Adventures in CSA (2012): Week 10 Pick-Up

We were out of town during week nine, and missed out on a great share week (we donated our produce to a friend, since we were gone). Luckily, this week's assortment is making us very happy.

CSA Bounty - Week Ten (veggies and fruit): 

4 lbs tomatoes

1 pint cherry tomatoes

2 sweet green peppers

3 hot peppers

1 bunch basil

7 ears sweet corn

1 eggplant

1 bunch cilantro

1 bunch arugula
1 cucumber

a lot of squash

1 Garden of Eve-grown organic watermelon 

1 sunjewel melon

peaches 

Oh, yeah. And there's still a cabbage from...week seven...oops.

Guess who's making another pan of King Ranch Squash?!

Adventures in CSA (2012): Week 8 Wrap-Up

At the start of Week 8 we still had these CSA items in our kitchen:
most of a bunch of green onion
1.2 cucumbers
1 head cabbage
some lettuce 

And then, our CSA provided us with an EXPLOSION of new summer produce!

CSA Bounty - Week Eight (veggies and fruit):

3 Sweet corn 

1.5  Lb mixed zucchini (we got all yellow)

1.5 lb cucumbers (we chose green)

2 stalks dill

1 bunch swiss chard

1 bunch beets

1 bunch carrots

1 bulb fennel

1 onion

bonus: half-pint of cherry tomatoes

1 plant basil (which we planted and are TRYING to keep alive, I promise)

1 half-pint Garden of Eve-grown organic blackberries

donut peaches

I kind of wish we'd signed up for fruit every week. This has been some good fruit. I miss it when we don't get to take it home.

Anywhoo, with this lot, we arranged to devour the following dishes:

1. More scrambled eggs with scallions (CSA scallion) and cheddar cheese (not pictured).



2. "I Actually CAN Believe They're Not Crab Cakes" (CSA scallion and cucumbers). I don't mean to be picky with the fine folks at Picky Kitchen, but this recipe didn't taste much like crab cakes. The texture was also clearly canned tuna. Luckily, I like canned tuna. Pickled cucumber was good on these, too, as it has been on most things the past few weeks.



3. Sausage and greens (CSA chard and tomatoes). Pine nuts and cheese were added to this dish. 



4. Cucumber salad (CSA cucumbers and dill). Dan didn't follow any one recipe exactly, but he says he more or less used this one, with slightly different proportions of ingredients. The baby devoured them. He loves vinegar!



5. "King Ranch" squash (CSA onion and yellow squash and scallion garnish). Okay! This is another contender for "Best Dishes of CSA 2012." It is also the recipe I plan to make again immediately when we (if we) get more squash. Our gluten-free neighbor enjoyed it, too, once I substituted cornstarch for the small amount of flour. Oh, also we didn't have a jalapeno, so I left that out. Layer of tortilla chips on the bottom, y'all.  Make it!



6. Fresh, raw: CSA blackberries and doughnut peaches and melon -- not pictured except for the melon. Guess what? Our kid can now say (nay, demand), "Bewwies!" I don't like cooking fruit that tastes this good. We left the peaches in a brown paper bag over night, FYI, to get them perfectly ripe.


 
7. Corn salad (CSA corn and spring onion). Avocado entered the picture (again; we love avocados), along with tomatoes and a dressing of mayonnaise, lemon, and cumin. Another standout.



8. Beet and Fennel Slaw (CSA beets, carrots, and fennel). This was based on a Martha Stewart recipe. The beets are served raw and shredded, which (if you have a food processor) is so much less messy and time-consuming than roasting or boiling them first. It was very good -- sour in a pleasing way.

Note: You won't find any Week 9 (a "veggies only" week) posts this year, as we were on vacation last week and gave our share to a friend.  Week 10 begins today. Onward!

Joining us over in Week 10:
1 head cabbage

Adventures in CSA (2012): Week 8 Pick-Up

Look at Week Eight's haul! Now, THIS is getting hard to photograph. I feel like we've hit the height of this year's season, but only time will tell if that's true. Best week yet!


CSA Bounty - Week Eight (veggies and fruit):

3 Sweet corn 

1.5  Lb mixed zucchini (we got all yellow)

1.5 lb Cucumbers (we chose green)

2 stalks Dill

1 bunch Swiss chard

1 bunch Beets

1 bunch carrots

1 bulb fennel

1 onion

bonus: half-pint of cherry tomatoes

1 plant basil

1 half-pint Garden of Eve-grown organic blackberries

donut peaches

Which joined a loafing-around-our-kitchen-from-week-seven crew of:

most of a bunch of green onion
1.2 cucumbers
1 head cabbage
some lettuce 
  

Eek! Use that cabbage, lady!

What did you get in your CSA share (or at the greenmarket) this week?

Adventures in CSA (2012): Week 7 Pick-Up

It's week 7, which means we're about a third of the way through our CSA season. The dill has gone to flower, but the corn is just getting started. What did you pick up this week?

CSA Bounty - Week Seven (veggies only):

2 lbs zucchini (green, yellow)

2 lbs cucumbers

1 head cabbage

1 bunch spring onions

1 head radicchio

2 pieces dill

3 ears sweet corn

1 bunch beets

Leftover produce from Week Six, still in the mix:

2 cucumbers

So, what would you do with these ingredients?

Adventures in CSA (2012): Week 6 Pick-Up

 

Mr. Baby and I had to go to a birthday party yesterday morning, so Mr. Dan picked up our weekly CSA share. It's hot stuff!

CSA Bounty - Week Six (veggies and fruit)

1 bunch dill

1 zucchini and 1 yellow squash

1 cabbage

1 head lettuce

1 kohlrabi

1 broccoli

4 pickling cucumbers

1 bunch carrots

1 bunch cilantro

3 pints organic blueberries

And, lest we forget, the following items are still hanging out from previous weeks:

2 more heads broccoli
3 more yellow pickling cucumbers -- eek!
another kohlrabi
some lettuce
1 bunch mustard greens -- I think these might have gone bad while I waited to buy Ritz crackers for a gratin. Curses!

Adventures in CSA (2012): Week 4 Wrap-Up

Week Four Produce (veggies and fruit)
2.5 lbs summer squash
2 pickling cucumbers -- CHALLENGE VEGETABLE
1 "regular" cucumber (but I'd swear this is just a big pickling cucumber. It looks the same as the smaller ones)
1 bunch parsley
1 bunch arugula
.75 lb mesclun mix lettuce
1 bunch carrots
1 bunch kale
3 pints blueberries

Plus the following items leftover from previous weeks:
5 radishes
a baggie of snap peas
1 bunch mustard greens
1 pattypan squash
1 bunch kale

With these ingredients, we made:



1. Double-your-pleasure kale salad (CSA kale). Kale, lemon, coarse salt, avocado, olive oil. This is the stuff.



2. Zu-canoes (CSA squash, including pattypan, and parsley). Dan stuffed these with squash, parsley, two types of cheese, green rice, and mushrooms. The pattypan squash's skin was a bit tough, but the zuchinni and oblong yellow squash were terrific.



3. Arugula salad (CSA arugula and mesclun mix). Arugula and greens, tuna, lemon, sunflower seeds. dried cranberries. Dan felt this was a little bland, but I quite liked it. I want to have dried cranberries in all of my tuna salads.



4. Blueberry Cobbler with Cream Cornmeal Biscuit (CSA blueberries). I found this recipe in the Rustic Fruit Desserts cookbook I was given as a Christmas gift. You can also find the recipe online. Unlike rhubarb, I think blueberry is best mixed with other fruits. I find its baked flavor a bit heavy, sweet, and overwhelming alone. Thank goodness for the superb biscuits on this cobbler. They cut the blueberry sweetness in just the right way.

5. Raw snap peas, eaten as a traveling snack (not pictured).



6. Several snacks of quick pickles (pictured) and raw cucumber (not pictured). I mentioned in a previous post that I am intimidated by the canning process. I've yet to "put up" any batches of...well, anything. But I did turn our pickling cucumbers into "quick pickles" by slicing them into thin rounds and spears before giving them a bath in commercially prepared (dill) pickle juice that just happened to be in the refrigerator.  24 hours later, they were good. 48 hours later, they were great!  We had them on sandwiches and raw. Baby-approved!



6. Epic Frito Salad (CSA mesclun mix). What a doozy, in the greatest possible way! Cotija cheese and a shredded Mexican mix of cheese, corn off the cob, Frito chips, tomato, black olives, red onion, and that mesclun mix came together under an elote-inspired dressing of lime, mayonnaise, and Tapatio hot sauce. This is Dan at his best, folks.

We traveled over the 4th of July holiday, meaning we didn't get through as much produce as we might have otherwise. And so, still in the fridge, fated to join Week 5's produce, lie:
5 small radishes (booo!)
1 bunch ruby chard
1 bunch mustard greens
1 bunch carrots
a little bit of parsley

Oh yeah, and thrown out this week:
2-3 handfuls of snap peas that sat in a hot car overnight while we were camping. Goodbye, cruel world!

Adventures in CSA (2012): Week 5 Pick-Up

Okay. I'm a little behind, seeing as I pick up Week 6 produce tomorrow and still haven't written Week 4 or 5's wrap-ups.  Whoops. Let's start with the easy stuff.

Last Saturday, we still had the following items in our fridge from previous weeks:
5 small radishes
1 bunch ruby chard
1 bunch mustard greens
1 bunch carrots
a little bit of parsley

And then we received the following veggies:



CSA Bounty - Week Five (veggies only)
note: nothing on this week's pickup was labeled, as there was some sort of key that had been lost (I was told).

4 small yellow squash
1 head unlabeled lettuce
1 bag loose lettuce (mesclun mix?)
2 heads broccoli
5 pickling cucumbers (2 yellow, 3 green)
1 kohlrabi
1 onion
1/2 lb. fava beans

And that's what we had to work with, folks...

Adventures in CSA (2012): Week 4 Pick-Up

 

As Week 4 begins, I have the following vegetables (leftover from previous weeks) hanging out in our kitchen:

4-5 radishes (Man! I could have sworn we had finally finished the radishes!)
a baggie of snap peas
1 bunch mustard greens
1 pattypan squash
1 bunch kale

At our CSA pickup site this morning, I was awarded:



 CSA Bounty - Week Four (veggies and fruit)
2.5 lbs summer squash
2 pickling cucumbers -- CHALLENGE VEGETABLE
1 "regular" cucumber (but I'd swear this is just a big pickling cucumber. It looks the same as the smaller ones)
1 bunch parsley
1 bunch arugula
.75 lb mesclun mix lettuce
1 bunch carrots
1 bunch kale
3 pints blueberries

So, we're off to the races with this lot. I am wary of pickling/canning/preserving food, by the way. I haven't had good luck with it in the past.

Oh, also -- what's your favorite recipe that uses mustard greens?

Adventures in CSA (2012): Week 3 Pick-Up

 CSA Bounty - Week Three (veggies only)

1 head lettuce
1 head bok choi
1 head escarole - CHALLENGE VEGETABLE
3 summer squash
1 pint snap peas
1 bunch cilantro
1 bunch kale
1 large cucumber
1 bunch ruby chard
1 bunch mustard greens

Plus:
1 partial pint of snap peas from week 1 (haven't gone bad yet!). I'm going to take them to work for office snacking.

Let's go!

Adventures in CSA (2012): Week 1 Pick-Up

It's a new season, and I'm back on the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) scene. If graded pass/fail on my past two years of CSA coverage, I'd definitely get two big, fat "FAILs," but I am pretty sure that's not how things work with produce.  Produce forgives. The farmers forgive. I did really well in 2009, then had two busy seasons (pregnancy, then a newborn) that made my blogging (and vegetable eating) falter. Now I'm jumping back in.

This year, I joined a well-established but new-to-me CSA (my second choice; there's another closer to my apartment that sold out -- one can't have everything one wants) and bought a vegetables-every-week + fruit-every-other-week share.

I suspect the coming weeks will offer me fewer "challenge vegetables," which is what I call a CSA item I've never before prepared myself (even if I've eaten it), since I have cooked with so many different things over the past few years, but I'm still hoping to see some new items. One other bonus with this new CSA group is that pickup is located near a farmer's market, which means I can supplement my share with other items immediately upon picking it up.

In the hopes of fully covering this season, I plan to write at least two CSA posts each week. One will show you my week's share and the other will provide details on what we made with those ingredients. Please always feel free to compare and contrast your own CSA weekly shares and let me know if you have recipes you think I should try. I'll probably create a special board over on Pinterest for those. I'm sure I'll also go back to some of the "greatest hits" recipes I've loved over the past few years.

I hope you'll keep reading!


CSA Bounty - Week One (veggies only)

1 bunch broccoli rabe -- CHALLENGE VEGETABLE!
1 bunch kale
1 bunch arugula
2 pints snap peas
1 head lettuce
8 garlic scapes -- lovelovelove them!
1 bunch radishes

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Smorgasburg - May 12, 2012

This past weekend, my parents were visiting. I made sure to take them to local food market Smorgasburg, as a visit there is quickly becoming a near-weekly tradition. So, what did I eat this week?



Mighty Quinn's pulled pork sandwich (the "big" is $9). The sausage that is supposed to be included on this sandwich wasn't quite ready at 11am, when I arrived at Smorgasburg. That's no big deal. I knew I was taking that risk when I got in line. This was my first eat of the day because the line gets long quickly. I'm not sure I'd have the patience to wait in it as long as some people do, no matter how good these are. And they are good. I especially liked the flavor of the bbq sauce used.

Beware! If you don't ask for a small sandwich, you get the big one.  Also, the guy who made it told me the sandwich would be a dollar off because of the missing sausage, but no one told the guy taking the money. I'm not mad about any of that, though. It was delicious and I'm glad it was big.



Hash browns with Grafton cheddar and pickled jalapeños,  accompanied by bacon mayonnaise, from the Egg Hash Bar. From what I could see, fried eggs were not listed on the menu, but several people ordered them alongside the hash. These hash browns are an excellent new addition to Smorgasburg. I'd visit this booth again and again.

Not Pictured: The Stand Rhubarb Rose limeade. Wow! The baby made an awesome sour face when he tried it, then asked for more. It was really tasty.


Olive breadstick from ?? Dan bought this for the little guy, but we shared. Anyone recognize it? [Update: reader Mechanic says they're from TomCat. Update2: They're actually from Commerce.]


Margarita Sandwich from The Good Batch. The cookies outshone the ice cream, but the whole package was really tasty.

I looked everywhere for horchata, to have as a parting beverage, but didn't see a stand selling it this week. I miss you, horchata!!

Have you been to Smorgasburg? What should I try next?

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Birthday Bites

You may have noticed that I'm fond of the edible birthday. It's true. I hardly need gifts anymore. Just feed me.

This year's birthday was another good excuse for eating with friends. I was surprised (truly surprised) by a birthday brunch of some favorites from Pies 'n' Thighs -- chicken and waffles, chicken biscuits, and a doughnut "cake." What you see above are the delicious, delicious remains of that party. Thanks, friends!




Because I didn't have time to bake myself a cake to share with family and friends, Dan brought home "cookie pies" from The Blue Stove. One was chocolate chip, one chocolate crinkle, and one snickerdoodle.  Happy Birthday to me! We shared two after dinner and had one with breakfast the next morning. Frankly, I liked them better than traditional whoopie pies, though they had a little too much cream filling (event for my taste) in their middles.

My favorite almost-four-year-old also helped her mom bake me a "proper" birthday cake the next night.  It was lemony and rich (not pictured). We all enjoyed large pieces with whipped cream. I probably need the recipe.



Finally, on a whim, I bought myself a package of these limited edition Birthday Cake Oreos. Don't you hate it when the store is out of classic Double Stuf? It leads me to all sorts of wild experimentation. Anyway, Happy Birthday, Oreos (their 100th birthday is TODAY!), but I really didn't like the Birthday Cake flavor much. I have a sweet tooth, but MAN, are they ever sweet. And Dan was out of the country during the week that followed my birthday, so I was forced to eat them all myself. Total Oreo-filling-plus-weird-sprinkle-pieces overload. But I managed. I nearly always do.
 
I miss you, Double Stuf!! You're my true birthday wish. Be back in stock soon!

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Quesadilla of the Day

Urban Rustic
236 N 12th St 
between Driggs Ave & Union Ave)
(718) 388-9444 
 www.urbanrusticnyc.com        


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Let Them Eat (Fish and) Cake

Bon Chovie fried, fresh anchovies.  Eat the head or twist it off -- it's up to you!


Ridiculously good pumpkin cake with hot fudge sauce and bourbon whipped cream -- the perfect cake to eat outdoors on a frosty autumn afternoon.

Months and months ago, we made our last sojourn to Smorgasburg, the seasonal (outdoor) Brooklyn Flea food market that is for neighborhood "foodie" fare what a farmer's market is for fresh fruits and vegetables.  Shortly after this trip, it closed for the winter.

I haven't come anywhere close to trying at least one thing from each vendor, but I look forward to continuing this quest in the spring. Smorgasburg reopens April 7th.

See past Smorgasburg/Brooklyn Flea posts here and here.

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From the Vaults: Doughnut Teaser

I keep eating doughnuts.  Here are a few.




Doughnuts by Pies 'n' Thighs, via Gimme Coffee





Doughnuts by Dough, via Gimme Coffee

Now that Gimme has switched over to doughnuts from "Dough" in Bushwick, I have to say I like the change.  Pictured above are a blood orange doughnut (anybody else reading Tyra Banks' Modelland? If so, you'll know why I am nuts over blood orange anything), a mixed-berry doughnut, and a chocolate chip and sea salt scone.  I found them superior in flavor to the dense and sometimes greasy Pies 'n' Thighs doughnuts.  I'll still eat PnT's flavors, especially lemon poppyseed, but I'm more often in the mood for a "Dough" frosted glazed.

p.s. Pies 'n' Thighs doughnuts are good if you're looking for the "window to weight gain" pictured below:



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More Work To Be Done...

I'm trying my best to eat my way through the vendors at Smorgasburg, the local Saturday "flea market" for food. Here are some highlights of my trips there this summer:


Doughnut holes from Dough


Landhaus maple bacon on a stick


Landhaus BLT


Brooklyn Soda Works blackberry-mint artisanal soda


Nana’s (made by Cecile Dyer of Pies ’n’ Thighs) frozen banana with nuts and sea salt

Okay, so I haven't really made a dent.  Smorgasburg closes for the winter on November 20th, so there's still time for me to visit a few more times. Have you been there? What do you recommend I try?

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