CSA 2014 week 8

week 8

 

Week 8 brought us a huge amount of food. We got broccoli, several types of eggplant, zucchini, summer squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, heirloom cherry tomatoes, green peppers, green beans, an Italian pepper, blueberries, corn, lettuce, and some peaches. For our choice pick I got a hot pepper and got my parents some green beans. I also relieved the take it or leave it box of all its Japanese eggplants. The box was literally overflowing. When I read the newsletter later it said this year’s CSA was actually overvalue (ie we were getting more value than we paid for). I take that to mean it’s been a really good growing year. It’s been a pretty mild New England summer. Warm and sunny but not disgustingly hot. The only “issue” (I use the term lightly) was now I had to figure out what to do with this ginormous bounty.

In this photo is the ENTIRE share’s worth. Most week’s I post just what belongs to me and my husband but this week my parents were on vacation so I went and picked everything up and this picture is before I divvied it up.

 

cast iron stiry fry currently in the cast iron pan

 

 

Since I had a lot of misc veggies to use and also still had some basil that was wilting away in my fridge I made up a big stir fry. I made the cast iron stir fry with basil, peanuts, and avocado from, yup you guessed it, Isa Does It. Im not even gonna bother linking to it because Ive already linked to it 100 times. Really highly recommended vegan cookbook if you haven’t figured that out yet. 😉 It’s pretty basic as far as stir fries go but it has a great sauce that goes on it and then you top it with chopped peanuts and basil and AVOCADO!!! YUM!!! I love pretty much anything with avocado. I wish I lived in California just so I could get CSA avocados. I am guessing that is one thing we wont get in our CSA boxes here! 😉

This had CSA zucchini, broccoli, and green pepper in it.

 

 

 

 

toddler legs. YUM!

 

 

The next day I made something called Yakisoba from the same cookbook. I’ve never had yakisoba before but it’s basically a Japanese (?) noodle dish. Im a little confused because it’s called yakisoba and it used udon noodles instead of soba noodles but I am no expert.

In it was CSA summer squash, broccoli, and corn that I cut off the cob. I also made this on our pickup day so I steamed some of the corn we had picked up that day. YUM!!!

Also here is a photo to illustrate the joys of meal time when you have a toddler. Baby legs for dinner! Or more accurately IN your dinner!

 

 

 

 

future salsa

 

 

Not only were we getting tomatoes from our CSA box but we also have ginormous tomato plants on our deck. Our regular garden in the raised beds did AWFUL this year because of general neglect and also no sunlight but the tomatoes on the deck are exploding!!! Thanks in part to what my husband calls our patented “Piggie Gold” compost which is basically composted guinea pig poop. So I had tons of tomatoes lying around starting to go bad and my husband hates tomatoes but will eat say tomato sauce or salsa. So I made two seperate batches of salsa. One not very spicy one for me and then one spicy one with 4 small jalapenos from our garden,  the only other thing that sort of grew, for my husband. It had mostly tomatoes from our plants and then also 1-2 CSA tomatoes and a chunk of the Italian pepper which we had gotten in our box this week which when tasted tasted very similar to a regular green pepper.

 

 

 

 

blueberry muffins

 

 

 

We had a glut of blueberries. For two weeks in a row my parents let us have all the blueberries since they had picked a bunch. My husband had been asking for regular old blueberry muffins with a crumb topping kinda like you get at Dunkin Donuts so I finally made some. I don’t know exactly what happened but my crumb topping kinda slid off while it was baking. They still tasted really good though. They were really really good. Very moist and delicious.

 

 

 

 

basil eggplant over jasmine rice, zucchini ribbon salad, and fresh corn

 

 

I had relieved the “take it or leave it” box of all its eggplant so finally I got around to using it all. I also still had some basil wilting away in my frig from the previous week so I made a basil eggplant recipe from the cookbook Vegan Table.` It called for two chile peppers and I used the one long red one I picked up as my free choice for the week. We think it was a cayenne pepper. It made it a bit too spicy for my tastes. Otherwise it was quite yummy and a quick and easy recipe for dinner. On the side a great way to use up zucchini is to make a raw zucchini ribbon salad. It’s super easy and even though it sounds bland it’s actually really flavorful. The one I made was this one. It has a lot of garlic in the dressing and super flavorful. We steamed up some of our yummy yummy corn too. it was a very CSA heavy meal and quite delicious.

 

 

curried vegetable salad with tofu poboy sammich and apple slaw on the side

 

 

The last thing we made for the week before our next pick up was a curried vegetable salad with the broccoli and potatoes from our CSA and a few random potatoes that randomly sprouted up in our garden this year. We didn’t actually plant any potatoes this year but apparently we weren’t very good about getting all the ones from last year.

This was served with a tofu poboy sammich and the apple slaw went on the sammich but there was so much I had some on the side too.