This week we got butternut squash, potatoes, red onions, carrots, kale, mustard greens, cilantro, parsley, popping corn, apple and apple cider. We have a Full Monty share; We eat mostly vegan and usually have no problem getting through our fruit and vegetables each week. This is our 5th year in the CSA, so by now there are very few surprises. We have our favorite recipes for each vegetable that we return to each year.
With butternut squash, we pretty much always make a butternut squash and chickpea curry from Madhur Jaffrey’s wonderful “World Vegetarian” cookbook. Here’s the recipe from a previous post we wrote for the blog: https://southsidecsa.org/2010/09/28/member-diary-16-katerina/
Mustard greens have such a great flavor by themselves that we just stir-fried them with red onion in a little olive oil. We paired them with an eggplant, tomato and pepper curry we made with the previous week’s vegetables. The tartness of the mustard green contrasted well against the sweetness of the eggplant curry.
We turned half of the kale and a bunch of the potatoes into comfort food — a vegan take on the traditional Irish dish colcannon — inspired by this blog post: Luck of the Irish – Vegan Colcannon
I baked the potatoes whole in the oven for an hour, quickly stir fried the kale, then mashed the two together with Earth Balance margarine, salt and nutritional yeast (for a cheesy flavor). We paired it with Field Roast vegetarian sausages, the only fake meat I like.
With the rest of the kale and the carrots, we made pasta with kale pesto and roasted carrots. It’s a variation (carrots instead of squash) on this delicious NYTimes recipe: Pasta With Kale Pesto and Roasted Butternut Squash
With the cilantro and red onion (and tomatillos and jalapenos from a previous week), we made a variation on this recipe: Spicy Tomatillo Salsa Recipe
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Pan or oven roasting the tomatillos, jalapenos and onion makes this salsa really great.
With our autumn fruit (apples and pears), we always make crumble. It’s so versatile that it can easily be made with whatever you happen to have lying around. And you don’t have to mess around with rolling out dough for a proper pie, but it tastes just as good. For this week’s crumble, I used apples and a bag of frozen mixed berries. I followed this basic recipe — Any Season Fruit Crumble – but replaced the butter with Earth Balance margarine. If you’re gluten-free, the crumble also works great with ground almonds in place of the flour.
Greg’s expert at making classic cocktails and wanted to find a recipe that included apple cider. He discovered the Fireside, which is delicious and perfect for chilly autumn evenings.
Ingredients:
- 1 1/2 parts Bourbon (we used Rye instead, as that’s what we had)
- 1/2 part lemon juice
- 1/2 part honey
- 1 part apple cider
- 2 dashes Angostura bitters
- 4 pieces of ginger or ginger syrup
Instructions:
Muddle ginger, lemon and honey in mixing glass. Add apple cider, Bourbon, bitters and ice. Shake and strain into iced double old fashioned glass. Garnish with a slice of ginger.
Enjoy!
Southside CSA 