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Farmshare, Week Six
Jul. 25th, 2013 09:04 pmA much more interesting post for you this week! The weather broke, and so did my sicky inability to do things, and so. This week I cooked.
Last week's inventory was:
Pesto mix - basil, scapes, parsley
Beets
Mixed baby greens
Sugar snap peas
Snow peas
1 head garlic
New potatoes
Mushrooms of a type I didn't check today
1/2 dozen duck eggs
--and a whole bunch of leftovers from the Still Sick No Energy wasteland of early and mid-July. We started off easy, with salad (which I didn't photograph, because frankly you've seen all my salads already), but Sunday the fit came upon me. And I wanted to cook. A lot.
When the dust cleared, there was:
THAT'S RIGHT GARLIC SCAPES SAY MY NAME, SAY IT--
That's a lot of garlic scapes, trimmed down and put in jars and pickled for the After Times. The jar on the right is chile and rosemary, and the jar on the right is with mint, because this is an experiment and we embrace things that might taste awesome or might taste awful. The brine was pretty easy: cider vinegar, water, salt, and a bit of sugar. I don't get to taste them until six weeks after canning, so in...about five weeks we'll find out if this worked.
There was also:
Oonts oonts oonts...
I was saying I needed to find more creative things to do with beets, and I got it: beet and beet green gratin. This is a recipe I appreciate because it actually uses the whole animal: you roast the beets, blanch/saute the greens with garlic, and throw the whole thing in the oven with beaten eggs and green onions and a little bit of milk and a nice solid amount of grated cheese. This might be a keeper -- it was really, really good, with the way the cheese cuts/mellows the earthy beetiness, and it basically contains things that show up from CSA and go into my fridge anyway. And produced easy leftovers. Win!
Putting things in bread continues, too, and things on bread: I finally did something with the shell beans from Week 2 -- a shell bean and sage spread. For some reason this didn't photograph well, but it basically involved simmering said beans with sage and thyme, and then mashing the hell out of them to mix in olive oil, salt, pepper, chopped garlic, chopped onion, lemon juice, and more sage. It is Nice on Bread for a Snack, and made half my lunch (with interminable salad) for a good part of the week.
We were out for dinner more than usual this week -- Indian on a night P. had rec league and I had a volunteer meeting, within a few blocks of each other, and then yesterday afternoon we had a high tea Groupon to use before it expired, so scones scones scones -- but Tuesday night we got down to making the first 2013 potato salad:
Boil 'em mash 'em stick 'em in a stew.
The success of my potato salad recipe is directly linked to how much stuff you put in it, so: potatoes, green beans (extra-CSA; we got them at the corner fruit market because they're green beans), hardboiled duck eggs, sugar snap peas, garlic scapes, green onions, and woohoo. The potato salad wins when there is more green stuff in it than white stuff. This potato salad won.
We had it for dinner with some rosemary-white bean soup I'd made and frozen some time this spring, and then it went into more lunches. We have been eating an awful lot of leftovers this week. Which...feels all right, really. They're exceedingly fresh leftovers, and even though I work from home, I still appreciate being able to have lunch ready quick so I can keep on with what I'm working on.
This all left us with a much better handle on the inventory:
Green onions (Almost there! End in sight!)
Baby leeks
Strawberries
Shelling Peas
Garlic scapes (I kept some out of the pickling expedition for salads and stuff.)
Pesto mix - basil, scapes, parsley
Beets
Sugar snap peas
Snow peas
Garlic
Carrots
Cucumber
Mushrooms
3 duck eggs
Look at that! Only three eggs left! It's full of stars!
This week's haul, picked up not two hours back:
Red potatoes
New Zealand spinach
Slicing cucumber
Snow peas
Zucchini
Baby leeks
Garlic
Mushrooms I again didn't go identifying
1/2 dozen duck eggs
Cocoa Royale cookies
Cracker share has, as you may notice, returned after the weird stealy interruption in service. I will still fight the person who took my crackers if I meet them, but for now the nice people at the pickup have put in measures to make sure my crackers get to me. We have, after some consultation, decided to extend the cracker share from its six-week experiment stage into the rest of the season. It's a little spendy, but not as spendy as buying the same crackers retail, and what it came down to was the simple fact that...we're eating them. It's created a better/healthier baseline for snacks around the house. So: Welcome to our household, cracker share. Keep being delicious.
Initial ideas for this week are already forming: P. wants to make some roasted potatoes, I'm going to finally do those roasted garlic baby leeks, and I still need to make that Every Pea and Green Bean Cucumber Raita Salad Thing before the peas start demanding trade concessions. But I'm finding it really pleasant that I haven't had one thing spoil on me since we started this year. My waste column is at zero. Perfect batting average. That feels...really, really good.
More pictures next week. My camera shall remain vigilant.
Last week's inventory was:
Pesto mix - basil, scapes, parsley
Beets
Mixed baby greens
Sugar snap peas
Snow peas
1 head garlic
New potatoes
Mushrooms of a type I didn't check today
1/2 dozen duck eggs
--and a whole bunch of leftovers from the Still Sick No Energy wasteland of early and mid-July. We started off easy, with salad (which I didn't photograph, because frankly you've seen all my salads already), but Sunday the fit came upon me. And I wanted to cook. A lot.
When the dust cleared, there was:
THAT'S RIGHT GARLIC SCAPES SAY MY NAME, SAY IT--
That's a lot of garlic scapes, trimmed down and put in jars and pickled for the After Times. The jar on the right is chile and rosemary, and the jar on the right is with mint, because this is an experiment and we embrace things that might taste awesome or might taste awful. The brine was pretty easy: cider vinegar, water, salt, and a bit of sugar. I don't get to taste them until six weeks after canning, so in...about five weeks we'll find out if this worked.
There was also:
Oonts oonts oonts...
I was saying I needed to find more creative things to do with beets, and I got it: beet and beet green gratin. This is a recipe I appreciate because it actually uses the whole animal: you roast the beets, blanch/saute the greens with garlic, and throw the whole thing in the oven with beaten eggs and green onions and a little bit of milk and a nice solid amount of grated cheese. This might be a keeper -- it was really, really good, with the way the cheese cuts/mellows the earthy beetiness, and it basically contains things that show up from CSA and go into my fridge anyway. And produced easy leftovers. Win!
Putting things in bread continues, too, and things on bread: I finally did something with the shell beans from Week 2 -- a shell bean and sage spread. For some reason this didn't photograph well, but it basically involved simmering said beans with sage and thyme, and then mashing the hell out of them to mix in olive oil, salt, pepper, chopped garlic, chopped onion, lemon juice, and more sage. It is Nice on Bread for a Snack, and made half my lunch (with interminable salad) for a good part of the week.
We were out for dinner more than usual this week -- Indian on a night P. had rec league and I had a volunteer meeting, within a few blocks of each other, and then yesterday afternoon we had a high tea Groupon to use before it expired, so scones scones scones -- but Tuesday night we got down to making the first 2013 potato salad:
Boil 'em mash 'em stick 'em in a stew.
The success of my potato salad recipe is directly linked to how much stuff you put in it, so: potatoes, green beans (extra-CSA; we got them at the corner fruit market because they're green beans), hardboiled duck eggs, sugar snap peas, garlic scapes, green onions, and woohoo. The potato salad wins when there is more green stuff in it than white stuff. This potato salad won.
We had it for dinner with some rosemary-white bean soup I'd made and frozen some time this spring, and then it went into more lunches. We have been eating an awful lot of leftovers this week. Which...feels all right, really. They're exceedingly fresh leftovers, and even though I work from home, I still appreciate being able to have lunch ready quick so I can keep on with what I'm working on.
This all left us with a much better handle on the inventory:
Green onions (Almost there! End in sight!)
Baby leeks
Strawberries
Shelling Peas
Garlic scapes (I kept some out of the pickling expedition for salads and stuff.)
Pesto mix - basil, scapes, parsley
Beets
Sugar snap peas
Snow peas
Garlic
Carrots
Cucumber
Mushrooms
3 duck eggs
Look at that! Only three eggs left! It's full of stars!
This week's haul, picked up not two hours back:
Red potatoes
New Zealand spinach
Slicing cucumber
Snow peas
Zucchini
Baby leeks
Garlic
Mushrooms I again didn't go identifying
1/2 dozen duck eggs
Cocoa Royale cookies
Cracker share has, as you may notice, returned after the weird stealy interruption in service. I will still fight the person who took my crackers if I meet them, but for now the nice people at the pickup have put in measures to make sure my crackers get to me. We have, after some consultation, decided to extend the cracker share from its six-week experiment stage into the rest of the season. It's a little spendy, but not as spendy as buying the same crackers retail, and what it came down to was the simple fact that...we're eating them. It's created a better/healthier baseline for snacks around the house. So: Welcome to our household, cracker share. Keep being delicious.
Initial ideas for this week are already forming: P. wants to make some roasted potatoes, I'm going to finally do those roasted garlic baby leeks, and I still need to make that Every Pea and Green Bean Cucumber Raita Salad Thing before the peas start demanding trade concessions. But I'm finding it really pleasant that I haven't had one thing spoil on me since we started this year. My waste column is at zero. Perfect batting average. That feels...really, really good.
More pictures next week. My camera shall remain vigilant.
