Drowning Nor Waving

I swear I will get back to Thursday afternoons on this. The combination of being full-out on revisions, in the don't-get-dressed-or-go-out way, and me just crashing into bed hard last night spiked the post. But! We are cooking!

I just don't seem to have taken a lot of pictures of it.

Last week's box was:

Swiss chard
Red potatoes
Parsley
Grape tomatoes
Leek
Yellow beans
Mixed greens

Mushrooms
12 duck eggs
Whole grain pancake mix

And the temperature's been doing that slow dive into fall, so we've been cooking warm things. Thursday night's dinner was beef chili, with some last-year dried farmshare beans and two weeks' worth of mushrooms, and what was actually a really epic salad:


Sometimes you just elevate the form.

This was the lettuce from last week, grape tomatoes, shelling beans, this week's mushrooms (P. is calling them pasta mushrooms; they could be al dente pasta, just very delicious and in vegetable form), green onions from the store, and chopped dates. And a little bit of fancy salt, I think. It was...yeah. Wow.

I mean, we do a lot of salads around here, but. That was something. FYI, salt + dates = something good, always.

That was also the night we learned that when you make a peach crisp and put all kinds of coconut in it, that's a good life choice.

Another something that was stupidly good: We took some swiss chard and made a quiche with it.


This is a different salad. Actually, we treated the salad bowl like a communal soup pot all week, and just kept adding things every night.

Swiss chard is one of my problem child greens -- it's just a little too bitter for most of my leafy greens solutions -- but we had lots of eggs, and I'd made that beet quiche a few weeks back, so the thought occurred. We did something very specifically right with this recipe, and it was on a whim: we put a handful of chopped sundried tomatoes in.

They were kind of sweet and salty and savory, and it just balanced everything out into stupid perfection. Italian sundried tomatoes I got at the cheese store to have a high enough total to use debit 'cause I was out of cash? You are today's hero.

We got our first full-grown leek of the year this week too, so. Potato-leek soup:


Looks boring, tastes awesome.

This is one of my staple foods for Getting Rid of Farmshare Groceries. Luckily, P. kind of loves it. We'd eaten the last container of frozen-in-early-spring soup for dinner Friday night, and kind of wanted fresh, so we made a big pot Tuesday night with our leek and all the potatoes, and all the parsley, and some of the rosemary. It was basically that, a bay leaf, some pepper, and water, and it turned out really hearty in a solid way, and just...nice. We also melted some smoked gouda into it, for a little more body. Good life choice!

And the last notable thing I didn't take pictures of is that yesterday morning, we tried the cracker share pancake mix. To, ironically, mixed results.

The blend of grains itself is really nice: it's buckwheat and red fife and cornmeal and stuff and things and evaporated cane juice instead of sugar, and it tastes like something that has nutrition. We followed the recipe on the back -- add two eggs and a two cups of milk, fire away -- and maybe it was that we halved it, and maybe it's that we were really skimping on butter because we had thismuch left, but...

Wow runny. Really, really runny. To the point where it scorched a bit in some places, didn't cook through in others, and turned into scrapy fail pancakes.

Which were very tasty, but. Peachy tasty shame.

We have more butter now. I'm going to give this another run sometime this week, and see if I can't get that batter consistency a little thicker and better.

And...here's a picture of squirrels, since I didn't take pictures of food this week:



They live in our back yard. They're friends.

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So what's left in the aftermath:

Cauliflower (still that last smidge)
Rosemary
Beets
Shelling beans
New Zealand spinach
Spicy dal crackers
Swiss chard
Yellow beans
Weirdly delicious white mushrooms
6 duck eggs
Pancake mix (shaaaame!)

And this week's takings:

Basil
Sweet corn (4)
Mixed baby greens
Winter squash
Kale
Hot pepper
Fingerling potatoes
Cucumber

Mushrooms
Cheddar crackers

We have made a good head start on this -- tonight's dinner especially was just really kickass -- but I have notions of corn chowder and kale-cucumber fakeout seaweed salad (improvised once, with Dr. My Roommate, two years-plus ago, and so I know it can be done). The hot pepper has been claimed by P., and I don't know what he plans to do with it. I do know what he plans for the squash, which is squash curry -- he made it for a friend's housewarming once and it sounds amazing.

A lot of the rest will depend on what we pick up in Kensington tomorrow. We are out of oatmeal and cheese and meat and raisins, and I badly want to roast a chicken, and it is time to go to the market.

And really, I will try to get this back onto Thursdays next week.

On time, this week! But sadly, probably boring: This has not been a big cooking week. Last week's big question was what I'd do in the kitchen, having been returned to my single-ish ways, and the answer is apparently "Eat leftovers."

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Last week's takings were:

Sweet pepper
Red potatoes
Green and yellow beans
Mixed greens
Sweet corn
Rosemary
Spanish onions

Mushrooms
1/2 dozen duck eggs
Spelt crackers

-- and they have been used somewhat unevenly. Saturday night we cooked a mega-ultra-ridicu-meal. And were eating it for days after.


BEHOLD THE PINKNESS OF MY SOUP.

The Jem-coloured soup is the summer borscht I mentioned a bit back, with some slight modifications (as in, no recipe needs that much sour cream, thank you very much, and I am speaking as a charter member of the I Love Sour Cream Society).

So, having probably halved (at least) the sour cream? It was good.

The next day, though? It was delicious.

It also made about 9836720893469243857234 servings, so I just kept ladling it out of my big mixing bowl, and I think I ate it until Tuesday. The potato salad, seen right beside it, was likewise giant, and lasted just as long. Five hard-boiled duck eggs and a whole week's worth of potatoes in that thing, people.


Angels, guys. Choir of angels.

P. also made us banana boats, since he is the best person ever.


I have one pancake recipe, but damn, it's all I need.

In the spirit of returning that favour, and because we had one (1) good peach left, I made pancakes for breakfast Monday morning. These were experimental, and contain said peach, chopped; what blueberries were also left over in the fridge; coconut flakes.

The concept here is really, really good; thing is, it needs more than one (1) peach. I have a new basket of peaches (!!!) that I picked up from the fruit market on my way home tonight, and we're going to re-run this piece of science later this week. Maybe next Monday, when said P. will be returned to me, just more jet-lagged.

I did do some cooking Tuesday as well, when the leftover parade ran out: a loaf of bread with the rosemary from last week's share and mushroom-leafy greens quiche.


There were like six pieces this size.

One of the good things about this summer's experiment is that I finally remembered how quiche is basically the easiest dinner. I have eggs, I have cheese, I have plant matter. Go!

This one has one of the Spanish onions from last week; most of last week's mushrooms; and, in place of the usual spinach, some Swiss chard and the beet greens that were left after the borscht affair. Duck eggs make good quiches: they taste like more, somehow. And they make big quiches, so I basically ate this Tuesday, yesterday, this afternoon for lunch.

Right. That's what I do when I'm living just-me. I still cook, but I eat boringly.

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So, needless to say the leftovers pile got bigger in Make Big Things And Eat Them Forever Week:

Pesto Mix - garlic scapes
Swiss chard
Cauliflower (miniscule amount)
Sweet corn (six)
Sweet pepper
Red potatoes
Green and yellow beans
Mixed greens
Rosemary
Spanish onion
Mushrooms (just a bit left here)
1/2 dozen duck eggs
Red fife crackers (thought these were spelt last week; I was wrong)

And this week is:

Beets
Carrots
Shelling beans
Grape tomatoes
Lettuce
Cucumber
New Zealand spinach (which is what I traded for the more corn I was supposed to get, because dammit, corn!)

Mushrooms
1/2 dozen duck eggs
Spicy dal crackers

Wildflower honey

So I've been really good about not doing too much trading this year -- the CSA is usually cool about doing trades if you keep it to one item a week -- but...corn. Already so much of it. I could not take home five more in any good conscience, and salad greens are always welcome in this house.

The honey was a lucky break: They don't always have it, and this is the week we inexplicably ran out of all of ours (I mean, we had three jars in progress: buckwheat, dandelion, and rosemary). It's a half-litre, and should keep us covered for a decent while.

First thoughts: Beets! I don't know when beets became my friend, but beets. Beets! Also, I'm glad the dal crackers are back. I missed those.

And tonight I have gotten takeout, because if I don't I will wake up from my scary protein-lust fugue state in a field somewhere, surrounded by the disembodied remnants of innocent cows.

Um. I'm gonna take care of that protein thing now. Later, guys.

We ate a lot of vegetables this week. We are in the running for the Vegetarian Life Achievement Award, which is the award I just made up for people who eat so many damn vegetables that they cooked themselves.

For you, readers, I have pictures.

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Last week's inventory was:

New Zealand spinach
Red potatoes
Cucumber
Red potatoes
Yellow beans
Pickling cucumbers
Swiss chard
Dill

Lobster mushrooms
1/2 dozen duck eggs
Whole grain oat cakes

We basically commenced destroying almost immediately.


I have no idea why that first picture is so blurry.

This was a joint and deliberate effort: What could we do to kill off some CSA backlog? P. made the roasted potatoes and carrots (contains: rosemary, a bit of olive oil, and some of those herbes de Provence I filched for bread the other week) and I did up a quick New Zealand spinach-cucumber-green bean salad, and then the sausages were sausages, and the cherry crisp was cherry crisp. Pitting cherries in front of Black Adder Goes Forth is fun. Ice cream from Greg's on top is funner.

Friday we did something lighter, for a reason that I'm not remembering at the moment (late lunches?):


Thus began a rather surprising streak of vegetarianism.

These are honey roasted potatoes, which were nice but nothing to write home about, really, and a slightly modified raita salad -- we threw in sugar snap peas and green beans along with the cucumber because reasons. This, I think, I'll make again: the raisins and garlic and yogourt combine to this really nice, spicy-sweet-smooth thing, and also cucumbers. I really, really love cucumbers.

I seem to have missed photographing Sunday's festivities (potato curry, courtesy P.), but since it was a long weekend, we had the luxury of Monday morning breakfast:


Basically this is how I wish I could start all my days.

Since we didn't have much fruit left after the cherry adventure (still don't, actually), we kind of used what was at hand for the pancakes, and thus were Cinnamon Banana Chocolate Chip Pancakes Where the Bananas Are Sliced In invented. I thought this was going to be a cluster. They were great.

The greens are just more New Zealand spinach and some of those green beans again -- we've been whittling them down all week -- and some dressing P. did up with balsamic vinegar and buckwheat honey.

I was sugar high off this until at least five in the evening.

Since it was a holiday Monday, we did some puttering in the kitchen: cinnamon raisin bread, and a zucchini orange loaf (I don't like zucchini, but encasing it in cake improves that situation), and what I feel was the serious win of the week.


I cannot convey just what you're looking at with these beets here.

I said a few weeks ago I needed new and interesting things to do with beets, and this was one of the things I googled up: brown sugar-glazed beets. My personal preference was actually to try a summer borscht thingie, which may be on the docket for this week, but P. voted for glazed and I am so glad he did.

Because whoa.

It's a really simple recipe: steam some beets, cut 'em up, stick 'em in a pan with some butter and sugar and orange juice (conveniently, the juice of the honey tangerine we bought to zest for the zucchini loaf. Use the whole animal!). Stir them until your liquid has turned into deliciousness.

I licked the plate. And then the serving bowl. And then I asked P. if he was using his plate, and he went "Yes, hands off."

Beets, I am suddenly in love with you.

Tuesday night's dinner was not as wildly successful:


This actually does not do the thing credit: There were more veggies in it than are visible.

Last week sevenravens suggested a Swiss chard garlic pasta as a destination for the Swiss chard we found ourselves suddenly owning. I'm not sure if I didn't balance the ingredients right, because we did cut the recipe in half (we are not four to six people), but this just didn't cohere for me: you had salty flavours (feta, olives) and garlicky flavours, and sweet currant flavours, and they mostly seemed to stare at each other. And as they say on Iron Chef, I don't feel like chard was the star of this dish.

This may also have to do with my infamously low bar for too salty. I dunno.

It was actually better in leftovers the next day. But this one didn't quite fly for us. Ah, well.

Aside from what P. termed "Fail Eggs" for breakfast yesterday (and bah, they were delicious: all brie and basil and spinach and garlic and rosemary) we kind of just took it easy: pierogies and a quick cucumber-dill-rice vinegar salad that mrissa mentioned as a standby at her place.


This more resembles our pre-CSA dinners.

In a fit of genius we also took some of the cocoa and buckwheat cookies from cracker share the other week, put our vanilla ice cream between them, and had baby ice cream sandwiches for dessert. There are no pictures of this. Eating happened too fast.

At that point we basically realized we'd done a whole week vegetarian, without...really noticing. Maybe this is how you slide into vegetarianism: There just keep being potatoes to use up.

---

Leftovers have been vastly, vastly reduced:

Garlic scapes
Pesto mix - basil, scapes, parsley
Garlic
9 duck eggs
Cocoa Royale cookies
New Zealand spinach
Red potatoes
Cucumber
Yellow beans
Dill
Lobster mushrooms
Whole grain oat cakes

Nothing on that list has gone untouched, too: it's all bits and bobs of stuff left over. I'm all we have fought the whirlwind.

And this week brings us:

Slicing cucumber
Sweet pepper
Beets
Swiss chard
Garlic
New potatoes
Cauliflower
Sweet corn

Lobster mushrooms
1/2 dozen duck eggs
Cheddar paprika crackers

Green onions we bought as extra because apparently I have Stockholm Syndrome for green onions now.

Initial thoughts: I think I want to try that summer borscht now; everything for it is already in my house and beeeeeeets. I also want a bit of a mulligan on Swiss chard recipes, and will have to go digging. And given amount of potatoes, beans, etc., a Nicoise salad may be in order.

I have no idea what to do with sweet corn, and thoughts past "boil it!" appreciated.

...I am finding it more and more interesting, also, that I don't like that is sort of expunging itself from my vocabulary. I don't particularly like zucchini. Or chard. Or corn. Or a few other things we'll get more of later on. And...the focus in my head seems to have shifted, definitively, to well, what can we make that will make it delicious?

This is an interesting outgrowth of the Iron Chef experiment; kind of a wanted one, actually. And...it actually feels really good.

A 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.

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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.

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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.

...on the whole, a wash.  It was Friday evening I got sick, right at the beginning of the groceries calendar week, and life has been mostly wonton soup and rice ever since (although that's improving rapidly today, to the point where I'm actually planning a proper dinner for tonight).

But I did make like one thing, so we'll duly record.

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Last week's load was:

Baby leeks
Strawberries
Sugar snap peas
Lettuce
Garlic scapes
Herbs (I think thyme?)
One lonely rhubarb

Chanterelle mushrooms
1/2 dozen duck eggs
Rye and currant crackers

-- and aside from the crackers, which came incredibly in handy when what I needed was flat plain things to eat, very little got off the ground. But I did start the week off right: By looking at all the garlic scapes invading my fridge and promptly making pesto.



Big pesto! Smaller individual potion!

So it happens that if you take ten thousand okay eight or nine garlic scapes, and blend them with some parmesan, walnuts, olive oil, pepper, and a bit of lemon juice, you get garlic pesto. Which is delicious; also like being punched in the mouth by someone wearing garlic-clove brass knuckles. I can only recommend eating this dish as a couple, because then at least you won't be bothering each other with the resultant vampire breath.

There are chanterelle mushrooms in this because Reasons.

We also did salad for that one:


There is nothing interesting about this salad, really.

And then I got sick and, while P. made me some scrambled eggs and a neat little green onion-duck egg omelette for himself the other day, that was mostly it.

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We do have this week's groceries: Luckily, for the days I can't get out to the pickup (and P. can't get out of the office for the window) there is an awesome green delivery company, basically one cool lady and her cargo bike, which has a standing offer to bring you your share for about eight bucks.

So our leftovers just went huge due to the week of inactivity:

Those damned shell beans
Green onions
9 duck eggs
Baby leeks
Strawberries
Sugar snap peas
1/2 a head lettuce
Garlic scapes (there were inexplicably still some left)
Herbs (thyme or savory; one of those)
One lonely rhubarb
1/3 bag chanterelle mushrooms
1/3 bag rye and currant crackers

Plus this week's load:

1 Dancine lettuce
Rhubarb (damn. I already quit you.)
1 quart mixed baby greens
Snow peas
Sugar snap peas
Shelling Peas
1 Leaf lettuce
Garlic Scapes (my old nemesis.)
Beets

Black mushrooms, either chanterelles or oysters?
1/2 dozen duck eggs
(No crackers this week for some reason I will investigate in person next week.)

I'm starting to stick together tonight's dinner (quiche), and if my stomach keeps accepting solid food, even if cautiously, I feel like we should be able to catch up on all that.

Hell, if not, I'll have some people over for dinner. Hey friends: Come eat my produce.

And I'm still doing that thingie with the baby leeks.

It is CSA day!  I am posting on CSA day!  A little late, mind, since there was a birthday party to attend tonight, but nonetheless this is two solid weeks of actual reportage.  Shocking.

---

As you may recall, last week's spoils were:

1 Dancine Lettuce
1 bunch assorted herbs
1 quart baby greens
1 bunch asparagus
1 bunch green Onions
1 bunch rhubarb
1 pint black shell beans

1/2 pound chanterelle mushrooms
1/2 dozen duck eggs
Pumpkin/sesame seed red fife crackers

--and while we are not as far through that as we were with Week 1 (due partially to it being stupid, stupid hot out most of the week and not really wanting to cook because it made heat), we have done credibly, if not always well.




I look all pink and delicious, don't I?


This is where most of the rhubarb went: Week 1's, and over half of Week 2's, and then most of the asparagus and some green onion bulbs besides.  In fact, it made me feel downright housewifeian: Two pots going on the stove while I made croutons with some home-baked bread in the oven, and a whole timing thing that only worked out because P. made it in the door with the baby spinach just in time.

Alas, that for all that work, it wasn't very good.

I mean, it wasn't terrible: It just wasn't very good.  It had a strong rhubarb and slightly onion flavour that wanted for roundness and depth.  We dumped a bunch of Parmesan cheese in it to attempt rescue, ate our dinner, and kind of learned our lesson on that one.  Pink soup, you were meh.  We will not make you again.

Rhubarb failure continued with Friday's breakfast, rhubarb and blackberry french toast (we had decided we needed to start using eggs already).  This is not pictured, because I cannot be assed to photograph my food when I've just rolled out of bed, but P. apologized for it and deemed it FailToast, so I gather he was not happy with his creation.  Rhubarb is not kind, guys.  Also, when we're using French bread for this, we will henceforth use more eggs.

Things picked up Saturday night, which is also, sadly unphotographed.  Having worked a hot long day at the bookstore, I came home and promptly passed out face down for a nap, and P. put together a really very good stirfry out of the rest of the asparagus, green onion, green garlic, chanterelle mushrooms, baby bok choy (last of that fruit market stuff!) and some tamarind, oyster sauce, etc.  It was basically a veggies cleanout, and it was delicious because my head hurt and I was starving and yum.

The other thing we learned that night is that pink grapefruit drizzled with a touch of buckwheat honey is basically the best thing on earth.  Guh.

Then on Sunday we went to our local for brunch and didn't cook some more.  Here's my best-beloved P. performing the typical behaviour of his species while I harass him with a camera because he just looked very sweet that day.




Serious tea is serious.


By the time we got back to cooking food it was Tuesday, and we had some eggs to use like a mofo, so I baked some green onion bread and made fancy egg salad (a whole whack of duck eggs, green onion, green garlic, mayo, honey, capers, and some of the herbs from the Week 2 batch).



Open-faced sandwiches seem to be a thing now. Also, salad is good.  And I don't know why the cow looks like he's coming out of my sandwich.

The egg salad sandwich was another of those eight-minute super simple things that tasted really, really good: We piled some baby greens and tomato on top of those suckers and it was pretty much done.  The salad, which is what we did with the Dancine lettuce, the rest of the black morels, some chanterelle mushrooms, and a bunch of the baby greens -- plus some almonds and strawberries that were fading -- was also nice and cold and pretty simple.  I still have a bit left in the fridge.



The laziest dinner.

Since we were continuing all lazy and leftovery: In going through the fridge earlier this week I discovered, among the various frozen food things my roommate left behind when she moved, a package of Loblaws hamburgers.  And well, they were frozen, and they were there, so we thawed them and Wednesday's dinner was hamburger time.

This did actually manage to use CSA food: the rest of the baby greens, more of the interminable green onions and garlic, and that's the last of the chanterelles up there caramelized, with some red onion.  The ketchup is actually CSA too: Made by one of the farm families and bought as an extra in Week 1.  The mustard isn't, but it's locally made at a preserves store in Kensington Market, and was worth the five bucks, as it is amazing.

Hamburgers themselves: strictly okay.  Toppings?  Awesome.  Next time we want burgers I'll just get some ground beef and make them, instead of eating things my roommate left in the freezer because they are there and free.

Dessert, however, was a highlight:



Heh heh.

Just some fruit that was about to go: mango, apricot, strawberries, and blueberries.  But I also poured some Chartreuse in, and let it soak for a while.  And...yo.  Also: Damn.

The crackers, again, got eaten in and around things.  There is no photo evidence of them as yet.  But they were good.

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So for a kind of lazyfaced, too hot, low-maintenance week, we didn't do too badly.

The leftovers:

Assorted herbs
1/2 bunch of green onions
2 or 3 pieces of rhubarb
Shell beans, which I didn't even touch
1/2 dozen duck eggs

--and our provisions for Week 3:

10 Garlic Scapes
6 pieces Rhubarb
1 quart strawberries
Green Onions
Lettuce
Dill

1/2 dozen duck eggs
Oyster mushrooms
Cheddar, paprika, and spelt crackers

Goat milk cheddar, which was not included in our share, but they had some there and the price was right.

We are thinking fish.  And something to do with that damnable rhubarb that'll probably involve caving and making a pie.

And that has been This Week in Local Eating!

September 4, 2012 Progress Notes:

On Roadstead Farm

Words today: 500.
Words total: 35,400 (wrong).
Reason for stopping: Bed.

Motivational Threat of the Day: None. I should start bugging people for them.

Darling du Jour: We'd sent for the Blakelys, and we got all of them. Everyone except the sheep.
Mean Things: Battlefield surgery. The fact that we needed that battlefield surgery like whoa.

Research Roundup: Parts of a feather.
Books in progress: Sean Stewart, The Night Watch

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It having been Labour Day weekend, I didn't do any labour. Instead P. and I went to the CNE and rode the Ferris wheel and ate deep-fried butter. And then I took some nice naps.

However, it is no longer Labour Day, so: words. And a CSA pickup this evening, walking through the rain down to Dufferin and College, and then back. The CSA had smoked ducks this week, so now I have a smoked duck.

Tomorrow is going to be a fine, fine day. :)

Week one! In retrospect, I ate out of doors a lot this week: a combination of NXNE, and it being very hot out, and preexisting food plans with friends, and having errands to run all over the city. This means I didn't do a bucket of cooking, but what I did I'm really happy with.

As we recall, we started with:

4 stalks rhubarb
1 head lettuce
1 quart field greens
1 quart jerusalem artichokes
1 kale
1 bunch spring onions
1 bunch beets
6 duck eggs
6 chicken eggs
1/2 pound chanterelle mushrooms

And bought as extras:

1 bunch asparagus
1 bunch carrots

...and bought, the next day, from the Bloor-Borden farmers' market:

1 jar wildflower honey
1 pint strawberries
1 pint raspberries
2 bunches spinach that are giant and lovely and ohgodspinachIloveyou
1 rack lamb
1 pint cherry tomatoes

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This week was mostly good for salads as big as your face.

Salad, face-sized.

This one was Wednesday's dinner: that tiny head of lettuce, a 1/2 pint field greens, spring onions, strawberries, chanterelle mushrooms, a mead vinaigrette, and a bit of chevre on top. I did some even better ones, involving the rest of the field greens and getting into the spinach, later on into the week.

This was also a good week for Things We Put Vegetables In. For example, sauteeing a bunch of vegetables and putting them in pasta! Or sauteeing a bunch of vegetables and putting them in scrambled eggs, even better when the eggs are duck eggs (and I think I will be putting kale in omelettes in future, too; that was a good call).

I feel like I'm using the egg share a little smarter already, too: the scrambled eggs, which I needed very badly after four days of NXNE, used up four duck eggs; two more were hard-boiled and just eaten cold with my salads, to get some protein into the meal. And some of the chicken eggs went to a batch of avgolemono Friday night, when I also needed protein very badly. Last year I kept finding myself with leftover eggs every week, which just built and built. So far, I've used nearly my full dozen in the week this time around.

I find I'm already snacking better, too. Some of those cherry tomatoes, I just ate with a little salt. And the raspberries never really went into anything except my mouth.

I will take mo' better pictures this week.

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Which brings us to the Week Two batch, picked up last night:

5 rhubarbs
1 pint field greens
1 lettuce (bigger)
1 pint peas (woot woot)
1 bunch oregano
1 pint strawberries
12 garlic scapes

6 duck eggs
6 chicken eggs
morel mushrooms (!!!)

--and some shiitake mushrooms I found at the little market on Brunswick and wheedled my way into getting to buy.

I'm not going to the Bloor-Borden market this week: I kind of want more of those tomatoes, but I have a lot of perishable veggies in the fridge, and at this point buying more would be an eyes-bigger-than-stomach situation. And also, before meeting sora_blue for cold noodles in Kensington last night, I ducked into the cheese store and got five or six kinds of cheese, so I'm probably in business for a while here.

Check back next Wednesday, when Dr. Strangepork asks: Will she actually make strawberry-rhubarb pie, or just talk about making it?

June 12, 2012 Progress Notes:

"Wild Card"

Words today: 1400.
Words total: 4900.
Reason for stopping: It's midnight, and I was hit-the-ground-running by ten this morning, so I am kind of tired and going to bed to read noir books.

Books in progress: Ross Macdonald, The Galton Case.

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Among other things, today was the first day of summer CSA (and the crowd cheers: CSA! CSA!). That means the season of fridge austerity, when I tried to eat my freezer soup and not buy groceries for a week or so, is now over, to be replaced by the season of:

4 stalks rhubarb
1 head lettuce
1 quart field greens
1 quart jerusalem artichokes
1 kale
1 bunch spring onions
1 bunch beets
6 duck eggs
6 chicken eggs
1/2 pound chanterelle mushrooms

And bought as extras:

1 bunch asparagus
1 bunch carrots

Yes, we are going to attempt CSA blogging again. Let's see if my attention span and my camera software hold out this time.

And...go!

April 19, 2012 Progress Notes:

On Roadstead Farm

Words today: 300.
Words total: 22,250.
Reason for stopping: This is not a day that has been cooperating with me, and I have to head out to a prior commmitment. Back to this when I get home, maybe.

Darling du Jour: N/A.

Words Hallie Won't Admit to Knowing: N/A.
Mean Things: The inability to get uninterrupted work done.

Research Roundup: Hydrangea, and whether it grows in Michigan.
Books in progress: Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go

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This afternoon's lunch: spinach salad, with slivered daikon, strawberries, mushrooms, horseradish cheddar, and mead vinaigrette; grapefruit eucalyptus tea; carrot cake; small sweet clementines. It was a ridiculously late lunch, but it made up for that by being good. I've had a frustrating couple of days, and I'm minded to talk about good things instead.

Okay, consider this a bit of a placeholder. I might add a couple hundred more sometime ridiculously late tonight.