CSA Box #8

CSA box #8 has arrived!  It includes:  bi-color sweetcorn x4, tropea onions, carrots, yellow cauliflower, yellow summer squash, green beans (actually green this time), 2 green bell peppers, one small head of red cabbage, tropical melon, 2 Italian eggplant, Tuscan kale, 2 small cucumbers, 2 Korean melons, kohlrabi x3, bag of tomatillos, bag of melrose peppers (look like shishito peppers but allegedly are sweet and have no heat; one is red), okra, and 1 head romaine. 

I already tore up, washed, and bagged the kale and put it in the freezer for use in breakfast smoothies.  I peeled and cut the carrots into sticks for eating plain or with hummus.  I diced up the melons, which are delightful, especially the tropical one.  I'd never had Korean melons before, and they are white and sweet inside, but the tropical one looks (and sort of tastes) like a hybrid of honeydew and cantaloupe (yellow outsides, green insides, but with a tinge of cantaloupe color inside too), but it's more tender and flavorful than any melon I've ever had before.

My goal this week is to eat more of the produce plain without a lot of added work or added calories.  I don't know how else we can eat this much food in one week.  So we plan to snack on some of the carrots, cucumbers, peppers, and tomatillos as crudites.  Aside from that, here are the recipes:

Baked Popcorn Okra

Lemony Steamed Green Beans
Because it looks easy and healthy and I can do this with the steamer basket while my corn boils in the water below.  

Boiled corn on the cob
Three for eating on the cob tonight, one for cutting the corn off and putting it into stuffed peppers another day.

Kohlrabi Salad with White Beans & Horseradish (Vedge, pg. 38)
I've made this before.  It basically tastes like my favorite sort of creamy potato salad, minus the potatoes.  I'm going to go easy on the dressing this time because it was a bit overpowering before.  I'm planning to make these first four recipes for dinner tonight. 


Korean Eggplant Tacos with Kimchi Mayo (Vedge, pg. 171)

Red cabbage slaw

Roasted Cauliflower with Black Vinegar and Kimchi Cream (Vedge, pg. 90)

Baby Cucumber Sambal (Vedge)

 


Avocado Tomatillo Salsa Verde 
or Tomatillo Salsa Verde

Cucumber Tomatillo Gazpacho 

Ratatouille
If I only end up using one of the Italian eggplants in the Korean tacos, I can use the other one here.  I also have a bunch of yellow squash, sweet peppers, and tomatoes that could be used in this.

Stuffed Mini Peppers
I'm going to try cutting the melrose peppers lengthwise and stuffing them with different things, including but not limited to the black beans and quinoa in the link above, and in some others maybe using some vegan cheese that's in my fridge mixed with I'm not sure what yet (not sure how well vegan cheese would roast under high heat...).  I also have some mozzarella and pizza sauce and black olives and an open package of veg pepperoni in the fridge that could be used to attempt pizza flavored ones.  Stuffed peppers are reasonably forgiving and I can just put them all on a pan and roast them together.


 

Summer Cookout-Style Dinner

These are foods I think of as summertime cookout flavors, even though I'm making everything inside my kitchen and there are no burgers, hotdogs, or BBQ.  I'm really just posting this because I'm making so many side dishes tonight that I need easy access to links to all the recipes in one place or I will inevitably close a window and lose my place while making dinner.  The goal for tonight is to prepare as many of my farm box vegetables as possible.  I'm banking on having plenty of leftovers to eat tomorrow when Sameer is fasting.

Vegan Fried Chicken
It's really air-fried soy curls, but it's quick and easy and it tastes good, especially with ranch dip, which I'm going to make out of the cashew yogurt in my fridge that needs to be eaten this week.

Spicy Cauliflower Wings
Because it'll be easier than the Vedge cauliflower recipe I had planned on doing (I'll do that one next week -- the email from the farm said we're getting cauliflower again on Friday).  Plus I've made this before when I had a cold or the flu or something and needed spiciness and it was really good.  Again, served with ranch.  It's entirely possible I'll be the only one eating these on account of spiciness.

Roasted Potatoes
Because I don't want to make potato salad and I'll be using the oven anyway for the cauliflower.

Corn on the Cob
Simran insists on butter, but I like it with just a squeeze of fresh lemon or lime juice.

Sauteed Fennel with Garlic 
This isn't a summer cookout food.  I'm not even sure I'll end up making it as it calls for 400% more fennel than I have, and I would need to make my own tomato juice (not sure how that would go).  I just don't know what to do with the single bulb of fennel that keeps showing up in farm boxes.

Zucchini Fritters
Summer squash is infinite.  I used to think I could never have too much because you can sneak it into so many things, but recipes never call for you to sneak multiple large squash into anything.  Fried food tastes good though, so this seems like a way to eat it.

[Edited after dinner:  This is WAY too much food to try to make in one day.  Do not attempt.  I ended up just throwing the fennel in with the potatoes (it burned, but it didn't adversely affect the potatoes) and skipped making the vegan fried chicken altogether.  I'll probably make it tomorrow to eat with the leftovers.]

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?).

CSA Box #6

CSA box #6 includes:  Japanese eggplant x2, golden beets x3, varietal summer squash, broccoli, vidalia onions, green kale, baby lettuce mix, music garlic, Lewis green beans (which are yellow and I don't know what that means for their edibility -- they don't look like they are meant to be yellow but they also don't look rotten), French breakfast radishes, rainbow carrots, shishito peppers, mini cucumbers, red new potatoes, Japanese turnips, and a red cabbage.

First I washed the radish greens, beet greens, and kale and put them in the freezer for use in breakfast smoothies.  I would've included the turnip greens too but none of them looked like they were in good enough condition to eat.  This should supply us with enough or nearly enough smoothie greens for the next week.  Sameer has already called dibs on the broccoli, which he plans to eat with this sauce.  I will probably just quarter the carrots and eat them raw with the hummus I made last Sunday.  The baby lettuce mix will end up in sandwiches or eaten plain by Simran.  I'm not sure what we'll do with the sweet onions.  I rarely use sweet onions, so I'll just substitute them for other onions whenever it seems like it'll work.

Charred shishito peppers with smoked salt (Vedge, pg. 25)
I just ordered smoked salt for this.  This will use up the shishito peppers.


French breakfast radishes with nori, tamari, and avocado (Vedge, pg. 43)
Because it's delicious.  I don't see the need to ever find another French breakfast radish recipe.


Red potato "ash" with sauce gribiche (Vedge, pg. 82)
This is supposed to be like a new take on potato salad.  It calls for a charcoal grill, which I do not have, so I'll end up doing the oven version.  Who knows how this will turn out, but the cookbook says gribiche is a close relative of remoulade, which I love.  I'll be substituting dried thyme for the fresh because I am not going to the store to get fresh thyme for this.


Seared French beans with caper bagna cauda (Vedge, pg. 97)


Eggplant with Catalan spices and saffron aioli (Vedge, pg. 120)

Japanese Turnips with Miso
I'm going to try this recipe again.  This time I'll use vegan butter to mix with the miso since it'll end up less salty than it did with the salted butter (recipe calls for unsalted, which I don't usually bother buying because it rarely matters).  I want to experiment with making the turnips less bitter.  I'm wondering if I overcooked them last time.  I don't know.  I haven't enjoyed any of the turnips I've made, but I also know it took me until my thirties to taste brussel sprouts that weren't bitter and gross, so I assume it'll just take some more tries to figure out turnips.

Carrot Zucchini Chickpea Fritters
To use the summer squash

Lauki Paratha
To use up even more of the summer squash.

Red Cabbage Slaw
I'm going to cook a big batch of black beans tomorrow and this will go well with them for lunches.

The beets were unexpectedly the golden kind, so I'm going to find a different recipe than the one I'd been planning to use.  There is a salt roasted golden beet recipe in Vedge that looks good but it also looks like a lot of work.  The cucumbers look like short, fat pickles, so I'm just going to quarter and pickle them.

[Edited 7/11/2020:  I decided to make the salt-roasted golden beets with dill, avocado, capers, and red onion.  This is what the beets looked like on their bed of coarse sea salt going into the oven to roast for TWO HOURS.  They are currently cooling so I can peel them, slice them with the mandolin, which I'm not comfortable with, and marinate them for the remaining hours leading up to dinner.  The recipe says the finished texture should resemble lox.  There is also a cucumber dill sauce I have to make to go with them.  I really hope these are good because it's a pretty ridiculous time investment.  I'm going to make the French breakfast radishes too (a no-cook, relatively easy dish) and just call that dinner for tonight.  We can air-pop some popcorn and fill up on that afterward as necessary.  Simran likes that.]

[Edited 7/12/2020:  The beets turned out well.  The mandolin was not actually hard to use.  Here is the finished product next to the French radishes, which never look pretty when I make them but whatever.]

Healthy Zucchini Bread - Attempt #1

Three small loaves are in the oven right now, but I don't have high hopes.  I realized as soon as I set the timer that I'd forgotten the ground flaxseed meant to bind everything together.  I also made a lot of changes from the healthy carrot bread based on instinct and also what I had on hand, which is why I'm typing this up immediately, just in case it turns out okay and I want to refer back.  Here is what I did, and I will report back afterward about how it turned out:

Ingredients
2 cups grated zucchini (approximately -- I didn't even measure; I used the fine grater and did NOT drain the liquid)
3 cups whole wheat pastry flour
1 tbs cinnamon
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 heaping cups Medjool dates + 2 cups boiling water + a couple pineapple rings and a few tbs juice, all combined in blender
1 cup raisins (it just wasn't sweet enough without)
1 cup dry toasted walnuts
1/2 cup quick cooking oats
about 1 cup homemade date syrup (because it was in the fridge and I wanted to get rid of it)
1/2 cup Ezekiel 4:9 cinnamon raisin cereal (because the consistency at that point felt a little too runny, probably on account of the date syrup, and I didn't want to grind up more oats and also no one in the house eats this cereal anymore and it would be nice to get rid of it)

Directions
1) Combine dry ingredients minus the nuts and oats (and cereal and raisins).  Meaning combine the dry ingredients with a flour-like texture.

2) Combine the blended date/pineapple slurry you just made with the vanilla and grated zucchini (i.e., the wet ingredients).  This part should've also included 2 tbs ground flaxseed.  Then stir in the dry ingredients until fully incorporated.

3) Stir in the nuts, oats, cereal, and raisins.

4) Spray mini loaf pans (it's easier to get something this dense fully cooked without burning the edges by using smaller loaf pans) with Pam and fill each halfway with batter.  Bake in preheated oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes.  I just checked mine at the 30 minute point and put them in for another 10 because they aren't done in the middle.  They will probably end up baking for at least 50 minutes, but I'll keep checking them by stabbing them in the center with a toothpick to see if it comes out clean yet.

Okay, so I probably should've baked them at 375 instead of 350 and I probably should've used the amount of oats and nuts that are in the carrot cake recipe because, while the flavor of this bread was good and the sweetness seemed right, the texture was wrong and the centers of the loaves weren't fully cooked even after 50 minutes and even after the toothpick was seemingly coming out clean.  It's hard to make the texture good on a whole-grain, no oil bread.  It's edible and it will get eaten -- I put one sliced loaf in the fridge and the others in the freezer -- and Simran said she likes it better than the carrot cake bread and wants to eat it for breakfast tomorrow, but I think it was mostly because 1 tbs of cinnamon turned out to be a good amount.  Next time I make this, I will remember the flaxseed and increase the walnuts to 1.5 cups at least.  Rather than doubling the oats, I'll probably use the rest of that Ezekiel cereal we have and then add oats until I'm at 2 cups in total. 

CSA Box #5

Box #5 just arrived a day early on account of it being a holiday week and I legit cannot fit this much food into my refrigerator.  I need to do a whole lot of prepping or eating or giving away or something.  Box #5 includes:  broccoli, spigariello (Italian leafy broccoli, which looks more like dandelion greens than broccoli), summer squash, varietal head lettuce, red spring onions (which smell amazing), baby carrots (which looks like last week's "young carrots" to me -- I'd forgotten the baby carrots at the store aren't actually what infant carrots look like), arugula, red and green basil, fava beans, red beets, zucchini blossoms, fennel, dill, joi choi, and pickling cucumbers.  I'm going to need to try a lot of new recipes since there are quite a few things here that are new to me. 

First, the arugula and greens from the beets will end up washed and in the freezer for use in breakfast smoothies.  There are plenty of more creative ways I could use them and it felt wasteful doing it to last week's beautiful kale and (less beautiful) chard, but I always consume them 100% this way and without any serious effort on my part.

The pickling cucumbers I will pickle just like I did before.  I'm going to use the same pickling brine as last batch since the recipe said you can do it and I'll just add a little of the fresh dill to it.  There is a spicy cucumber sambal recipe in Vedge that I might try with a couple of the pickling cucumbers.  I have no idea if they are the right texture for this, but I'm willing to risk it.

I'm going to try to make at least the spigarello and zucchini blossoms and the fava beans for dinner since Sameer isn't fasting today and we actually stand a chance of eating a fair amount.  I'm thinking of just doing as many Italian-style sides as I can in one day.  It's always nice to have leftovers for lunch the next day anyway. 

Beetroot pots de creme (Vedge, pg. 179)
This will supposedly use up about half a beet, as well as the last of the coconut milk in the fridge.  I think I have enough chocolate chips in the pantry to make it.  We'll see how this goes.

Beet Salad
This seems like an easy way to use up the rest of the beets without oven roasting them in the middle of an already hot summer.


Spigarello Sauteed Italian Style
To use up the spigarello.

Traditional Italian Fried Zucchini Blossoms
I chose this recipe because it doesn't require me to stuff them with cheese OR deep fry them in an entire vat of oil.  I've never had zucchini blossoms before, so this will be interesting.

10 Minute Garlic Bok Choy
My plan is to use the joi choi on this.


Sauteed Fennel with Garlic  

My favorite way to eat summer squash is zucchini crab cakes and I have a lot, so this will probably happen.  Side note: I've been subbing out the egg with flaxseed for awhile now.  You can make it vegan by omitting the butter.  I've tried it with vegan butter but it tastes weird when heated.

I might also try making some of the summer squash into a healthy zucchini bread a la my healthy carrot cake recipe.  I imagine the only change I'd make is to swap out the carrots for squash.  I'm going to remember the vanilla this time and increase the cinnamon too though.

[Edited after dinner:  We ended up having (clockwise from top) some hummus Sameer made and baby carrots, pan fried zucchini blossoms (delicious and easier to make than expected), spigarello sauteed Italian style (also delicious; I used apple cider vinegar; same recipe would work with any dark leafy green, e.g., arugula or kale), blanched fresh fava beans.

Pasta Primavera with Pesto Alfredo

I am tired and just jotting down what it occurred to me to make for dinner tonight so I don't forget later when I am more tired and have to do this.  I made the garlic scapes and carrot greens into a (hefty amount of) rough pesto with some pine nuts, olive oil, and salt.  There was a lot more finished product than I intended.  I'm going to throw some of it into the Vitamix with some water, raw cashews, and seasonings to taste and make it into a pesto alfredo sauce.  Apparently you can make anything into a vegan cream sauce by running it through a blender with raw cashews and water and seasoning it to taste.  I've done this a couple times now (for pesto alfredo and a vodka-less vodka sauce) and it is easier than I would have expected and very forgiving since you fix the thickness and flavor while it's still in the blender.  Just err on the side of too thick since you can always add water but it's harder to cook it out.

I think I have Tofurky brand vegan chik'n strips in the fridge, and if I don't, I definitely have Tofurky brand Italian sausage.  They add a lot in terms of flavor and how filling the dish is.  I also have whole wheat penne for this.

I'm going to blanch the fresh fava beans and throw at least some of them into this pasta dish along with some of the fresh English peas, one or two of the little summer squash sliced, and some broccoli florets and sliced bell pepper from the freezer.  And maybe one of the fresh shallots from the farm box.  And some of the red basil.  I tried putting the red basil in a sandwich yesterday and it was not good for that.  It has a nice, fairly typical basil flavor, but it's too strong to use as sandwich greens and the stems are too fibrous to chew, so I'll have to rip off some of the leaves and just throw them into this whole thing at the end.  Or add them to the blender while I'm making the sauce.  I'm not sure which will make it a weirder, less appetizing color (red basil is the brownish color of pretty much any other red lettuce).  It should taste nice though. 

[Edited after dinner:  The sauce contained a generous scoop of my homemade garlic scape pesto, water, raw cashews, salt, some dry oregano, fresh red basil, and fresh ground black pepper.  I don't know amounts because I kept messing with it, but it was probably around half a cup each of the pesto and the cashews and maybe a cup of water (definitely don't take my word for it on the water).  The vegan parmesan on top from the produce department -- I can't remember the brand -- was a really good addition, probably because the sauce needed lemon or something equivalently tangy and I didn't think to include any.  The garlic scape pesto had a serious bite to it from CONTAINING MOSTLY GARLIC so my primary goal was evening out the final sauce so it wasn't too spicy.  The rest of the ingredients were a couple of fresh shallots thinly sliced, a few baby summer squash sliced, fresh English peas, fresh fava beans that I'd blanched and double shelled (today I learned fresh fava beans have a really nice texture), some leftover diced yellow bell pepper, and Tofurky chick'n strips lightly sauteed in olive oil.  I ended up using whole wheat spaghetti because I felt like the thicker, chewier texture of the penne would've been overpowering with all these small, tender vegetables.  Farfalle would've also worked.]