Week 3

We are thoroughly enjoying our adventures with our CSA share. Up until this point, I have been just adding the greens to basically everything (salad, sandwiches, etc.) and eating the turnips and radishes raw or in salads. I haven't tried an actual recipe until today. We just had Braised Mixed Greens for dinner and it was a success! Everyone, including our littlest one, finished their meal and Brian (who is not normally a fan of vegetarian meals) even had seconds. The recipe is as follows:

Braised Mixed Greens

1 tbsp olive oil, plus extra for finishing

1 small onion, finely diced

2 garlic cloves, 1 slivered, 1 halved

1 lb greens, such as chard, broccoli rabe, spinach, kale, washed and chopped

A few leaves or a few handfuls of sorrel, 5 or 6 lovage leaves or a handful of chopped cilantro and parsley

Sea salt and freshly ground pepper

1 ½ cups cooked beans (borlotti, cannelloni, etc), home cooked or canned

3 to 4 slices chewy country bread

Shaved parmesan or crumbled gorgonzola

1. Heat the oil in a large skillet or Dutch over. Add the onion and cook over medium high heat, stirring occasionally. Once the onion starts to soften a bit, after 3 or 4 minutes, add the slivered garlic. Cook for a minute more, then add the greens and any herbs. Season with ½ teaspoon salt.

2. As the greens cook down, turn them in the pan to bring the ones on top closer to the heat. Once they've all collapsed, add ½ cup water or bean broth, lower the heat and cook. Partially covered, until tender. Depending on the greens as long as 20. Just make sure there is some liquid in the pan for sauce. When the greens are done, add the beans, heat them through, then taste for salt and season with pepper.

3. Toast the bread and rub it with the halved garlic. Arrange on plates and spoon on the greens and beans. Drizzle with olive oil. Garnish with the cheese, if using, and serve.

Serves 3 – 4

This recipe is from Vegetarian Suppers from Deborah Madison's Kitchen also the source of the Wine Braised Lentils. A terrific book, it also has a lot of vegan options.

When I made this, I used:
-a combination of broccoli rabe, kale, and braising greens
-1 15 oz. can of pinto beans
- an extra garlic clove chopped
-garlic infused olive oil to brush on the bread before toasting

We also tried making kale chips today and they were a big hit, although a little too salty!

One of the best things about joining a CSA for us has been eating vegetables we never would have bought at the store and exposing our girls to the farm, the veggies, and the story of how they make it from a seed to our plate! It is a ton of fun for me to experiment with the cooking as well!

Week 3 - We love kale!!

This week we got all-star lettuce mix, braising mix, lacinato kale, salad turnips, brocolli rabe, and a double serving of spinach because we couldn't have peas (thanks Isabelle Farms for accommodating our legume allergy!).

I'm starting to get the hang of this - it isn't feeling too much like iron chef anymore because I know each week I'll need some basics (olive oil, garlic, onions, lemons, a slice or two of bacon) and from that I can make almost anything that gets thrown my way (that and I repeated some recipes this week that my family liked). This week completely rocked!

• all-star lettuce mix was used with some cherries, almonds, and basil-sage-tarragon dressing
• I bought some garlic scapes (so funny, 3 weeks ago I had no idea what to do with them and now I'm buying them on my own) and substituted the braising mix for spinach in our stand-by Garlic Scape Soup
• This week, we tried Baked Kale Chips - easy, awesome, delicious. I cannot wait to get kale again!!!
• I used the salad turnips as a side for the Garlic Scape Soup and made White Turnip Salad with Bacon and Pecans again. I realized that I don't quite follow the recipe - I use all the turnips we had (about 8 white salad turnips), don't use onion, and pour off most of the bacon grease. But it is still a family favorite.
• Finally I used the Cooks Illustrated suggested boil and saute recipe for the Broccoli Rabe - it was okay, but not fabulous. I will keep researching....
• The spinach, I went with our stand-by Cooks Illustrated way of cooking spinach. I served one bunch for dinner and another bunch with breakfast (yum! I should do that more often).

Week 2 - Oops

For week 2, I was traveling on business, but my partner was able to pick up our share (broccoli rabe, butter lettuce, arugula, radishes, kale, garlic scapes). He then put the entire share in the fridge - in the bag he picked it up in. When I returned 2 days after the share pick-up, everything was wilted and not looking like it was in good shape. I usually don't think much about how to keep veggies because we eat them pretty quickly... I usually just throw things in the crisper - with the exception of asparagus that I treat like fresh cut flowers (cut a little off the bottom, put in a jar with some water, and keep in the fridge). But now I'm going to be more mindful of how to keep the vegetables.

Fortunately, my neighbor told me about a neat trick - put wilted vegetables in cold water with ice cubes to make it perk up. The broccoli rabe could not be saved, but we were able to use everything else.

I had some failures this week - Radish chips were soggy and not very good. The garlic scape pesto was a little too peppy (maybe it needed more cheese?) and overpowered everything. And the kale cooked like the Cooks Illustrated Best Recipes recommended wasn't very flavorful. But I did have some successes....

• The Open-Faced Prosciutto and Plum Sandwiches were awesome! The arugula really gave it a nice flavor.
• How can you go wrong with a nice butter lettuce salad?

Week 1 - It's like Iron Chef

So we just finished Week 1 of our CSA with Isabelle Farm - it feels a little bit like the show Iron Chef. We get a newsletter at night the day before pick-up telling us what our share is - not quite the ideal time to figure out what to do with the share or go grocery shopping to supplement what we already bought during the weekend.... So we can either figure out how to fit another trip to the grocery store between work and childcare or we can do with what we have in the house to make it work.

For Week 1, we received Kale/Collards (aka Bunching Greens), Lettuce Mix, Spinach, Radishes, Garlic Scapes, and Turnips Greens w/ Baby Salad Turnips.

My goals for participating in the CSA were definitely met this week - we joined so we could: (1) increase our vegetable intake; (2) diversify our vegetable intake; and (3) diversify my cooking repertoire. Once we received the newsletter with the week's list of veggies, I started searching for recipes. This week we used:

• Garlic Scape Soup (the entire family - including a 4 year old, who loves diverse foods - loved it)
• Spinach Pie (but instead of frozen spinach, we used fresh spinach and the Cooks Illustrated way of cooking the spinach)
• Turnips, Bacon, and Toasted Pecan Salad (We dumped off some of the bacon drippings. It was awesome - everyone had seconds of this salad)
• Radish sandwiches with hard cheese (yummy crusty bread cut into slices, butter, sprinkle of sea salt, thinly sliced radishes, and robusto cheese - recipe from Isabelle Farm's Newsletter)
• Collards with bacon (served with eggs and bacon breakfast)
• Various salads with fruit (mmmm, blueberries and strawberries), nuts (pine nuts and toasted pecans), and lemon vinaigrettes

Looking forward to next week!