28 July 2010

Tales from the CSA: Week 9

In this week's box:

1 head Boston Bibb lettuce
1 lg. bag broccoli florets
1 green pepper
4 Ginger Gold apples
2 red tomatoes
2 yellow tomatoes
4 cucumbers
3 eggplant
1 zucchini
2 yellow squash
5 Star Fire peaches
6 nectarines
6 plums (some Shiroh, some Methley)

It was so impressive I had to take a picture.

This week I got double-whammied, because we ended up with a lot of Food Lab: Raw Meat leftovers as well (PERFECT avocados, grapefruit, watermelon, lemons, asparagus).  So we've enjoyed avocado and grapefruit salad with a honey poppy seed vinaigrette the past few nights and a watermelon and feta salad on the side of fresh pasta with an asparagus lemon sauce this evening.  Which of course is not helping with using the CSA produce.

The fruit is mostly gone, other than the apples, just from snacking - no special work there.  Likewise with the tomatoes - some went into pasta salad and the rest just got sliced and eaten with basil from my garden. The cucumbers went into a batch of "The Cuke" for the Food Lab crowd, which everyone loved.

The big news/discoveries from this week were:  that cucumber sorbet? AWESOME in gazpacho (had dinner with a friend on Sunday, she had made gazpacho, and I took it along).  I'll definitely be doing more of that as the tomatoes really start rolling in.  And the Thomas Keller ratatouille is on, but Chef Spouse wanted to wait until this coming weekend to make it - less time pressure.  I'll be sure to report back on how it turns out.


5 comments:

Hecate said...

And the cucumber sorbet/gazpacho mix was also quite soothing on a sore throat. V, v. good.

Claire said...

Leave yourself a lot of time for any Thomas Keller recipe. I swear that man does not do anything that doesn't take hours to make! The first time Andy made a TK lamb recipe it took him 2 hours (no, I'm not exaggerating... I don't need to) to prep the lamb before the cooking process even began. The second time he recruited a friend who is a doctor to help, asking, "You did a surgery rotation in med school, right?" By the third time, he'd gotten it down to an hour. Damn good lamb though!

Liam said...

I've been contemplating putting together a ratatouille one of these weeks with my CSA takings but haven't decided on a recipe. Is the Keller one from the ad hoc at home cookbook? Or the French Laundry cookbook? Or elsewhere?

Anonymous said...

@Claire - you said it! That's why we're tackling this on a weekend. Of course, hiring a few sous chefs to help out would probably be a good idea, too.

@Liam - I'm not sure if the recipe is in any of the cookbooks. It's the one he put together for the movie Ratatouille. I found it here.

Liam said...

Cool, thanks!