4 posts tagged “greens”

We had leftover ground beef and pork sausage from making stuffed peppers, so we decided to make some Italian wedding soup and made some small meatballs for it. The soup was incredibly easy to make. We sauteed some garlic, onion, celery and carrots, then added chicken stock, some orzo and the meatballs and then added in some greens at the end and garnished with some asiago cheese. The greens were all leftovers from the weekly CSA: spinach, arugula and salad greens. It made for even better leftovers the next day. It was one of the best soups I have ever had, and I ate it for dinner and lunch the next day!  And I don't particularly even like soup as a meal all that much!

Maybe one of the reasons the soup was so good was because of the crostini with onion marmalade that we added to it. Leah made some onion marmalade out of a few big yellow onions, balsamic vinegar, brown sugar and salt and pepper cooked slowly over low heat. We made some crostini from toasting some baguette slices, rubbing with garlic and then topping with the marmalade. This was awesome in the soup! We also used the marmalade as a spread on ham and roast beef sandwiches throughout the week.

We steamed some rice in the rice cooker with a can of diced tomatoes and chopped up "spicy greens" mix from the CSA. Leah made a spicy sauce from roasted tomatillos, roasted jalepenos, roasted green onions, lime, cumin and garlic. She pan fried some onions and halibut and then simmered the fish and onions in the sauce and served it over the rice with avocados and tortillas on the side. The sauce was really delicious and went great with the fish!

Ah, zucchini bread... the best use for zucchini, in my opinion! I'm not the biggest fan of summer squash, so I made this on Friday evening, before dinner. It made a very nice dessert and snack over the next few days.

Even after making the zucchini bread (2 loaves!), we still had a zucchini left. I had to look up online some interesting way to prepare it and found this, which turned out really nice. Just cut the zucchini in half lengthwise, brush with a little butter and sprinkle on some grated asiago cheese (or parmesan) and broil in the oven for about 10 mins, til it browns. The potato salad is boiled fingerlings tossed with a pumpkin-seed oil, dijon and sherry vinegar dressing while still warm.

We have a LOT of catching up to do for this week! It was so hot during the week that we couldn't cook and ended up going out pretty much half the week. Most of the stuff we had from the CSA requires cooking, so by Friday we still had potatoes, fava beans, beets (and greens), turnips (and greens), green/purple/yellow wax beans, mixed greens and chard. That's a lot of stuff to try to figure out what to do with in only a couple days. Plus we got our first fruit box from the CSA as well. I don't think we'll be counting the fruit as part of the weekly challenge, since the pears we got are just now ripe enough to eat.

So, Friday cooled down a ton by comparison to the rest of the week and we took advantage of that to boil some veggies to make our favorite nicoise salad. The baby yukon gold potatoes were so good in this dish! Leah really did a great job with the lemon vinagrette and all the veggies were so perfect. Unfortunately, the purple beans turn green almost as soon as you start to cook them, so that was a bummer. The yellow wax beans were incredibly tender, must be because they are so fresh and new this time of year. We also used the other Lemon Boy tomato that we got at the Farmer's Market and it was really delicious. We'll have to grow some next year!

Leah had also cut up all the fruit that was getting a little overripe and decided to make waffles for breakfast to use them up. We found a super simple waffle recipe that turned out great: 2 cups Bisquick, 2 eggs, 1/2 cup oil, 1 cup club soda. It made a perfectly light and crispy waffle and was easier to make and tasted as good as the buttermilk waffles I made from scratch before.

We needed to decide what to do with the bag of mixed spicy greens. Leah's mom used to make a hot bacon dressing to go with dandelion greens, and I have never had that before, so we gave it a shot. The mixed greens were a little bitter, like dandelion greens, so it seemed like they would be a good match for the sweet bacon vinagrette. We also sauteed the turnips and added the greens to the salad mix to beef it up a little and tossed in the rest of the green and yellow wax beans. We were a little worried about the dressing, because it was REALLY sweet. We added more red wine vinegar and some dijon mustard and a liitle salt to cut some of the sweetness, but kind of resigned ourselves to the fact that it just might not be very good. You win some and lose some, right? So we tossed the greens with the dressing, added the turnips and beans and crumbled the bacon on top. And guess what? It was actually really good! I think the bacon bits helped a lot, but the greens were just bitter/spicy enough that the sweetness was nicely balanced. Oh, and the steaks turned out perfectly, too :P

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!