CSA week five wrap-up, week seven start-up

Not much left of week five after all this time. I'm holding on to the sapotes since they seem to be finally approaching ripeness now that my kitchen has turned back into a hot-box. I hope to make the recipe I came up with in the next day or two.

The rest of the dill I used making a halibut gravlax. It's still curing so I don't know how it's going to turn out. Dill does go nicely with halibut so that part I'm confident about, but since it's a steak instead of a fillet, I don't know if it's going to cure all the way through. I may have to slice it in half and then give the inside a quick sear to make it all palatable. I'll let you know how it turns out.

That just leaves the lettuce which I've got to admit I haven't touched since I stuck it in a plastic bag two weeks ago. I'm curious if it's anything close to edible at this point. I'm going to go take a look now...and that looks perfectly fine. Weird. Even weirder, I've just noticed that the bag has a hole in it. I've got no idea why this lettuce hasn't rotted.

Anyway, on to this week.



The little black sapotes aren't going to ripen for a while. I'm skeptical that they'll ripen properly at all when they're so small. I've got nothing to back up that suspicion, though.

The cabbage I'm going to set aside for a while. I've eaten more than my fair share of cabbage recently and I've got plenty of leftovers in the freezer. If you're thinking of making bacalhau a mineira with yours, you should consider using your kale in there too. One of the recipes I found included kale and I think the combination would work really well.

As for me, right now I'm thinking of just shredding the kale Brazilian-style and sautéing it up as a side dish, but I'll look into more African recipes for hearty greens; maybe something there will appeal.

I want to use the garlic chives in a noodle dish, but there are so little of them I don't know if it'll work. East Asian recipes use garlic chives as a vegetable, not an herb. I've got one recipe that calls for a pound of them. I suppose if I use a lot of other vegetables I'll be fine, but it won't be a proper banh pho xao he.

I quite like the idea of using the clementines for a proper Szechuan orange chicken, but I'm not using the recipe in the newsletter. A) it says garlic is optional which is clearly nonsense, b) it doesn't coat the chicken in cornstarch so the texture won't be right and c) it doesn't get its heat from Szechuan peppercorns. It shouldn't be hard to find something rather less bastardized.

The avocado looks dense enough that it can probably approximate a Hass in a California cuisine recipe. That will probably require at least one of the tomatoes too. Assuming they ripen at around the same time, anyway.

Carambola I've always had trouble using in recipes. I think it's better eaten out of hand.

But all that starts tomorrow. I stopped by the Coral Gables Farmers Market on the way back from picking up my share and got some lovely, very fresh, mahi mahi fillets for dinner. I had hoped to pair them with something from the box, but nothing usable right now seems to fit. Maybe the kale. Or the lettuce? I'll have to think about this.