Local Food 6/20/2009

This week is the fourth week of our CSA and I’m still thrilled with everything.  One of the things I’m noticing is that the amounts of vegetables I get are, indeed, smaller due to receiving a half-share.  Duh, right?  I’m going to be paying more attention to that when I’m planning meals this week and will most likely be halving the recipes using CSA veggies in order to take into account the smaller amounts of vegetables.  This will also let me have meals with two vegetable dishes, which will make it easier to make it through all of our produce each week!  

Two bunches of basil – one is regular and the other is lemon basil.  It has a distinct lemony flavor and an almost minty flavor.  There’s also more dill.

Our usual compliment of lettuces.  We received a bag of mixed greens and two small heads of leafy green lettuce.  

A nice bunch of Swiss chard and green onions.  We also got a pretty wildflower.  

A bunch of beets with greens and a handful of turnips.  I’ve never had beets before, so I’m looking forward to trying these.  Our farmer said that they’re variegated inside so won’t bleed as much as regular beets. 

Cute little cucumbers.  I’ve only started to enjoy cucumbers within the past few years and I’m not entirely sure what to do with them outside of salads, sandwiches and sushi.  I believe I’m going to attempt to make gazpacho.  

A nice pile of new potatoes!  

More yellow squash and zucchini.  I believe that next week I’ll buy a bunch more zucchini and work on baking some bread.  It freezes well and makes lovely gifts.  

Cabbage!

That’s it for the CSA box, aside from the eggs that I forgot to photograph before Art put them in the fridge.  Everything below is from other farmers at the market.  Everything always looks so delicious that any impulse control I have fails.  

Here are more cucumbers… There is a lesson here and that is “Check your CSA box before buying other stuff.”  I didn’t notice that I already had cucumbers when I bought these, so now I have lots and lots of cucumbers!

Beautiful pattypan squash.  Art was sad that he missed my first experimentation with pattypans, so I knew I had to get more so that he’d be able to try them as well.  

It’s still a bit early for tomatoes here, but we’re at the beginning edge of tomato season.  These are four “seconds” from one of the farmers.  Apparently they’ve got a few dings that make them less desirable, and cheaper, but they just look perfect and beautiful to me.  

I go through grape tomatoes like candy in this house.  They’re a main component in all sorts of salads and other dishes.  This is the first time I’ve been able to get them at the market.  Between these, the eggs, and the green onions, I have a good foundation for loaded egg salad one of these days.  

I also bought some new herbs for my garden.  Sadly, our herb farmer was out of spearmint, but I was able to get rosemary, thyme and tarragon.  I think that pretty much takes care of all of my herb needs.  I decided not to plant them today since it’s raining outside and I’m still a bit sore from all the walking in Vegas earlier in the week, but I’ll be sure to take more pictures once I plant these.  My peppers are starting to flower and all of the herbs except for the dill are flourishing nicely.