Prunes and CSA

This morning, we had a very special episode of Village Harvest, gleaning almost a ton of Italian prune plums from the Guadalupe Historic Orchard. This is one of my favorite places we go every year (they come thick and fast at the end of the summer) and we also enjoyed the best volunteer group evar, 25 or so hardworking, enthusiastic folks from Intel.

While apricots were a bust here a month or so ago, there was a bumper crop of prunes.

Picking is the glamor job, but as the boxes piled up, I roped more and more people into sorting to keep up.

Afterward, there were many squishy or split fruit to take home.

I say “many,” but we picked at the perfect time this year. Sorting was an absolute pleasure with such firm, lovely fruit. I took 500 lbs to Martha’s Kitchen, to their surprise. But they handled it with aplomb.

I swung by to pick up my CSA box on the way home.

We have lettuce, spinach and green beans.

Radishes and carrots.

Baby bok choy, round zucchini, red cabbage and an enormously long Armenian cucumber.

And peppers plus the first tomatoes and eggplant of the year! Yay!

Nothing too far out of the way for cooking this week. I’ve already eaten the bok choy (stir fried with eggs and ginger) roasted the chilis for skinning them, and I’m drying the zukes. I like to cook red cabbage with apple and sausage. I’ll keep my eye out for some apples.

I also have about 7 pounds of prune plums to deal with. I’ll post again about that.