Bialas Farms CSA: Week 3

Sunday, July 13, 2014

I’ll be honest, I was considering skipping a post altogether after last week. With all of our guests visiting Wednesday through Sunday, I cooked pretty much non-stop with last week’s share and was burnt out by Monday. Burnt out to the point where my meals consisted of leftover See’s peanut brittle for 36 straight hours, which gave me a pencil eraser-sized canker sore and convinced me that I needed to resume eating vegetables again.

So that’s what I did. I attacked Week 3’s CSA box with all of the passion I could muster…

1. Green pepper
2. Tuscan Kale
3. Sugar snap peas
4. Carrots
5. Tarragon
6. Red beets
7. Fresh onions
8. Romaine
9. Summer squash*
10. Radishes
11. Golden beets*
12. English peas
13. Italian Parsley
*not in the box and purchased separately from the farm stand

Starting with some scape and beet green pesto. I made so much of it, that in addition to using it to coat some zucchini noodles for dinner that night, I had enough left over to freeze in an ice cube tray for future soups, stews or pasta sauces. I’ve never done this before, but I can only imagine how excited I’ll be when I uncover my stash in the dead of Winter when I’m needing a dose of Summer the most.

To make the scape and beet green pesto:

Pulse two garlic scapes in a food processor until finely chopped; add a handful of pumpkin seeds (or pine nuts if you prefer), and pulse again until chopped; next, add the greens from two bunches of beets (will nearly fill the processor) and blend until chopped. With the motor running, slowly add a ½ cup of olive oil to the pesto, then ½ cup of Parmesan. Season to taste with salt and pepper. (Note, this makes a ton of pesto, and if not sealed well, the top will darken. Use one part for your meal, and save the rest by freezing the pesto in ice cube molds – if you want to use one down the road for a soup or dressing, just pop and thaw or throw the frozen cube directly into something warm like a soup or stew).

Also included in the mix this week was a blue cheese and tarragon dip, perfect for those perfect sweet carrots that I’ve been receiving each week. I usually make my blue cheese dip with a combination of garlic and thyme, but my new bunch of tarragon was calling my name. The match was perfect.

To make blue cheese dip:

Mix one 6 oz container of Greek yogurt with an equal amount of sour cream. Whisk in the juice of half a lemon, and grate a clove of garlic into the bowl (I find that using a microplane works best here). Stir to blend. Add a cup of crumbled blue cheese, and a ¼ cup of chopped fresh tarragon. Season to taste.

Have you ever heard the recommendation that you should include a rainbow of colors in your diet? I’m fortunate that my CSA box makes that possible every week; sometimes I get too excited and have to eat them altogether.

Sometimes you make so much food for one night that you’re left with a pile of leftovers in your fridge. I know there are people who hate leftovers, but I love them and put out plates of leftovers with freshly-prepared food for a next-day feast. From last week’s box – the roasted carrot quinoa and the red, white & Adirondack blue potato salad. And new for the evening, we had a watermelon & queso blanco salad + some beautiful roasted beets & goat cheese.

To make the beets & goat cheese salad:

Cover the beets in foil and roast at 350 degrees for 60-90 minutes, depending on size. I like to use a combination of colors, in this case, red beets, and golden beets. Cool the beets in their foil, and when ready to handle, slip the skins off. Thickly slice the beets and scatter on a plate. Dress the beets simply with salt & pepper, olive oil, and white balsamic vinegar. Crumble goat cheese over the top. Optional: add some segmented pieces of orange or grapefruit and some torn mint.

One bunch of kale came with my CSA box this week, but knowing that I wanted to make some kale chips, I added a second bunch to the mix. They were scarfed down so quickly that I didn’t have time to snap a picture. I’ll make sure to snap one for a future post. But in case you need a recipe, I rubbed some olive oil into the kale, seasoned with salt and pepper, and roasted them for 20-25 minutes until crispy.

Wondering what other vegetables could be eaten in chip form, I tried my hand with beet chips, which were fabulous. Earthy and sweet, but crispy and salty enough to satisfy my biggest chip craving; I’ll definitely be making these again…

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CSA

Bialas Farms CSA: Week 2

Monday, July 7, 2014

We’re into week 2! We picked up our CSA box on Saturday and spent another great week cooking more vegetables than we can usually handle.

This week’s box had some new vegetables including broccoli rabe, and Adirondack blue potatoes. I should have kept some of them separate for our mystery food challenge since neither I, nor the kids, have tried them before. But they were so perfect for a July 4^th red, white and blue potato salad that I used them all in one fell swoop.

Given that we had a few families visiting the lake this weekend, I also loaded up on a few extras that weren’t in my box.

Here were the contents of Week 2’s box:

Green leaf lettuce
Italian parsley
Yukon Gold potatoes (from their regular farm stand)
Sugar snap peas
Garlic scapes
Bok choy
Red radishes
Adirondack blue potatoes
Sage plant
Swiss chard
Baby carrots
Broccoli rabe

*not pictured (in hiding?) were a boatload of English peas

Aside from the Bialas produce, I picked up some local strawberries and blueberries from another vendor at the Ringwood Farmer’s Market, The Orchards of Conklin, and a pork shoulder from Snoep Winkel Farm.

The kids have been pretty excited to pick up the box because it brings mealtime and playtime together. After I set out the vegetables and get them ready for washing & bagging, Lauren now asks me if she can do her own vegetable artwork. In theory I don’t have a problem with it, but it makes for a gigantic clean up effort. But if that’s what it takes to get the kids interested in eating their greens, I’m game.

One of the first things that the kids like to eat are the carrots. With the greens and peels intact. I’m a peeler myself, but the skins on these baby carrots are so thin, that they’re downright delicious straight from the ground with nothing but a quick wash.

This week, my first dish was a beet hummus, using some leftover beets from last week’s box, to serve as a dip for the radishes. To call this dip hummus is a bit of a stretch since it contains no tahini, and a fair amount of yogurt. But with its chickpeas and garlic, it’s about as close as Lauren will come to tasting true hummus given her sesame allergy. Potato potah-to, it’s still pretty fantastic, and I’ve included the recipe below.

To make the beet hummus:
Blitz a garlic clove in a food processor until minced.
To the processor, add a few roasted beets (roast the beets in foil at 350 degrees for an hour, let cool, and then slip from their skins), a 14-oz can of garbanzo beans, 14-oz can of butter beans and then pulse. With the motor running, add a ¼ cup of olive oil in a slow stream to emulsify. Add a 6-oz container of yogurt and a tablespoon of Harissa; blend to incorporate. Season with salt and pepper.
(Optional) Serve with a drizzle of olive oil, a sprinkling of Maldon salt, and/or chopped fresh herbs.

The hummus was also really great stuffed into a toasted pita with a basic tabbouleh which I made with our farm share parsley, a tomato, bulgur and some lemon juice + olive oil. Feeling like I was going with a Mediterranean vibe that day for lunch, I rounded things out with some green leaf lettuce topped with grilled calamari. We don’t do this every day, but we should. It took almost no time to prepare and was a great combination of healthy and delicious.

We had fun with our greens at lunch this week and opted one day for a pasta bar instead of our usual sandwiches. I was skeptical about whether this approach would encourage the kids to eat more veg, but was shocked when Sam layered broccoli rabe and blanched English peas over his pasta. On top of the mountain of bacon of course.

Lauren, my resident vegetable eater, just went for bacon and a splash of the pasta cooking water, which she referred to as “dishwater”. Appetizing. Feeling bad for my neglected vegetables, I loaded up on ricotta, heaps of English peas, mint, lemon zest and chili flakes and it was one of the best pastas I’ve had in a long time.

With the heat this week it was hard not to go crazy for cold things, so we made a lot of pops. Thinking that it might help entertain the kids this summer, I went hog wild on Amazon before we left the city, ordering a few different types of popsicle molds. The added benefit being that it gets the kids off of the neon ice pops from the A&P, and gives them some added nutrition.

These ring pops were one of their favorites – we pureed strawberries with some mint simple syrup and poured them into the molds. The best kind of accessory for beating the heat…