I got a CSA box on Thursday that included:
a quart of really ripe strawberries
a giant Napa cabbage – almost 3 pounds
Zucchini and summer squash, almost 4 pounds
Broccoli, 2 medium stalks
One green bell and one green frying pepper
One kohlrabi
a bunch of scallions,
two healthy stalks of curly basil
5 garlic scapes
So of course a large section of my brain has been processing what to do with all this loot. The basil and the strawberries were the things to use first. I worked at home on Friday and Mark and I ate the strawberries for breakfast, so one down.
We also had a stirfry with rice on Friday for dinner, before going to see Hearts Beat Loud (which was highly enjoyable, though many of the reviews called it “slight”, and a feel good summer movie), and the broccoli went in there along with the prior box’s summer squash and scallions, and some sugar snap peas, a few from the farmers’ market and a few from that earlier box. Not Asian-flavored, just the veggies cooked in a small amount of oil then eaten over rice with cheddar cheese on top. It’s like a dish I made a lot in college: zucchini and carrots fried up, cheese melted in, then dumped over brown rice and sunflower seeds on top.
I thought about making a pesto pasta salad; it’s like Fraboni’s – pasta with pesto and cheese, and peas and fake crab. I did make the pesto on Friday, using Deborah Madison’s proportions from Vegetarian Cooking For Everyone. I feel like I experimented with pesto for years and had PostIts in a couple of books with the amounts of basil, garlic, pine nuts, cheese, and olive oil that I decided I liked, and then I got that book (gosh, it’s 21 years old now) and there was the formula on p. 57, so I threw out my PostIts. Anyways, Madison suggests adding a bit of optional butter and I had butter in my French butter keeper that was getting way too soft in the heat, and I threw that in. I think it makes a milder pesto that stays greener, but it gets hard in the fridge when the butter congeals, so might not be so good with pasta salad. We had it on gnocchi on Saturday with a squash and tomato gratin, but there’s still a good bit left, so I think the pesto pasta salad will be arriving soon – maybe for 4th of July.
Earlier on Saturday, I made garlic scape hummus, which will be good with the leftover pita I brought home from the Turkish dinner I helped with on Thursday.
I also mixed up kimchi and packed it into jars – I had chopped and salted that giant Napa cabbage on Friday. I used this recipe from David Lebovitz, who mostly writes about baking and sweets. I had the chili paste, gochujang, but I didn’t have any Korean chili powder, so I put in a little ground Ancho chili.
On Sunday morning we had zucchini & summer squash lattice tart, that I’ve also made before – using this Martha recipe as a template. As a template, because she always tells you to do stuff the hard way or the wrong way, like make the lattice first and then lift it up and pour in the custard – really?! Or put in the sauteed diced squash filling first and then put the cheese on top – really?! when putting the cheese in first makes a good moisture barrier to protect the bottom crust. And I used scallions instead of leeks because that’s what’s in season now, the same time as the squash, although to be fair to Martha we no doubt will still have zucchini later in the summer at the same time as baby leeks.
I think I am going to make ratatouille with what’s left of the squash, and the peppers, and freeze it, because I found one last carton of diced tomatoes from last summer in the freezer that I should use before this year’s come in – oh, and I guess I could add that pesto, if it doesn’t seem quite right for the pasta salad.
You can see there’s a bit of a theme of putting things by here – like the kimchi and the ratatouille. This is because we’re instant empty nesters – our students, our AFS high school student and the graduate student intern who was staying with us – both moved out last Monday. If you look at the squash gratin pic, the part that’s gone is how much the two of us ate on Saturday. Which means I do a lot of freezing and otherwise preserving to use up each CSA box. Like the kimchi, blanching and freezing greens, pickling things, and making tomato sauce and freezing that.
Still have to figure out what to do with the kohlrabi – there’s only one. Pickled or slaw, maybe.