CSA week one wrap-up, week two start-up

That first share, even a full, is always easy to use in a leisurely way over a full two weeks. That is, if you can keep everything from rotting. I ended up throwing away the turnip tops which were a bit past prime to start with and didn't keep well and just a bit of lettuce. My inflated bag experiment did a great job of keeping the mizuna and callaloo fresh until I got around to using them. Moisture accumulated on the sides of the bag, but since they were well away from the greens nobody got hurt.

I did make the dilly beans as I said I would, but I screwed up substituting kosher salt for pickling salt so they're not very good. I think I can tell through the saltiness that I don't care for the combination of dill and cider vinegar anyway. I also made a stir fry of green beans in a peanut-chili sauce. Pretty good if you don't mind the greasy-goopy texture of the sauce. It used a bunch of leftovers so there's no reproducible recipe to share. Other than a couple salads, I think that's all that's gone unreported. So, on to this week...


Starting from the left, there's garlic chives. I'm thinking dim sum-style pork and chive dumplings. I do like them a lot with crudo (Italian sashimi basically), too.

Above them are black sapote. My initial plan is to substitute them into a Cajun fig cake recipe, but it'll be a while before they're ripe so there's plenty of time for some other impulse to hit me.

Next over are Italian dandelion greens. They're lovely sautéed with a little garlic over pasta. I missed out on using my turnip tops that way so I'll probably won't do anything more fancy here.

The green pepper will get used without any plan most likely.

The avocado, once it's ripe, I'd like to roast and see what I can do with it. Roasting was an interesting experiment before, but I want to find a practical use for flavor and texture that results from the technique.

The bok choy is tricky to use interestingly, extraordinarily easy to use boringly. Nothing wrong with a basic stir fry or steam, I suppose, other than the lack of blog fodder. I'll have to do some research to see if there's some alternative.

The lettuce I'm thinking may go into a soup. Maybe with shrimp stock this time around.

And finally the zucchini and squash. I've got a variation on albondigas, traditional aparently, that uses them. That should be interesting.