Here’s a picture of this week’s** pick up! We have almost all of the shares, we are only missing the chicken share. Included this week are:
- Veggie share: cucumbers, potatoes, cabbage, red onions, radishes, corn, parsley, kale, zucchini, and garlic heads
- Berry share: Blueberries and blackberries
- Orchard share: three kinds of plums
- Egg share (1 dozen)
- Meat share: A chicken, chicken wings, filet steaks, and a choice of beef cut
(**This post is from Aug 5th share. Due to vacation & life craziness of blog editor it didnt get posted till now….)
Random beef cuts
It’s true that the meat share can sometimes include cuts of beef that we’re not familiar with. We had a Top Round cut that we realized would make a great pot roast type of meal, and we weren’t going to be around early enough to cook dinner. We have an electric slow cooker, and just using the meat, water, celery (from last week’s pick up- more on that later), carrots, onions, we slow cooked that puppy overnight to make a nice pot roast dinner.
Chicken Wings!
Those of you who had A week this week might have been excited for the chicken wings! We love wings but had never made them on our own before. We found two recipes but basically followed this one from Alton Brown: Buffalo Wings!
The first step involved steaming the wings, which we did using our spaghetti pot with the strainer above. After chilling we baked them at 425 for 20 minutes, then immediately tossed them into a bowl with melted butter, hot sauce, and garlic. Bonus: they weren’t fried, so it’s cool to eat extra. We also used some of the celery and carrots from the week before to make the classic accompaniment to wings (as well as a little bleu cheese sauce).
Note about wilty veggies
Water. It really works. Submerging your greens in water really does help solve the wilting problem, which is important because we try to stretch our veggies across two weeks. In this case, we used it for both wilty celery as well as soft carrots. While we initially just cut the stem of the celery and stood it up in a cup of water, we found that actually submerging the whole thing was much more effective
Zucchini Fries
We’ve been getting a lot of zucchini lately. So we found a simple recipe for fries. Cutting them up into 3 inch (more or less) strips, they were dipped in a milk/egg white mixture and then coated with a mixture of bread crumbs and grated parmesan. 25 minutes on a greased baking sheet and they were great! This was the basic recipe we followed: http://www.health.com/health/m/recipe/0,,10000001831902,00.html
Blueberry Basil Ice Cream
If you’re lucky enough to have an ice cream maker, this makes for an amazing flavor and you can chip away at all those berries! Our favorite base recipe for ice cream is this one: http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2009/02/vanilla-ice-cream/
Before making this we made a blueberry basil reduction. For that we mixed about 1 ½ – 2 cups of blueberries, picked and rinsed, with ¾ cups sugar and about 6-8 fresh basil leaves in a small sauce pan. We stirred frequently for about 10-12 minutes, as the blueberries popped and reduced.
Then we use that ice cream recipe, but instead of using the scraped vanilla bean to infuse the milk, we used another 6-8 fresh basil leaves. Finally, in step 5, right before putting the custard mixture in the fridge overnight, we added the blueberry reduction. Then we put it in our ice cream maker after letting it sit in the fridge 8-10 hours.
Deviled Eggs
We had a block party for Melissa’s job and were short on time to shop and cook, so we turned to a house standby: Sriracha deviled eggs. In this recipe, we mix the yolks with squeeze of mayo, a spoonful of mustard, juice from one half of a lime (or a squeeze of Nellie and Joe’s Key Lime), a healthy squirt of Sriracha, some chopped cilantro (from this week’s share), salt, and pepper. These were gone quickly.
Sautéed Kale
We’ve made lots of things with kale- kale chips, raw kale salad, used it in baking with other things. But this is one of the simpler and tastier ways to use it as a great addition to a meal. We heat up some olive oil and some crushed or minced garlic in a pan. After giving the kale a good rinse and getting rid of the thickest stems, pile it all on there. Mixing and tossing it around every couple of minutes as the kale reduces and after about 12-15 minutes you have a great dish. The before and after picture are important because you shouldn’t be afraid to really throw all the kale in there and fill it up, because it reduces quite a bit!
Southside CSA 