Deb's Lunch … and dinner and breakfast too

I got two CSA boxes in a row, and then we ate carry out Friday, and at a steak house on Saturday.

Three cucumbers, 4 patty pan, 1 zucchini, a couple of yellow summer squash, a bunch of scallions, one smallish fennel, half a purple onion (its uncut mate not shown), three Walla Walla onions, a small head of butter lettuce, 2 springs of broccoli, half a bunch of parsley, and a kohlrabi. In the red plastic cup at the back is a bunch of big leaf basil – that’s living on the counter because the fridge is too cold, as are the three tomatoes from the Saturday market.

This is not counting the bunch of kale, bowl of sugarsnaps, and the bottle of tomato juice also from this week’s box, or the 5 – 6 carrots in the other vegetable drawer from last week’s West Side farmers’ market.

Nor the giant bag of green beans in the basement fridge.

And, not to mention various bowls & containers, some of which contain “processed” CSA box veggies, like the bowl of tabouli with parsley and cucumbers, and that’s where the other half of the purple onion went; oil & vinegar potato salad; baked beans, mustard greens with peanut sauce; and the bowl of roasted beets.

And actual leftovers – clamshells of red beans and rice, fried shrimp, and jambalaya,  from Friday’s New Orleans Takeout, and a foil pan with leftover steak from Saturday.

There’s also fruit – a pint of raspberries, maybe a little sub par, and a pint of blackberries that are quite nice, and a quart minus about 15 sweet cherries that are delicious.

Visions of making the following out of all this stuff have been dancing and reformulating in my head all weekend:

• squash gratin with the fennel and the squash and the basil and the tomatoes
• OR, I just discovered and am quite taken with Julia’s Squash Tian – I could make it from Food52 or my mother’s 1973 copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 2
• summer squash casserole from this book
• and of course there’s always zucchini butter to use up all varieties of summer squashes
• a big stirfry with the sugarsnaps, and the kohlrabi and the kale and and the broccoli
• quick pickled cucumbers and purple onions
• mixed berry pie to take to Debbie Cardinal’s pie party, with whatever of the berries we don’t eat for Sunday breakfast, plus some of those blueberries from the freezer
• or else maybe a savory pie with some of the squashes? and basil, and tomatoes
• some kind of pilaf with rice cooked in tomato juice, with kale – but maybe I should freeze those before they go bad, because even though it didn’t get as hot as the weather service threatened, it’s still kind of hot for a pilaf
• wash the lettuce and the parsley eat them as a salad with steak or shrimp on top – Rach comes tomorrow and that’d be a nice Monday night dinner for us girls
• chilled beet borscht – with some of the scallions, and cucumbers – but I’ll have to buy sour cream
• scallion pancakes – I already made the dough – but these can be made up and then frozen and fried right before eating
• green beans cooked with tomato, or bacon … both?!

And, of course, I’m not actually supposed to be thinking about cooking, I’m supposed to be working ….

Overabundance
https://t.co/wjN6eRhaot via @DebsLunch @firstworldme

— Debra Shapiro (@DebsLunch) July 19, 2015

Postscript – OK I think I figured it out – some of it, anyways. I made the sub par raspberries into raspberry sauce, that we drizzled onto our Sunday breakfast fruit salad. That we ate with eggs and toast and bacon, and the last of the baked beans.

I made ratatouille pie for Debbie’s pie party. I put the one zucchini, and a summer squash, and a patty pan, and the fennel, and the tomatoes and basil, into the ratatouille, and I let it cook down while I got a little work done.

It was a lovely night for a bike ride to the party, which was out at Garner Park – and ca. 50 minutes of riding including some serious hills, meant I could enjoy some of the many varieties of pie.