Saturday, February 20, 2010

CSA week 11 wrap-up, week 12 start-up

Wow, that's quite a load of greens. I've got, from left to right, collards, turnip and radish greens (in good shape for a change), baby bok choy from the extras bin, dandelion greens, chard and cabbage. I saw all this and immediately thought of a couple mixed greens stew recipes I've been reserving just for a week like this. My first though was tsigarelli, a stew from the Greek island of Corfu, but I'm leaning towards Cajun gumbo z'herbes. Tsigarelli traditionally uses just tender greens, but gumbo z'herbes is designed to use collards, scallions and cabbage too. Plus it calls for last week's leftover celery and parsley and fresh thyme and rosemary too. A darn near perfect fit.

I'll probably leave out the baby bok choy though since they're so good with oyster sauce. That just leaves the carambola and radishes to eat out of hand and a few turnips which I think I'll have glazed as a side dish with a chunk of meat of some sort.

Oh, I should mention last week. I found an interesting Transylvanian cream of green bean soup I was planning on making, but when it came to cooking time I was more in the mood for one of those CSA-standard throw everything in the pot vegetable soups. First time I've done that, I think. It turned out tasty, mainly thanks to all the bacon I started the dish off with, and nicely used up a fair amount of cabbage, potato and parsley as well as all the green beans. Not really worth taking photos of, though.

So I guess it's just gumbo for this week unless I change my plans and do something novel with the bok choy. I'm also heading down to Possum Trot for the big potato dinner Wednesday. Anyone else going?

3 comments:

kat said...

Oh man that is a lot of greens! I have to say part of the reason we aren't doing a csa this year is we got too many greens to use

Caroline said...

I still had greens left from our last box! But I'm working on delicious ways to kill them off this week: brazilian collards, goat cheese and greens empanadas, tofu and greens stuffed mushrooms, pasta with chard, etc. No shortage of vitamins A, C and K in our house.

billjac said...

I think this sort of share forces you to become a greens connoisseur. Which is the best one for this particular application? How can I emphasize the differences between them so I don't get bored? That sort of thing.

Or you can just toss them all into one pot like I'm going to.