Wednesdays, starting next week.

Mothers Day!

Mothers Day weekend had a rocky start, but it was, overall, definitely better than just okay.

It all began Thursday.  I am at the age that doctors insist you sign up for a series of invasive tests.  This time it was the dreaded colonoscopy.  FUN.  The gastroenterologist's office had mailed me a prescription and instructions for the prep to be done on Thursday.  It mainly consisted of what I can best describe as self-inflicted waterboarding.  I had to mix FOUR LITERS of water with polyethylene glycol and electrolyte powder and drink it ALL, eight ounces every ten minutes, starting at four in the afternoon.

Uh, are you kidding me???

At least there was a lemon flavor packet to supposedly make it more palatable.  Just to be safe, I started at three.  The first quart went down fairly quickly, but after that, I struggled.  And struggled.  And struggled.  The stuff had an odd flavor, and an odder texture - too thick to be watery, but too runny to be thick.  It made me gag just to think about drinking it.  I sipped root beer between chug fests to get the taste out of my mouth.  I got about two-thirds of it down by the time I went to bed at eleven.  I never finished the whole jug.  YUCK.

Friday was the colonoscopy itself.  Not bad, except they had to knock me out, so That Man had the dubious pleasure of being my chauffeur to and from the hospital/torture chamber.  After returning home, I ate a heavenly bacon deluxe cheeseburger, fries, and cookie dough concrete mixer (we had gone to the Culver's drive-thru), because I hadn't eaten since Wednesday midnight, then crashed into bed and slept until Saturday morning.  UGH.

Saturday was JAMMED.  I went to the plant sale at Teter Organic Farm and bought my Mothers Day hanging flower baskets for the front porch and some plants for the garden.  The wind swept across the fields in an attempt to turn the vegetable and herb plants into tumbleweeds, but I thwarted its evil designs and got everything loaded into my car.  I went to lunch with some friends and had an amazing Hoosier pork tenderloin sandwich.  And onion rings.  And chocolate volcano cake.  Oh my.  So delicious.  So decadent.  So much talk.  So much FUN.  Thank you, Muldoon's!

Back home, I unloaded my plants and hung the baskets on the porch.  Instant flowers!  I climbed into the boat, and cleaned leaves and spruce needles out of the cockpit - no slimy mess this year - YAY!  Everything was dry and easy to handle.  I took the gas tank out of its locker, cleaned it up a little, drove to the Co-Op for gas, mixed in the two-cycle oil, drove home, and put the gas tank back.  For dinner, I went to a Mexican restaurant with a different group of friends.  More fun!

Sunday (Mothers Day), while I was at church, That Man loaded the truck with everything we need to launch the boat, hitched it to the truck, and moved it out of the backyard into the driveway.  I got home, changed clothes, made a minor repair to the rudder, grabbed some work gloves, rousted The Boy out of bed, and drove to the marina, followed by That Man with the truck and boat.  After raising the mast and mounting the motor and rudder in the parking lot, we got the boat launched, motored into the slip, its fenders out, and securely tied up.  Whew!  From the time I got home from church to leaving the marina was two hours - pretty good time.  After that, I headed to the KFC drive-thru to procure the post-launch feast.

Best Mothers Day ever!!!

But that's not the end of the weekend's story.  Monday, I got a followup call from one of the colonoscopy nurses.  You know the drill.  They call and ask whether you're having any problems and how they might improve the process.  I told her I was more than fine, but surely there's a better way to prep.  Well, she said there are approved methods and blah, blah, blah.  I said I understood, but I couldn't guarantee that next time my prep would be adequate since I had such a difficult time with it.  Oh, but I did fine, she said.  I persisted.  There simply has to be a better way than gagging down more than a gallon of icky goo.  "WHAT?" she said.  "What do you mean, 'more than a gallon?'"  So I told her the deal - how I got the prescription and its instructions to mix up four liters of solution and everything.  She told me there are two OTHER preps that could have been used, requiring drinking only one quart.  It was my turn to say, "WHAT???  What do you mean, 'ONE QUART?'"

Why didn't anyone tell me the alternatives?  Why didn't they ask me my preference?

Unbelievable.

I guess it's funny.

Well, maybe it will be - later.  MUCH later.

But still...

I did have the BEST Mothers Day weekend, sandwiched between its inauspicious prologue and exasperating epilogue.