Week eight: in which there are eggs.
Aug. 14th, 2011 03:22 pmStuff got a little busy in the last half of this week: an arts community event, the Fresh City Farms launch (which was a great party and is a great idea, and I'm trying to figure out how to support it better given that I, well, have a CSA already), night markets, birthday parties, time with friends from out of town, and standing on a corner of Kensington for an hour on Friday night talking politics and shooting the shit with friends I just ran into on said street corner. I have been Little Miss Socialite since about...Wednesday.
Which has left precious little time for cooking, or even eating at home too much. Most of these events came with outside food. Dumplings with out-of-town friend yesterday afternoon! Birthday party barbeque in the evening! Fresh City Farms veggie snacks and egg tarts on Thursday night! All very good, we must say.
But today I am back to a bepajamaed writerly self, and planning some solid kitchen time, and so here's week eight.
As memory serves, this week's share was:
2 quarts mixed greens
1 lettuce
2 cucumbers
1 zucchini
1 tomato
1 swiss chard
1 bunch rosemary
Plus a bunch of spring onions and two bulbs fresh garlic from the table, and a basket of peaches, 1 quart cherries, 2 quarts raspberries, 1 quart blue plums, and 2 quarts tomatoes from the MyMarket. And in the first half of the week, I got some solid use here. Campaign Crisper Freedom has started.
It occurred that if I was going to chop things up and put them in eggs, I could equally chop them up and put them in pasta.

No, I haven't gotten around to that camera-fixing thing yet.
It was mostly the same things, too: a clove of garlic, a spring onion bulb (really easier to just get the spring onions and have two! kinds! of onions! in one!), a garlic scape, peas, grocery-store shiitake mushrooms, a grocery-store tomato I had left over, and just some olive oil, white wine, fettucine and parmesan.
This was good. Enough that I did a reprise on Saturday, with some swiss chard and a bit of sour cream thrown in to get a little more of a sauce texture.
I will also admit that potato salad is getting to be a bit of a staple around here.

Major difference: I put green beans in this time too. It was a good plan.
The big new thing I tried this week was a giant (yes, giant) Israeli salad:

Just look at this blurry Israeli salad.
This is an internet recipe, mixed with my vague memory of the kind they make up at Sofra by my parents' house. It containeth: three cucumbers, two tomatoes, two green onions, a bell pepper, the half-bunch of parsley left over from the mango-apricot salsa, four cloves fresh garlic, olive oil, fresh lemon juice, salt, pepper, and dried mint, and then you put it on top of some mixed greens.
It was pretty good at first, but once it had sat overnight in the lemon juice and so forth, it was nice. Am still sort of picking at the leftovers of this one. It used up a lot of vegetables that needed using, but the consequence of that is that...well, there's a lot of it.
We also did some little things with the fruit: raspberry sour cream muffins (mostly now in the freezer in ziplocs for easy weekday morning breakfasts), and a couple peach/raspberry/cherry smoothies. The raspberries got used pretty quickly. There are still a few peaches left. The cherries are hanging on, but I expect to just munch them into oblivion this afternoon.
So on the whole, I did not eat out less, but the carryover isn't as bad right now. Also, I have accepted that some things have just been sitting in the fridge too long, and they are going in the green bin. This is, yes, a defeat. I will keep track of what got wasted, to remind me to Never Waste Again.
This week's contestants:
1 cauliflower
1 bunch spring onions
2 pints red potatoes
2 pints green beans
1 pint grape tomatoes
1 handful basil
6 chicken eggs
6 duck eggs
No MyMarket this week; I had somewhere to run to Wednesday evening.
I did, however, get to Sanagan's yesterday afternoon and picked up a couple duck breasts and a nice big chicken. Since they source all their meat from local farms (and I think preferentially smaller, family-run ones, and it's sustainably farmed and not hugely expensive, and also they're quite pleasant there), I think we can include things we get from Sanagan's on the farmshare scorecard.
You may note egg share has started. Egg share! I get the duck eggs this week. Next week's half dozen will belong to Dr. My Roommate, and so on until November.
Also, the spring onions were supposed to be three cobs of corn, but I still have corn from last year in my freezer, so I traded them in. I use onions consistently, week after week. I do not have to invent reasons to use onions.
I am cleaning out the fridge this afternoon -- full-on scrub and reorganization of my proprietary little shelves -- and this will mean some cooking. Current plots include roasting that chicken with rosemary and garlic and good things like that; gazpacho, which I need to bake a loaf of bread for (recipe calls for a couple slices); leafy greens-and-beans salad; come to think of it, maybe a quiche. I haven't made quiche in eleventy billion years.
I still need to figure out what to do with zucchini. I don't really like zucchini.
Which has left precious little time for cooking, or even eating at home too much. Most of these events came with outside food. Dumplings with out-of-town friend yesterday afternoon! Birthday party barbeque in the evening! Fresh City Farms veggie snacks and egg tarts on Thursday night! All very good, we must say.
But today I am back to a bepajamaed writerly self, and planning some solid kitchen time, and so here's week eight.
As memory serves, this week's share was:
2 quarts mixed greens
1 lettuce
2 cucumbers
1 zucchini
1 tomato
1 swiss chard
1 bunch rosemary
Plus a bunch of spring onions and two bulbs fresh garlic from the table, and a basket of peaches, 1 quart cherries, 2 quarts raspberries, 1 quart blue plums, and 2 quarts tomatoes from the MyMarket. And in the first half of the week, I got some solid use here. Campaign Crisper Freedom has started.
It occurred that if I was going to chop things up and put them in eggs, I could equally chop them up and put them in pasta.
No, I haven't gotten around to that camera-fixing thing yet.
It was mostly the same things, too: a clove of garlic, a spring onion bulb (really easier to just get the spring onions and have two! kinds! of onions! in one!), a garlic scape, peas, grocery-store shiitake mushrooms, a grocery-store tomato I had left over, and just some olive oil, white wine, fettucine and parmesan.
This was good. Enough that I did a reprise on Saturday, with some swiss chard and a bit of sour cream thrown in to get a little more of a sauce texture.
I will also admit that potato salad is getting to be a bit of a staple around here.
Major difference: I put green beans in this time too. It was a good plan.
The big new thing I tried this week was a giant (yes, giant) Israeli salad:
Just look at this blurry Israeli salad.
This is an internet recipe, mixed with my vague memory of the kind they make up at Sofra by my parents' house. It containeth: three cucumbers, two tomatoes, two green onions, a bell pepper, the half-bunch of parsley left over from the mango-apricot salsa, four cloves fresh garlic, olive oil, fresh lemon juice, salt, pepper, and dried mint, and then you put it on top of some mixed greens.
It was pretty good at first, but once it had sat overnight in the lemon juice and so forth, it was nice. Am still sort of picking at the leftovers of this one. It used up a lot of vegetables that needed using, but the consequence of that is that...well, there's a lot of it.
We also did some little things with the fruit: raspberry sour cream muffins (mostly now in the freezer in ziplocs for easy weekday morning breakfasts), and a couple peach/raspberry/cherry smoothies. The raspberries got used pretty quickly. There are still a few peaches left. The cherries are hanging on, but I expect to just munch them into oblivion this afternoon.
So on the whole, I did not eat out less, but the carryover isn't as bad right now. Also, I have accepted that some things have just been sitting in the fridge too long, and they are going in the green bin. This is, yes, a defeat. I will keep track of what got wasted, to remind me to Never Waste Again.
This week's contestants:
1 cauliflower
1 bunch spring onions
2 pints red potatoes
2 pints green beans
1 pint grape tomatoes
1 handful basil
6 chicken eggs
6 duck eggs
No MyMarket this week; I had somewhere to run to Wednesday evening.
I did, however, get to Sanagan's yesterday afternoon and picked up a couple duck breasts and a nice big chicken. Since they source all their meat from local farms (and I think preferentially smaller, family-run ones, and it's sustainably farmed and not hugely expensive, and also they're quite pleasant there), I think we can include things we get from Sanagan's on the farmshare scorecard.
You may note egg share has started. Egg share! I get the duck eggs this week. Next week's half dozen will belong to Dr. My Roommate, and so on until November.
Also, the spring onions were supposed to be three cobs of corn, but I still have corn from last year in my freezer, so I traded them in. I use onions consistently, week after week. I do not have to invent reasons to use onions.
I am cleaning out the fridge this afternoon -- full-on scrub and reorganization of my proprietary little shelves -- and this will mean some cooking. Current plots include roasting that chicken with rosemary and garlic and good things like that; gazpacho, which I need to bake a loaf of bread for (recipe calls for a couple slices); leafy greens-and-beans salad; come to think of it, maybe a quiche. I haven't made quiche in eleventy billion years.
I still need to figure out what to do with zucchini. I don't really like zucchini.