We’ve been members of Southside CSA since its founding (6 years?) but this is our first Member Diary! We are a family of three and we pick up a veggie share every week with meat and eggs every other week. This week we were super excited to see corn cobs at The Woods for the first time this season.
I like to use the corn right away so the first thing I did was make a corn salsa that I could quickly throw on top of dishes throughout the week- it ended up in quesadillas, on pizza and in salads and I still have enough left over that it will probably last another week or two.
Along the same lines, I also made a veggie pickle slaw early in the week inspired by this Smitten Kitchen recipe to throw into dishes throughout the week. Our version used up carrots, cucumbers and celery. It’s great to bring to bbq’s!
I also like to save up my beets and wait for a cool day to roast them. Luckily, early in the week we had a day cool enough where I could keep the oven on for over an hour and I roasted two weeks worth of beets and I threw in some carrots. Once they are roasted, I keep them in a tupperware in the fridge. They are easy to add to salads or as a side to meals. I also like to cut them into little sticks and give to our little baby to eat while I’m preparing meals.
We love how much kale we’ve been getting this year. Kale is a year-round staple at our house where we eat it raw in salads almost every day. For lunch this week I alternated between a kale caesar salad and a kale beet salad with a tahini miso dressing. The caesar dressing is made with anchovies and a raw egg from the egg share. I also throw in carrots and cucumbers from the csa, the corn salsa I made earlier in the week, plus tomatoes from our backyard and croutons made from leftover bread.
The tahini miso dressing is the easiest- tahini, miso, lemon juice and water mixed together and thrown on top of beets, mixed with walnuts and goat cheese. Our baby also loves to munch on kale so I’ll quickly steam a couple pieces for him to suck on while prepping lunch.
For dinners this week we made squash and leek quesadillas with some chorizo from the meat share. We threw in some of the corn salsa and also an apricot salsa I made a couple of weeks ago. Quick and easy meal!
We also love making pizzas- we took a class at Brooklyn Kitchen several years ago and we make pizza pretty frequently during the cooler months. We took advantage of the one cool day we had and made up a dough and then had caramelized leek, kale and corn salsa pizza for dinner inspired by this recipe.
Another fun dish we like to make is grated zucchini cut into long strips and used it like pasta. We use the basil to make pesto (the extra is frozen in muffin tins to use during the winter months). We sauté the zucchini slightly, add some cream and pesto, top with tomatoes from the backyard- done!
One last tip for recipe inspiration- I use an RSS reader to pull all the food blogs that I like to follow which makes it easy to search through by ingredient or browse photos. Unfortunately I haven’t yet found a good alternative to google reader, but feedly has a great display- it makes me feel like I’ve created my own cookbook. Unfortunately it doesn’t let you search so I also use inoreader when I want to find a recipe by ingredient. I also use bloglovin because it sends me a daily email with newly added recipes. Not ideal, but hopefully one of these rss readers will catch on and support all of these functions.
Southside CSA 