Week 3 -- July 3rd

This week was radishes, spring onions, lettuce, baby bok choy, kohlrabi, carrots, summer squash and sugar snap peas.

I thought the radishes looked really cool, nothing like anything I'd ever seen in a supermarket. I think they were either "French Dressing" or "French Breakfast" radishes. French Breakfast radishes are more common, but looking at photos of the two varieties they seem to resemble French Dressing radishes more closely. They're pretty similar-looking though. They were quite peppery, much stronger than the supermarket variety to which I'm accustomed. I used some in salads.

The spring onions I quartered through the stem and grilled them as described in this post. The bulbs were great, but the green parts charred easily and were pretty tough and chewy where they weren't burnt.

I used the baby bok choy in an improvised stir-fry.

The kohlrabi was totally new to me. I read many helpful articles online, including this one which I love if only for the introduction of the phrase "WTF, CSA?" as in when one shouts "WTF?" upon looking into the week's CSA box. Anyway, kohlrabi's pretty awesome. It tastes a lot like the stem part of a head of broccoli. I made a slaw with the kohlrabi using a recipe very like this one (perhaps even this one! I can't recall.)

At the end of the week, there were still some veggies kicking around, notably a handful of radishes, carrots, sugar snap peas and squash, so I cut up the squash and carrots into large chunks, tossed everything with olive oil and sea salt and roasted it in the oven until caramelized and yummy. I used the roasted veggies in a frittata one night for dinner.

Week 2 -- June 26th

This week brought summer squash, beets, arugula, green oakleaf lettuce, broccolini, rainbow carrots, cucumbers and sugar snap peas.

I used the slow cooker roasting method on the beets again, which continued to work great, although this week I had the more traditional red beets rather than the golden hued beets of last week. As a result the peeling was a bit, um, redder. Not too bad though; my fingers were only stained for a couple handwashings.

This time I prepared the beet greens differently, using this recipe. The dish reminded me of another recipe I like to use for collard greens and I thought it was quite tasty, but my mother didn't love the sourness from the vinegar.

The broccolini is different from broccoli rabe/raab or rapini, I learned. I had previously used the terms interchangeably. Broccolini is a cross between broccoli and Chinese kale (which we call gai lan in our family); broccoli rabe is a relative of the cabbage and turnip families and is bitter. I stir-fried the broccolini with olive oil, garlic and sea salt.

The sugar snap peas were added raw to salads, as were the carrots. I was unsure whether the carrot greens were edible (some bloggers say yes) but the idea really didn't appeal so I tossed them. They were lush and beautiful though.

Week 1 -- June 19th

Our first week we had Baby Red Russian Kale, golden beets, pea tendrils, lettuce, garlic scapes, sugar snap peas and summer squash. A few of these veggies were new to me: the Red Russian Kale, pea tendrils and garlic scapes.

One of the farmers said she enjoyed snacking on the baby kale while watching TV. I wouldn't go quite that far, but found it tasty when incorporated with other salad greens.

The pea tendrils I sauteed with olive oil and garlic. They tasted very like snow pea pods -- no surprise there, I guess!

I had long heard of garlic scapes via the blogosphere and was very intrigued but had never encountered them. I tried a little piece raw and wow -- instant heartburn! I found this great post on Serious Eats about the myriad things one can do with them and ended up grilling them with a little olive oil, sea salt and pepper. It was a little bit of a challenge because the leafy bits wanted to char. Grilling the scapes rendered them incredibly mild -- someone compared the flavor to asparagus and I have to agree. It was an incredible contrast to the hot, peppery-ness of the raw scapes.

One last comment: I LOVE beets, but I had never cooked them myself. I was a little nervous as I had heard that the process is quite messy. I found great stuff online about roasting unpeeled beets in the oven -- the peel slips right off the beets once roasted, but being June, I really didn't want to heat up my kitchen.  Then I found this awesome post about roasting beets in a slow cooker.  Voila! I rubbed the beets with a little canola oil, wrapped them in foil and tossed them into my crockpot, which I then plugged in on my screened-in porch, free to heat up the already overheated outdoors.  A couple hours on high later and I had roasted beets. Once the beets were cool enough to handle, the peel slipped right off -- fabulous!

I also had a ton of gorgeous beet greens that topped the beets, and needed to attend to them immediately while they were still fresh but wasn't going to be able to eat them that day. I referred to this wonderfully informative post on A Veggie Venture for direction on how to prepare the greens for later use and also for the original inspiration for roasting my beets.