CSA Week 8

Week 8 brought:

More purple basil, leeks, a head of lettuce, 3 ears of corn, 2 green peppers, 2 tomatoes, 1 zucchini, and 4 peaches. I also bought a bunch of golden beets, a beautiful array of hot peppers, apples, plums and 2 lemon cukes.

What is a lemon cuke? I was wondering that myself, so I bought two. They are plain old cucumbers on the inside, but they are round and yellow like lemons. A great farmer's market find.

The cukes and lettuce went into bowls of bun, a cold Vietnamese noodle dish that's one of our favorites (see recipe in sidebar).

 Next, I made sure to use the purple basil as soon as possible. I made pesto for the first time, using this great recipe for a vegan version. It didn't come out black as I had thought, which was a plus.

The pesto went into a delectable batch of pesto risotto with roasted zucchini from the great vegan recipe site Post Punk Kitchen.

Next came a failed attempt at beet salad. I cleaned the beets and wrapped them in foil, then baked them for an hour at 425 degrees, as instructed in various beet recipes, only to find out when the hour was up, that my toaster oven hadn't maintained the heat for the full amount of time. The beets were still hard as rocks and there was no way I was cooking them for another hour. Discouraged, I tossed the beets and made a wacky whatever-I-can-find salad out of lettuce, garlic sauteed beet greens and Trader Joe's vegetable pakoras (Indian vegetable fritter balls) to replace the beets. With a mustard vinaigrette and almonds, it was...unique. I served it with salmon in an onion-parsley butter sauce. Not the best meal we've had.

Last but not least, the green and hot peppers went into curried shrimp with coconut milk. Much to my surprise, one of the green peppers had a little spider living inside - that's how you know it's farm fresh! I also used a chayote for the first time, an awesome squash that looks like this. I also had thought up until this point that the leeks I had recieved in my share were scallions. (It's kind of hard to distinguish between a skinny leek and a scallion without cutting them.) When I began cleaning and chopping them for a garnish, I thought something was differnt, and it took GP and I awhile to agree that they were leeks. This led to the term 'sneaky leeks'. (A food industry version of WikiLeaks?) In the end, the shrimp were great.

We gifted the corn and remaining leeks to GP's parents, and I snacked on the fruit and tomatoes.

Week 9, here I come!