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!