CSA week nine start-up

Clearly, when I called last week a light share I didn't know what I was talking about as the freeze left us with even less to work with this time around.

I ought to use the corn today as it loses sweetness quickly. If I've got enough shrimp left I think I might make a shrimp and corn chowder.

The green beans are a bit too much for one side dish, but not enough to be the main component of a dish. I haven't come across many recipes that use green beans as one of several major ingredients. That's kind of an odd thing about green beans, isn't it?

The bok choy, on the other hand, is precisely the right size for a side dish and I have a recipe for restaurant-style Chinese greens in oyster sauce. I'd often order that as a secondary dish when ordering a meat-intensive main dish at the more authentic sort of Chinese restaurant. The mysteriously generic "Chinese greens" was my preferred version, but it's good with bok choy too.

The big bunches of parsley and cilantro make me think of North Africa as that's the only cuisine I know of that uses large amounts of both. There's a braised chicken and chickpeas that will use maybe a quarter of each bunch. Parsley salads aren't too tough to come by. I did a little searching just now and found that you can find cilantro-intensive recipes if you search for "dhania" or "dhanya" which is the Hindi and/or Punjabi term for it. I'll have to sort through what I found for a bit before I know what I'm going to cook.

Also in my North African cookbook was a charred red pepper salad that looked pretty good. Or, since it's so big, I might stuff it instead.

The extras bin was full of black sapotes when I got to my pick-up spot kind of late so I think a lot of people have given up on them. I took one so I'll be sure to have a full cup of pulp to work with when they're ripe. Given my success with the oat bars I think my next attempt might be a black sapote congo bar or maybe substituting them into a fig cookie recipe. I've got to deal with my nearly-ripe canistels first, though.

That leaves the tomato, which I'm sure will find a place, and the strawberries which have been so good fresh that I'm happier eating them by themselves or with a little cream than processing them at all.


After picking up my share I headed over to the Coral Gables Farmers Market and did a little shopping before it was time for the Slow Food Stone Crab Picnic. At the Rare Fruit Council booth I picked up a pummelo and a dragonfruit cutting. Pummelos are sweeter than grapefruit, but there is, I'm told, a fair bit of variation so I won't know what I'll be doing with mine until I get it open. The dragon fruit cutting, though, I've already planted. They're supposed to grow pretty quickly so I should know fairly soon if mine is going to do well.

I also bought some onions, potatoes and peppers. The peppers are nothing unusual, but I like how they looked with the pummelo and dragon fruit so I put them in the photo.

That's kind of long and it's getting well into the afternoon so I'll talk about the picnic in a separate post later.