CSA - Week 2

I'm sure you have all been waiting with hungry bellies to see what veggies we got with this week's CSA.  Illustration provided below. 

Saturday night I did steam last week's broccoli and saved a serving for Miranda to eat with dinner and froze the rest.  I melted a couple tablespoons of butter in some olive oil and pan fried some pounded and seasoned chicken breasts for about three minutes on each side.  Once the chicken was cooked I added the radishes, thinly sliced, and zest of one lemon to cook for five minutes or so, then added 1/3 cup of white wine.  Once that cooked down I threw in equal parts of chopped basil and flat leaf parsley.  In retrospect, it was a little too much parsley since I couldn't taste the basil.  Next time I'd go 2 to 1 with the basil.  I poured the final product over the chicken breasts and served with a salad of last week's green leaf lettuce, raspberries, carrots, almonds, and goat cheese with a raspberry vinaigrette. 

Last night I made another asian stir fry with the pac choi.  I'll post more details and pictures later.  If we continue to get pac choi, I'm going to need some suggestions on what to do with it that is not asian stir fry, because that's all I'm coming up with on my internet searches.  We (I mean Ben) also ate some of the broccoli with dip during the football game.  I've got to make time to cook Thursday evening if there is any hope of getting through the majority of these veggies by the time we pick up the next share this Saturday. 

Soup is good

Doesn't that soup look good?  To use the kale from this week's CSA share, I made Turkey, Kale and Brown Rice Soup.  I pretty much stuck with the recipe as published this time.  Giada, I noticed there was no picture of this recipe on the Food Network website.  If you want to use mine, just message me and I'm sure we can work something out.  

Well, we have another crop of veggie to pick up tomorrow but I still have a full head of lettuce and a full head of broccoli that remain untouched (I'm sure you all are real shocked about that second one).  It sure would be handy if we still had bunnies to help us out with some of these greens.  If we get more broccoli tomorrow I may blanch and freeze one head for later in the year.  Stay tuned to see what comes this weekend.

Salmon with Pepper and Pac Choi Saute

Last night I tackled the pac choi, which after googling I found out is really just another name for bok choy.  As you can see here, I baked some salmon, seasoned with Emeril's Asian spice.  To accompany that, I started with this recipe, but of course I modified it more for our family tastes.  Like, instead of mincing one teaspoon each of ginger and garlic, I julienned a two inch piece of ginger and sliced 5 large cloves of garlic.  I also added about a cup of sliced shiitake mushrooms and two of my monster green onions julienned to the pan at the same time as the garlic and ginger.  I used the entire bunch of pack choi and I dashed a little more of Emeril's Asian spice into the veggies when I added the soy sauce.  Voila, dinner.

And yes Jennifer, I ate an entire serving of those vegetables without picking anything out.  Miranda only ate the peppers.

CSA! CSA! CSA!

Several years ago when all of our friends joined CSA's, I looked into it, but there was only one farm near us and the drop-off locations and times were not particularly convenient.  Oh yeah, and I don't love vegetables.  Last spring, one of my employees offered up her share to anyone in our unit willing to drive all the way over to Alamo Heights to pick it up.  Wait ... What?!?!  That's where I live.  So in the intervening years, that one farm has grown and expanded and there is now a Saturday morning drop-off less than a mile from our house.  We joined in the summer and walked most weekends to pick up our crops.  It went well enough.  I learned that I just can prepare eggplant in a way that any of us will eat it, except in cake form (think zucchini bread).  We also had okra coming out of our ears in the end.  This weekend was our first pick-up of winter crops.  This week's share includes Green Leaf Lettuce, Rainbow Chard, Green Shallots, a Kale mix, a Pac Choi and a head of Broccoli.



My first meal with the veggies was a Swiss Chard Lasagna.  I required an additional two noodles because I was using a larger lasagna pan, and when I had to soak those additional noodles, I decided to improvise further and brown about 8oz of ground turkey and add that before the second layer of noodles.  And I probably used more like 5oz of mozzarella cheese on top.  It was quite yummy and Miranda sort-of ate it.  Even though her favorite veggies are green peas and green beans, she still has a problem with "green stuff" that is mixed in with other food. 

Tonight I'm going to make something with the pac choi and some of the green onions.  I'll let you know how it turns out.