CSA Box

Thursdays are Live Earth Farm CSA days, so I picked up my box this afternoon. Let’s see what’s inside!

First we have two baskets of strawberries. LEF specializes in strawberries, so CSA members get quite a few of them. I’ve signed up for the extra fruit share, and later in the summer, I will be tearing my hair out about what to do with them all. But this week, I’ll eat them, put them in school lunches, and maybe make a simple ice cream.

The eggs come from TLC Ranch. I just visited the 5,000 happy hens at TLC last week. I love these eggs, and I love what Rebecca and Jim are doing.

OK, this is where the box starts getting difficult. That’s a bunch of dandelion greens in front, arugula to the right, and a bag of baby tatsoi behind. I still have greens from last week, so I think I’ll cook them all with olive oil and garlic, then combine them with ricotta salata and pasta to bring to Veggielution on Sunday. As I said before, I tend to want to use up large amounts of a given ingredient in one recipe. It’s nice to have lots of hungry people to feed, although many of them are vegetarians, so I have to leave out the bacon.

A bag of fava beans, a bag of broccoli florets, and a bunch of rainbow chard. I’ll probably shell and peel the favas and combine them with mashed potatoes, puree the broccoli and roll it inside crepes, and either use the chard in my big pasta dish, or stuff it with sausage and rice.

Red leaf lettuce and two spring onions. The onions will go into the first thing I cook this week that needs any sauteeing, and the lettuce will be a salad. I don’t actually end up making too many side salads, but I do love me a big salad with smoked trout or salmon.

Carrots I usually save up, and either roast when I get enough of them, or chop them up with celery, onion and parsley when I get celery in the box. I freeze big slabs of this mirepoix, and use it as the base for tomato sauces and soups. The radishes will go to Veggielution as crudités. The tops are already in my compost bin.

Finally the Fuji apples. I have about 20 apples in my fridge, so it’s time to make a pie.