Box #12: Do not attempt to adjust your screen

I couldn't resist arranging these veggies into a nerdy color wheel. A variety of tomatoes including several heirlooms, carrots, sweet onion, cured garlic, yellow squash, broccoli, green beans, zucchini, cucumbers, jalepeno peppers, basil, a watermelon, red-leaf lettuce and mixed sweet peppers. Yay!



Ha, ha! I'm half a pepper!

Seriously, though, our good friends Don and Sarah are on a three-week cleanse. Sarah's doctor recommended the modified elimination diet, one version of which you can find here. No sugar, no dairy, no gluten, no alcohol, no peanuts, no fatty meats, no over-processed junk. When Patrick and I made dinner for them, we found out that what Don and Sarah have been saying is true: There's nothing like dietary restrictions to make you a more creative cook. Let's be positive: Fresh veggies and fruits are in! Lamb chops are in!

So we had them over the night of our CSA pickup. Adapting this recipe from Epicurious, Patrick roasted some eggplant and red peppers, then chopped them up with Italian parsley for the relish, adding a little brown rice syrup. The relish alone was great—I'd like to think of other things to use it on. Sandwiches?

To make the dinner decadent without gluten or dairy, we went a little bonkers on the meat. Pat prepared four huge, rare lamb chops from Hutchinson, Minn.'s The Lamb Shoppe via The Wedge. While that was happening, I washed, chopped and divided most of the CSA haul into veggies for salad and veggies to roast.



The salad group got a pureed dressing made from cashew butter, ginger, garlic, olive oil and curry powder, thinned with water. That was tasty and spicy. The roasted group got olive oil, dried rosemary and about 30 minutes at 375.

Sarah's original dessert didn't contain any CSA items, but I have to mention it because it was a wonder of ingenuity that could only come from a long-denied craving for ice cream: coconut milk, agave nectar and egg whites, frozen, with chopped nuts and baked apples on top. Delicious.

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Curry and pickles?

But not together, not this time.



We had a bunch of veggies hogging up our fridge, and decided to show them who was boss. A can of coconut milk was lurking in the back of the cupboard, and some red curry paste was hanging about, so some kind of Thai style curry would be the end for this loafing produce. CSA Yellow squash, zucchini, onion and red bell pepper all joined in to make things simple and delicious. Good job, if I do say so myself. And I do.



Next on the agenda was more pickles. Dill and pickling cukes were in the CSA, and I wanted to see what kind of pickle those would make on short notice. After deciding to do this without any cooking, I again went the simple salt pickle route. Along with the salt, dill and cucumbers, I threw in some dried chili peppers, mustard seed, sliced garlic and peppercorns.



I let that stand in the pickle press for 24 hours, and then switched it to the refrigerator for another 24. They had a nice mild flavor, and were excellent with a little japanese soy sauce (Koikuchi) and rice.



One last thing. Check out how awesome that CSA heirloom tomato is.



And it was even better to eat.

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Box #11: OK, OK, we're a little stressed

You know how some weeks you don't make time to go grocery shopping and instead just live off of Chinese takeout? Yeah. No matter how busy you are, you just can't do that with a CSA. The veggies come each week, and if you don't want to be the irresponsible schlubb who forfeits a box, you squeeze in time to hit the pickup site. Now you have ten pounds of fresh vegetables to wash, prep, drag to work or wherever you're running to and eat. The up side is, it forces you to stop and smell the watermelon and to get your RDA of five fruits and vegetables. The down side is, sometimes you just want to eat ramen by the glow of a DVD.

Some produce you can forget about in the crisper, but this week's box was another amazing haul. Because we had to split up the share before we brought it home, this picture is of a HALF SHARE:



Dill, red-leaf lettuce, basil, green kale, sungold tomatoes, heirloom tomatoes, red and gypsy frying peppers, corn, zucchini, green beans, cucumber, yellow squash, onion, garlic, pickling cucumbers, watermelon (!) and cilantro. This is a little more than a half share, actually, because Marcos and Jamie are up to their ears in garden tomatoes and gave us their part, plus I nabbed some extra pickling cukes and dill from the bonus box at the pickup site.

Take another look at that gorgeous melon:



Friday afternoon we headed up to the North Shore of Lake Superior for a glorious weekend at a friend's cabin. The first thing I did when we got there was combine the green kale with the garlic, last week's lacinato kale and two small heads of radiccio for a delicious batch of my favorite meal: roasted brassica. Yes, as Tanya pointed out, I'm a total nerd for pushing burnt cabbage while everyone else is enjoying wine and pizza. But one or two others enjoyed it.

The watermelon also ended up at the cabin, as did the cilantro, which we used in a sixfold batch of urad dal from "How to Cook Everything Vegetarian."

My breakfast monday morning was a huge, gold heirloom, sliced and mixed with basil, olive oil, salt and pepper. This unfocused photo of my half-eaten breakfast is a pretty good representation of a Monday morning after a weekend at the cabin:



It was tastier than it looks.

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Sweet Pickles!

No, not those sweet pickles, the delicious kind you use to stuff your face!

Anyway, with the arrival of those cute pickling cucumbers in last week's box, pickles of some sort were in order. I have been experimenting with tsukemono recipes lately, and decided to try out a recipe for sweet pickles from a tsukemono cookbook I picked up.



The recipe called for normal salt pickles to start. Basically, you slice the cucumbers in half, mix them up with 5% of their weight worth of salt, and put pressure on them for about 24 hours. The salt should draw out the water, thereby picking. I also added a little salted water because I had so few cucumbers, and was concerned that there would not be enough liquid to immerse the vegetables. I have a cool little press for the pressure duty, called a tsukemonoki (similar to this one; mine was from United Noodles) but a bowl, plate and weight of some sort should work as well.



After 24 hours, I washed the pickles off, and set them aside to dry.



I then set out to make the marinade to sweeten them up. I mixed

1 1/2 cups rice vinegar
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup sugar
1 bay leaf
1 dried chili pod
1/2 cinnamon stick
6 pepper corns

and then brought the whole mess to a boil. I set it aside to cool down to room temperature. After it was all set, I put the pickles in a jar and dumped the marinade over the top and shoved them in the fridge. After another 24 hours (all this waiting was making me really want these pickles) they were all nice smelling, and pretty nice tasting to boot.

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Take me to the river

Jamie and I were able to take a long weekend and went down to her parents place in Buffalo City Wisconsin. Buffalo City is a little place on the Mississippi halfway between Wabasha and Winona on the Wisconsin side of the river. We enjoyed a couple days of relaxing and pontooning down the river.











Since we left on Wednesday we knew we would not have our part of box 10 (which was amazing by the way) until we got back on Saturday. Luckily the last few boxes have contained some good storage veggies, and we've put off eating them for just this weekend.
First we chopped up the beets, carrots and potatoes, and then tossed them with olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper.











Then we wrapped them up in tinfoil and put them in the fire.












All this was supplemented with Thousand Hills Hot dogs purchased at the Bluff Country Co-op. A nice store in the middle of Winona, Minnesota. Go Co-op!
This fireside feast was washed down with a couple of Wisconsin brews, Leinenkugel and New Glarus. It was great to be able to leave home and still have a local fireside feast.
Speaking of local eating, in case you don't have the fortune of having a lively co-op community where you live, the four week span from August 15- September 15 has been designated as the "Eat Local America!" month. It's rather fun to look at what is on your plate, and realize that one could actually trace everything you are consuming to it's source. And not just a virtual understanding either, but actually get in a vehicle and go see these places today.

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Box #10: Wow!

Here we go: mixed heirloom, red and Roma tomatoes; cured white onions; a chocolate pepper; a gypsy pepper; Yukon gold potatoes; a pint of mini colored peppers; grape tomatoes; lacinato kale; sweet corn; zucchini; summer squash; cucumbers; carrots; and cured garlic!



Look at this beautiful little tomato:



And these peppers like a string of Christmas lights:



Moon Salad
I was craving a cold salad Friday and wanted to include as many fresh veggies as possible into a massive bowl of goodness that we could just graze from over the hot weekend to come. I put a pot of black beans on to cook.

While the beans did their thing, I microwaved our two corn cobs, husks and all, for six minutes, turning once. (This is my favorite quick, low-energy way to cook corn.) Then I set them out to cool a bit.

I washed and sliced the summer squash, zucchini, tomatoes and peppers. Since the beans would take a while to cook, I got ambitious with presentation and decided to preserve the round shape of the cute little peppers by cutting them into rings. To seed them, I cut off their tops and dug in with a little spoon. Slicing those hollow little peppers takes a sharp knife and I almost ended up with fingertip salad.



I shucked the warm corn and shaved the kernels off of the cob. I added half a head of garlic, minced, and the onion, sliced into half-moons. I rinsed and drained the beans and added them to the mix, then created a dressing of about two tablespoons each olive oil and hot sauce. I squeezed the juice of one lime over everything, added salt and pepper and tossed it. Then I chilled it for a couple hours.

I call it moon salad, because everything is a circle or half-circle. Zowie! It has kick.



Saturday night, a treat from my childhood: fried zucchini! Slice it, dip it in egg, dredge it in cornmeal and fry it in hot oil, turning once to brown both sides.



I must admit, I wasn't really looking forward to another round of roasted carrots. So I used butter and olive oil this time. This combined with the flavorful Yukon golds and a few halved garlic cloves, roasted in a cast-iron skillet in a hot oven for 45 min, was enough of a change to make the carrots crustier, creamier and tastier than I expected. Dang, those potatoes were good. I ate the leftover veggies for breakfast the next morning.

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Friends share food

David Sedaris tells this great story about being a drug addict, and how when your life revolves around drugs, you start to realize that all your friends are addicts and dealers.

I'm glad to say that our best friends have been around since before we became hard-core foodies. But seeing how much food permeates every conversation and event, you'd think it was the glue. This is true on both sides of the family—that is, with groups of friends I met through Patrick as well as those he met through me.

So when our close friends Don and Sarah hosted a potluck picnic to celebrate their return as newlyweds from three years in Boston, Pat and I had to make something special. Food as a gift, you know? What better gift than the food we value most: our CSA stash. We knew our boxmates, Marcos and Jamie, were thinking the same thing and starting with exactly the same resources. Our two households' results could not have been more different.

Pat and I were inspired by Marcos and Jamie's summer slaw, a slaw without mayo that's perfect for warm days at the park. We transfered that concept to a potato salad, expanded to include all the delicious, colorful roots we recieved in last week's box. I cut the roots into chunks, barely boiled them and added a big fistfull of fresh herbs from Marcos and Jamie's garden, Driftless garlic and onions, plus balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt and pepper. I couldn't resist the local theme and added great northern beans as a little food pun, even though they were canned beans from who-knows-where. I call it welcome home salad, and it needs more dressing. (If you make about a six-serving bowl, make like half a cup of dressing.)



Marcos and Jamie went a completely different direction with this gem from the Joy of Cooking: zucchini-carrot cupcakes with ginger-cream cheese frosting.



Check out the fluffy centers. If it were a contest, they cupcakes would have won.

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Box #9: Impromptu pizza party!

Marcos picked up the box this time—he usually works Thursday evenings, so he'd never been to our awesome pickup site and was itchin' to go. Here's box nine in all its August glory:



Green-top and purple-top beets, yellow onions, red-leaf lettuce, blackberries, mixed tomatoes, huge zucchinis, cucumbers, new red potatoes, carrots, green beans and mint. Marcos had prepped and refrigerated an herb-y pizza crust that morning (that's just the kind of food hero he is), so we decided to have an impromptu pizza party. Here's Marcos rolling out the dough and explaining what makes it good:



He's not messing around. Here's the salad Pat and I made in the meantime:



Marcos sauteed the zucchini and put it on the pizza along with sausage, Jamie's homemade tomato sauce and cheese.



That's what I call veggies.

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Box-eight wrap up

What a whirlwind week! We're well into box nine and I've yet to report on box eight, our first totally waste-free share in (I'm ashamed to say) three or four weeks.

We were glad to have radishes again for our salad. The onion, yellow summer squash and gypsy frying peppers went into Patrick's spectacular fajitas. What a festive way to put a variety of vegetables to use. Fajitas—like breakfast scrambles, stir fry and vegetable tempura—are like gold to CSA members because they tolerate a lot of substitutions. Any other favorites in this category?



Speaking of scrambles, here's last weekend's:



Broccoli and zucchini, served with whole wheat basil biscuits. We love biscuits, but the two of us can only eat so many. We usually stuff ourselves to avoid wasting them—not the healthiest thing. Does anyone have a use for leftover biscuits? I can't imagine they freeze well.

Here's a gorgeous, crunchy salad we made with the iceberg, arugula, radish greens, carrots and purple beans. Did you know you can eat radish greens? They're a little bit spicy.



To our half of the cabbage, Patrick and I added Brussels sprouts for a big batch of roasted brassica. Between our roasted brassica and Marcos and Jamie's summer slaw, the humble cabbage is turning out to be one of our favorite CSA items.

What's left? Oh, yeah, the green beans and the parsley we ate raw. If you don't believe parsley can be a snack item, ask my mom. She says that, as a little kid, I used to get down on all fours in her herb garden and graze just like a cow on parsley. I still eat it on its own by the mouthful. Or ask Sassy, our cat, who launched an attack against an irresistible sprig of parsley on our counter. Maybe someone told her it's a natural breath-freshener.

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Mmmm...Cabbage

I have to admit that cabbage has always been one of those vegetables I know I'm supposed to like, but have never quite enjoyed. In my world it has always been a side dish, generally boiled to a pale green mush and slapped alongside some meat, or mixed with ridiculous amounts of mayo and sugar and once again slapped alongside some meat. Boy how things have changed.
While Jamie was preparing this mayo free slaw recipe my hand kept reaching in and grabbing handfuls of delicious raw cabbage. Once more, CSA membership has re-introduced me to my food. The crunch and depth of flavor contained in each bite of the cabbage was phenomenal and invigorating, a sharp pop as the flavor of summer greens was released then followed by a subtle buttery aftertaste. Thank you Driftless! I think there is a new candidate for my vegetable garden next year.
Here is the recipe we made from such good food stock (the peppers came from our garden, everything else from Driftless), a wonderful summer slaw perfectly suited to life as a man course. Plus it has no mayo so it is great for vegans and summer potlucks. Next time I might add some mustard seeds.

Summer Slaw
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup distilled white vinegar
1/4 cup vegetable oil
8 cups coarsely shredded green cabbage (about 1/2 large head)
1 cup thinly sliced red bell pepper
1 cup thinly sliced green bell pepper
1 medium onion, thinly sliced
1 carrot, coarsely shredded
3 scallions, chopped
3 radishes (radishii?), thinly sliced

Whisk sugar, vinegar, and oil to blend in large bowl. Add remaining ingredients and toss to combine. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Cover tightly and refrigerate at least 4 hours, tossing occasionally. Keep refrigerated.

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Box #8: Our friendly neighborhood pickup site

We pick up our CSA veggies from a neighborhood home that acts as a pickup site. Sometimes a food co-op is a pickup site, and I've even heard of CSAs that deliver right to individual households for a fee. You and your box mates should consider the pickup procedure when you're choosing a farm.

When we first were considering CSAs, I was bummed that the co-op we frequent doesn't host any CSA pickups. It would be really convenient to grab our farm's veggies along with all our other food, and we'd know exactly what to buy to compliment the box.

As it turns out, visiting our pickup site has become one of our favorite parts of the week. Picking up the CSA reminds me a little of Election Day, because it's one of the few times you interact with a gathering of neighbors. Julie and Sean offer their quirky, welcoming backyard (with chalkboard, picnic table, garden, U.S. Constitution and antique reference books) as a distribution hub for dozens of households.

Everyone you meet there has at least one thing in common with you, so you talk about the veggies and trade recipes. Smart members bring their own bags so they don't have to schlep the box home and back. Sean taught us how to collapse the boxes with a "gouge the eyes" technique on the bottom flaps.

According to our farm's Web site, pickup site hosts get deeply discounted boxes. Becoming a host might help defray the daunting upfront payment for a CSA. I think hosts also might end up with extra veggies when members flake out on picking up their boxes.

Here's what we got: iceberg lettuce, green savoy cabbage, carrots, Italian flat-leaf parsley, broccoli, yellow summer squash, zucchini, arugula, gypsy frying peppers, the last of the delicious fresh garlic, radishes, green and purple beans, sweet onion and basil.

This is one of those boxes that made me sure we should get a whole share next year. I'd really like to roast that whole cabbage, slice that whole zucchini and fry it with corn meal, and not split up that adorable family of radishes or that cute pair of peppers.

But, so it goes. Each week we get out the scale and the knife and carefully form two equal piles, even if it means cutting a head of garlic in half. This takes a little patience, but it results in each household getting a lot of variety. I've known other box mates who divide veggies based on preference and avoid cutting things up. That's something you'll have to work out with your box mates if you share a share. Here's how our table looks every Thursday night:

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Box-seven wrap up

I love the crunchy-sweet green bean. It's one of the few vegetables I'm used to eating fresh off the vine, because my grandma used to grow them. I know they're tasty stir-fried, but they usually don't make it into the pan. What a treat to see them with wacky purple skins:

Patrick kept an open mind about the iceberg lettuce. It's not my favorite, but it does add some crunch. What better way to dress it up than with bacon, tomato, sourdough and mayo?

When Patrick picked up box seven, pickup-site coordinator Julie was like, "What cocktail are you going to make this week?" Here it is: CSA raspberries, vodka and Izze sparkling clementine juice.

Now for my favorite part: fennel-fruit stew. I used the rest of the raspberries, the fennel bulb, stems and leaves, all the not-so fresh fruit I could find in the kitchen (a pear, a peach that was abused in the grocery bag, and an orange), and some frozen strawberries and blueberries. I seasoned it with a cinnamon stick, a few cloves secured in a tea ball, and honey.

I let it stew for like 30 minutes on low heat, then spooned it over cooked wheat berries and added yogurt. It wasn't pretty, but it sure tasted great.

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