week 5
Week 5 delivered a bounty to us. We got more lettuce, more beets, summer squash, zucchini, tomatoes, blueberries, corn, green beans, cucumbers, and then some new things like a green pepper, a Japanese eggplant, and a white eggplant. We got to choose two things extra out of several boxes. My dad got some wax beans and I got a purple pepper. I’ve never even seen a purple pepper before. I think I’ve seen every other color except purple. I must have lived a sheltered life. We used some of our Stillman’s bucks we had gotten with our CSA subscription to buy potatoes for my parents and more corn for me. They also had a “take it or leave it” box at the pick up location where you could leave things you have too many of or take stuff that’s in there that other people left. All that was there when we picked up our box was fennel and Swiss chard so I said a big NO THANK YOU!
pickled beets
We may have to add some beets to it in the near future. I do love the beets but we have an over abundance. Im torn between wanting to roast them and not wanting to turn my oven on. My mom pickled some of her beets and cucumbers. I haven’t tasted them yet but she gave us a jar.
yummy yummy beet greens
Since we had an overflow of beets we also had an overflow of beet greens. I ended up sauteing two weeks worth of beet greens all in one shot. I just love them with olive oil, salt, and a crap ton of garlic. My husband adds apple cider vinegar over the top of his.
bum corn
I had gotten the extra corn because I needed to take the kernels off a few cobs for a recipe and I knew we would also want to just steam and eat some. I picked a few bum ears though. That’s the problem with early season corn. Sometimes you get a few bum ears. Two of them looks like they were not ready to be picked yet, the kernels were so small and white and the third had some odd spacing in the kernels and the top had on kernels.
I still used them. I was making a recipe called Seitan Summer Saute from my Isa Does It cookbook.
Summer Seitan Saute and salad
I had made some homemade seitan in my crockpot and then used the corn kernels from my CSA corn. Even though the ears looked kind of like not the greatest the recipe tasted fantastic. I served it over jasmine rice and made some guacamole to go with it. It’s also the meal that the two weeks worth of beet greens went with and also a salad with a bunch of our CSA vegs.
pick a peck of purple peppers
To use up more of my homemade seitan and some of our ginormous amount of cucumbers I found two recipes in a book called Grills Gone Vegan. I didn’t end up actually grilling anything but I used the recipes as a basis for what to do and marinated the seitan with one of the marinade recipes from the book and sauteed some peppers and onions and made fajitas with the seitan and onions and peppers. I used two of my CSA peppers. The green one that had come in the box and the purple one I was so fascinated by. (Im easily amused obviously)
When I cut open my purple pepper it was whitish/green inside. FASCINATING!
I cut a chunk off and ate it and immediately had to text my pepper hating mother to tell her never to eat a purple pepper. It tasted very similar to a green pepper but more “dirt” like if that makes sense. If you like green peppers you will like purple peppers. I don’t have strong feelings either way.
seitan fajitas and spicy Asian cucumber salad
The peppers were quite tasty sauteed up and then put into the fajitas. I served it with a Spicy Asian cucumber salad from the same book. It used two whole cucumbers which was good since we have a refrigerator full of cucumbers. The salad was a bit too spicy for my wussy taste buds but my husband liked it.
In the very first post of my CSA blog I talked about the cost of the CSA and how doing the math out, it financially made sense for us. It is an expensive venture up front. The full share CSA was $500 and we split that between my parents and us. Seeing as not only am I vegan but I also really enjoy cooking I easily spent $30 a week on produce. I believe the CSA is supposed to run about 16 weeks depending on weather and the growing season. So for our half that works out to about $16 each week. Of course not everything you may need in a week will be in the box but this week at the grocery store I spent exactly $6.27 on produce. And that included a cantalope for $2.50 which wasnt even on my list of things I needed to buy. So if you take out the impulse cantalope I actually needed to buy $3.77 worth of produce this week. Not too shabby. Other weeks it’s more especially if I need avocados but you get the picture. And that’s not even saying anything about eating local and supporting local businesses and local farms. That’s just looking at it from a financial perspective.
Noodles in Thai Curry Sauce with Japanese and white eggplant
I still had the eggplants to deal with. My eggplant cooking experience is pretty limited. I do like eggplant but I dont like cooking it. I feel if it’s cooked well it’s really yummy and tasty and if it’s not cooked well it’s rubbery and chewy and bitter. So I usually leave the eggplant cooking up to the eggplant professionals. Also I have never cooked a Japanese or white eggplant so I didnt even know what the difference was. I did some googling to find a recipe and found a recipe for a Thai noodle curry with Japanese eggplant. I figured I would use both my Japanese eggplant and also the small white eggplant. It came out really well. I used regular basil from my basil plant. I also only had a small amount of Soba noodles in my cabinet so I added angel hair pasta to the mix.The only thing I would say is that 3 tsp of curry paste is way too little. It should be like 3 tbsp. I added a lot more curry paste. The recipe also calls for zucchini so I was able to use up some of our CSA zucchini. I saved the recipe it was really good. I will probably make it again.
beet burgers with steamed green beans
We also still had a lot of beets from the week before so I finally decided to cave in and try making beet burgers! There is a recipe for them in the Isa Does It cookbook that I was a little wary of. Burgers made of of beets sounded weird to me. I like beets but I wondered if they would be too “beety.” The process was actually quite simple though a bit messy obvious when you are shredding beets. I was totally scared to try it but was pleasantly surprised. I actually didn’t think it tasted that much like beet. It tasted like a veggie burger to me! It was quite yummy. There is also lentils and brown rice in the burger so maybe that is what keeps it from tasting “beety.” While digging through my crisper drawers looking for beets I came across some green beans I had forgotten about so we steamed up our green beans to go with the burgers.
Pelly & Penny eating corn husks and silks and Pixie is hiding in the log hut
At some point we steamed up the rest of our corn and ate that. It was better than the corn from earlier in the week but still tasted a bit of “early season” in it. The piggies also helped me dispose of some of the corn husks and silks.
We ended the week with a butt load of cucumbers, some summer squash, the blueberries, and some beets I had inadvertantly left at my parents house.
crazypiggielady 