Sweet Sassy Molassy

We used up the last of our CSA stuff this week, just in time! We're leaving for a 9 day road trip tomorrow, so we'll miss 2 weeks of CSA orders. We're donating this week's since it seems everyone's out of town, and friends will pick up next week's and hopefully enjoy it :)

So, this meal was kind of random, but ended up being really good. We had some beet greens and baby turnips (and greens) and a handful of mizuna left from the basket, so Leah sauteed them with some garlic, spring onions and butter. We poached a chicken breast in some chicken broth infused with coconut, curry, garlic and coriander (it's a soup base called College Inn Thai Coconut Curry Culinary Broth) and a can of coconut milk. We cooked some rice in the same mixture and both chicken and rice ended up having just a mild coconut flavor, which was nice. Leah made up a sauce of lime juice, fish sauce, soy sauce and grated garlic and that was AWESOME on the chicken and rice in the lettuce wraps. It would have just been "ok" with it, but with it, I just wanted to keep eating and eating! The greens and turnips also were very tasty!

We're leaving for California in the morning, so the CSA Challenge is on hiatus for 2 weeks, but expect lots of pics of the trip instead!

Instead of just using up the items in our CSA basket as parts of a meal, or side dishes, we've also been snacking on sugar snap peas and carrots, adding mizuna into ramen and udon soups for lunch and Leah made a hummus-like dip out of the shelling peas and some of our garden herbs. 

I was really surprised by the mizuna, it works great in soups and I'll definitely be using it more often. Leah has been adding it to her breakfast ramen in the morning. I added some to udon that I took for lunch to work the other day and it was really nice and made the packaged noodle soup seem fresher and added some nice color as well. Mizuna has a bit of a tangy-ness to it, much like a mild sorrel flavor.



The "peamus" or "mock-amole" was really tasty and a much more interesting use for the shelling peas than just adding to a salad or using as a side dish. The idea was inspired by a post on Twinkiechan's blog. It's kind of sweet and spicy at the same time and goes great with salty crackers like Triscuits.

Leah did all the work for this meal, which turned out great! She made a salad of sauteed swiss chard and chiogga beets, topped with feta cheese, a few sliced turnips and a vinaigrette with oregano and parsley from the garden. It was awesome!

She also grilled burgers (made from mini-cattle ground beef from the farmer's market again) and sauteed the spring walla walla onions from the CSA basket. Everything turned out so good! I toasted the buns on the grill and managed not to burn them, so that was like a bonus :)

Salad Nicoise is one of our old standby dinners. It's both delicious and super easy to make. A typical nicoise salad has boiled new potatoes, steamed green beans, hard-boiled eggs, olives, tomatoes, tuna and a dijon vinagrette. We generally substitute kalamata olives for the Nicoise oilves, because they are easier to find and are only a little bit saltier. We also usually use the pre-packaged lemon-pepper tuna steaks (either StarKist or Bumblebee brand) instead of the canned tuna. We just like it better :) This time we used some yellow wax beans in place of the green beans and some fingerling potatoes, both of which we got at the farmer's market when we picked up the CSA basket, with this recipe in mind. Leah made a nice vinagrette with some of the herbs from our garden too!

For dessert, I made a rustic tart with nectarines and some gorgeous raspberries from the farmer's market. I did it the lazy way, with store-bought Pillsbury pie dough. All you need to do is lay out the dough, pile some fruit on it, fold over the edges so they overlap, sprinkle a little sugar on top and bake for about 30 minutes at 425 degrees. Couldn't be easier! This is what it looked like before it went into the oven:

We had a salad planned for Sunday night's dinner because we needed to use up some lettuce and veggies from the previous week and also knew we would be getting more lettuce and greens this week. So, Leah made a chimichurri marinade for the gulf prawns, avocados and romaine hearts, all of which she grilled. I tossed romaine, mizuna and  flashy trout's back lettuce (the speckled one, from last week's CSA) with a citrus vinaigrette as the salad base. We layered some tomatoes, Korean cucumber, grilled avocado and grilled gulf prawns on top of the lettuces. We also added a few of the pickled turnips that we made the other day. Those turned out nice, kind of sweet and spicy. The trout's back was similar to romaine, but a little more earthy and delicate. The mizuna was very nice and tasted like a really mild sorrel, without the sourness. The mix of the three lettuces, with one being grilled, made for a surprisingly good salad blend!

Dessert was farmer's market strawberries on top of some semi-stale poundcake that we splashed with amaretto to make it moist again, with whipped cream on top. I am not a huge fan of almond flavoring, but the amaretto paired suprisingly nice with the strawberries.

Meal #2: Chicken and Dumplings, Strawberries and Cream

CSA items used: carrots, onions, strawberries

CSA items used: onions






The last meal was crepes made with 3 of the eggs. There are no pictures because they were awful-looking and hard to make, but at least they tasted ok! We have a new non-stick pan that is too big for making crepes, so they kept breaking because of their weight. Then we switched to an old smaller pan, but it was not really very non-stick in the middle anymore. So back to the big pan and Leah used the flat handle of a wooden spoon to fold and flip them, which seemed to work ok, but still not the greatest. We finished them off with a simple sauce of butter, lemon juice and orange juice with orange imperials.

I forgot to do a screen grab of my actual order, but this is what we chose this week:


You have selected:

1. English Shelling Peas
2. Nelson Carrots
3. Mizuna
4. Swiss Chard
5. Turnips
6. Spring Walla Walla Onions
7. Sugar Snap Peas
8. Chioggia Beets

You can pick your order up on Sunday at the Lake Forest Park Farmers Market 11am-4pm

Ok, well, this meal consisted mostly of farmer's market stuff, but we did use a couple of the CSA onions, so it still counts! The meal itself was very simple: grilled corn, grilled asparagus and grilled burgers with grilled onions. We got the meat from the farmer's market as well, it's from organic grass-fed free-range miniature cattle. It sure tasted good, and we only added a little garlic, A-1 sauce and salt & pepper to the meat before making patties. The corn was grilled in foil with some butter and chili-lime seasoning. We tossed the asparagus in some olive oil, salt and pepper and grilled that too. Same for the onions. We toasted the buns on the grill as well :) We may need to upgrade from a little Smokey Joe one of these days.

So, the second meal of the CSA Challenge was really just using up leftovers. We had a lot of chicken leftover from the night before and also had some carrots and onions, so I originally planned to make a pot pie. But when I got to the store to pick up some chicken broth and pie dough, I decided at the last minute to switch it to chicken and dumplings instead, because it would take way less time to make.

This one is easy enough to make. I started with peeling and chopping the rest of the purple carrots and sauteed then with a couple of the spring onions from the basket. Note: the purple leached out of the carrots and turned everything a weird purplish color, which looked kinda gross but tasted just fine. I would probably not use these again for mixing into anything, but they are fine on their own or roasted. After the veggies had softened a bit, I added a carton of chicken stock, about a half a bag of frozen peas, a few of the leftover potatoes from the previous night and the chopped up chicken and brought it to a boil. Also added a bunch of salt and pepper too. Then I mixed up the Bisquick dumplings, added them to the boiling soup, reduced the heat to low and cooked it uncovered for 10 mins, then covered for 10 mins. Then it was ready to serve and that's when we noticed how purplish everything was!

Dessert consisted of store-bought pound cake topped with the CSA strawberries and some fresh whipped cream. Very simple and very delicious! The only hard part was whipping the cream, which for some reason took me 3 tries and dirtying of various kitchen mixers until I finally just hauled out the Kitchenaid mixer to do it. I don't know why I thought the immersion stick blender chopper attachment would work, but I tried it first. Then I just used the regular attachment, since I had somehow managed to get that to work sometime before, but it also wasn't happening. I thought about using a hand mixer, but couldn't find a bowl that would work, so I dragged out the Kitchenaid from the pantry. Now I have a sink full of dishes and a countertop full of stuff, all just for some whipped cream!

This is the first meal of our personal CSA Challenge, which is to use up all the items from our CSA basket each week. I hope they all go as well as this one did! We had some split chicken breasts in the fridge that needed to be cooked soon and the weather has been on the cool and cloudy side lately, so roasted chicken and veggies just seemed perfect.

I scrubbed and cut the beets and peeled the carrots and tossed them into a roasting pan with some fingerling potatoes from the farmer's market and a little olive oil, salt and pepper. Then I seasoned the chicken breasts with salt and pepper and put a little leftover compound butter under the skin to keep it moist and hopefully add some more flavor to the meat. Then I placed the breasts on top of the veggies and put the pan into the oven, baking them at 475 for about 15 mins, then turned down the heat to 400 for another 30 mins. I checked the internal temp with a meat thermometer at that point, and they were not quite done yet (they were big breasts on the bone), so I left them in and started the beet greens. I used the rest of the compound butter and added a couple garlic cloves to a skillet and then added the beet greens and a bag of arugula that was hanging out in the back of the fridge. I added a couple splashes of balsamic and sherry vinegar, salt and pepper and then tasted. It was a little too sweet for me, so I squeezed the juice of a tiny little lemon (probably about half a normal lemon's worth) over it, which added just the right amount of acidity. Turned up the heat on the chicken to a low broil for a gew minutes to crisp the skin again and voila, dinner was ready!