CSA Box #7

CSA box #7 contains:  new potatoes, yellow summer squash, broccoli, pickling cucumbers, dill, swiss chard, yellow beans, cauliflower, sweet corn x6, fennel, black currants, shallots, greenhouse tomatoes, squash blossoms, and celery.

Black currants are very sour.  I've never had them fresh before today, but the dried ones I've had were also very sour, so I assume this is standard.  We all tasted them and then opted to put them in the freezer for use in breakfast smoothies.  I'll wash and freeze the chard for smoothies too.  Vedge has a good recipe for the corn but something I like just as much that is easier and healthier is just boiling the corn on the cob and eating it with a squeeze of lemon.  I put the dill that didn't go into the pickle jar in my food dehydrator and filled the other shelves with chives from the planters on my deck.  I use both dried dill and chives whenever I make ranch dip, so they will eventually get used up no matter how much I have.  I am still struggling to use up this much summer squash. 

Easy Refrigerator Pickles
I've made lots of these over the last few weeks, but they are good and they get eaten.  I'll mix up a fresh batch of the brine today and make more with the new cucumbers and dill.   

Traditional Italian Fried Zucchini Blossoms

Sauteed Fennel with Garlic  

Yellow Squash Fritters
I'm going to use flaxseed and water in place of the egg and skip the butter to make this vegan, but I will have a skillet full of hot oil from frying the squash blossoms anyway, so I will fry these up afterward and see how it goes.  Surely the frying and salt are enough to make these taste good regardless of anything else.  I also have fresh chives and vegan sour cream that might be good served with them.  I wonder if I could make a cashew cream flavored with the garlic scape pesto still taking up space in my fridge.  I wonder how that would taste as a sauce for fritters.  Or maybe after I go to the store tomorrow and have fresh cilantro again I could make the blend it with the pesto to make some kind of garlicky chutney-ish, chimichurri-ish sauce.

Green Beans & Potato Subzi
An attempt to use up the yellow beans that yet again look like they were supposed to be green.  They went bad within one day in the fridge last week so I still don't know how they tasted.  I'm going to wash and cut the news ones and put them in the freezer today to buy me some time until I can make this next week.  

The celery looks very fresh and there are so many healthy, green celery tops that I don't know what to do with it all.  I think I'll cut the celery into sticks to see how much there really is.  We could probably finish it off just as crudites.  I'm going to wash the greens and put them in the freezer for breakfast smoothies.  They are great for broth or soup, but I'm not making soup in the middle of July, so I figure they'll be fine in smoothies.  They look too nice to throw away.

I'm not sure what to do with this much broccoli.  I've already cut it into florets and washed it, so I might just move the majority of it to the freezer for use in stirfry or pasta at a later date.

The shallots work in place of onion in plenty of dishes, so I'll just do that, and the tomatoes will get eaten without much effort.  We finally got a good number of them from the farm (like 6?).