CSA 2011: Week 22

I'm having a hard time remembering what I've made over the past week.  Notable standouts were a White Bean and Kale Minestra, which I will post about soon.  It used kale and garlic from the CSA, and carrot from the market.  We also made one of my favorites, Lemon Pepper Shrimp - I put shredded kale in the pot with the orzo instead of our usual sauteed broccoli, and this also used up the last of our garlic from the CSA.  I also canned a sauce made with tomatillos, which I'll also try to write about eventually.  Tonight, we had sausage along with today's freshly picked string beans, along with some oven-baked fries made of a huge sweet potato I got from the market a few weeks ago.

Today's PYO...

The tomatillos were plentiful but most of them are not ready.  I picked into a plastic bag but I'd say it's roughly a quart or less.  The sauce tomatoes were a little tough to find.  Cherry tomatoes are mostly a bright, pretty orange.  Hot peppers took me a long time - 50 is a lot! - but I got about 20 jalapenos, 5 serranos, 8 or 9 reddish peppers, a mild Sandia pepper, and a bunch of roundish/oval shaped ones.  I can't figure out what they are but I think I will pickle them along with the jalapenos.  We skipped flowers, eggplant, okra, herbs (except for parsley), and ground cherries.

I also got 4 jalapenos from the farm stand...

2 light red and 2 butter lettuce or Bibb lettuce or something... Mom kept most of this...

Carrots... Mom kept most of these...

Peppers... all green, so I tossed them in the donation bin...

I picked 2 bunches of cilantro and no parsley, since we got PYO parsley...

The main choice group this week was beets, cabbage, turnips, bok choy, radishes.  Now that I'm thinking about it, I believe the cabbage may have been gone when we returned to the farm stand after our PYO.  I took two bok choy and my mom took two radishes.

Mom forgot to snap a photo, but we also got 4 pounds of tomatoes.  They are very underripe at the moment, which is good because I have a few other things to deal with while I wait for them (specifically pickling these peppers and doing something with the bok choy).  I've also got tons of ripe sauce tomatoes needing to be used - I'm hoping to can these as plain crushed tomatoes.

Eggplant Stuffed With Rice and Tomatoes

This recipe for Eggplant Stuffed With Rice and Tomatoes appeared in the NY Times Recipes for Health with a collection of stuffed vegetable recipes for late summer vegetables - zucchini, eggplant, tomatoes, and bell peppers.  It's been on my radar for a few weeks, and I decided to give it a try.  As I often mention, I cook for two, not twenty as I sometimes would like to believe, so when I started to take out the ingredients for this recipe, I opted to make roughly half of it.  Even so, not all of it was eaten :( but what was eaten was very good.  I tried the dish both cold (as suggested) and hot and it worked both ways.  The thick, vibrant sauce, made from grated tomatoes and interesting spices, made it even better.  I ended up cooking the dish for far longer than intended - I opted for brown basmati rice, so it needed a bit more time to cook.  (My mom tried the related recipe for stuffed tomatoes, and the rice didn't cook at all.  So I was cautious when starting, but this recipe called specifically for uncooked rice.)  I omitted the mint because I didn't have any, and the cilantro was really enough herb for me, especially with the strong flavor of the sauce.  This was a tasty "farewell to summer" recipe, which I ate with a friend at a picnic table in a sunny park on my lunch break.  I'll be keeping this in mind as an eggplant recipe for next summer.

Roasted Tomato Soup

I was attracted to this recipe by the "roasted" part.  And the "tomato" part.  And the "soup" part.  It came out a lot different than I expected, but it was delicious.  It was simple to roast all the tomatoes, pepper, onion, and garlic.  I didn't even set the timer.  I think since I used plum tomatoes, it was not as tomato-y as it should be, so I added a bit of tomato paste to amp up the tomato flavor.  I left tiny chunks in the soup, so it had a bit of chew, and added some cooked brown rice, which complemented the texture of the soup.  I also had to add an extra sprinkle of the smoked paprika... very tasty.  This was a small pot of soup, so it's already all gone!  You can see the recipe here, but it's also in Super Natural Cooking.  I think the lack of photo in the book is probably the reason I haven't thought to make it before.