CSA week 3: 8 vegetables, easier prep, mostly tasty meals

This is what came in
my CSA basket Wednesday.

This is what it looked like.

This is what I did - or am going to do - with it.

• The green leaf lettuce went into two hamburger buns, two side salads, and two dinner salads.
• The radishes went in a baggie, with salt, to my neighborhood playground. My daughter ate them as we watched her children play.
• The broccoli is in my refrigerator's vegetable drawer. There's a good chance we'll eat it tonight, with salmon.
• The beets, wrapped in aluminum foil, went into the oven at 400 degrees for an hour. After spending a day in the refrigerator, they joined the green leaf lettuce, a couple of oranges, some goat cheese, and a few slices of red onion in a dinner salad.
• The beet greens are likely to show up under tonight's salmon, after I've chopped them and wilted them in olive oil.
• The kale stared at me defiantly until I repeated the process I described last week. We always have potlucks to go to. And actually, the kale bread is so good that I'm making a little extra so we'll have some at home too.
• The romaine is in the vegetable drawer waiting for an avocado to ripen. It will soon join a black bean / cheese / bell pepper / chopped tomato / sliced avocado salad.
• The arugula threatened to get even more bitter if I didn't use it immediately. I found a salad recipe in Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, a book you should own if you frequent farmers' markets or subscribe to a CSA, and made the salad the day the kale arrived. If you're desperate to use up some arugula, you don't have to wait to buy the book: the recipe is here.
• The zucchini is with the romaine and the broccoli in the vegetable crisper. I'm planning to dice it, sauté it lightly, and toss it in pasta, probably rotini, with diced roma tomatoes and last week's garlic scape pesto.

Whew. I think it will all be used up by next Wednesday, when the next CSA portion arrives.

Chard: The gateway green

If you've been following my CSA posts, you know that this week's delivery flummoxed me. But things are turning out okay. Thursday night I made a salad that included

• the romaine lettuce; 
• the turnips and the kohlrabies (which I sliced thin and roasted); 
• garbanzos marinated in olive oil, lemon juice, and garlic scape pesto; 
• thin sliced tiny yellow bell peppers; 
• and a diced roma tomato. 

It wasn't bad.

Last night I fixed the chard. Chard is not one of your giant gnarly greens. It's a little crisper than spinach and has a slightly sweeter flavor. It's worth trying even if you aren't a fan of the more serious greens such as kale, collards, or mustard greens.

I washed the leaves, removed the largest stems, and tore the chard into smaller pieces. You can eat the stems if you like a bit of body in your greens, though it's a good idea to cook them for at least five minutes before adding the leaves.

I cooked the chard uncovered in about a cup of vegetable broth, stirring frequently. In about 20 minutes, it was soft enough to eat. Toward the end, I added a spoonful of garlic scape pesto for flavor (that is seriously good stuff!). The whole pile of leaves cooked down to two large servings!

I served the chard with Trader Joe's Pizza Greco-Roman, one of the tastiest frozen pizzas you can buy.

And now all I have to face are the enormous lacinato kale leaves and the second installment of garlic scapes. I'm going to make more garlic scape pesto in just a minute, and I'm working on the kale. Stay tuned.

The Great Scape: or, what to do with yet another weird CSA vegetable

This is a garlic scape.

It is the stem of the garlic flower. Farmers often cut it off so that the garlic bulb, the papery-covered thing we buy in little red-net packages at Trader Joe's, will grow bigger. I don't know what most farmers do with the scapes. I had never met a scape until last Wednesday.

My CSA portion included a fistful of scapes. Naturally I turned to Google, since I had no idea what to do with them, and I found "The Crisper Whisperer: 7 Things To Do with Garlic Scapes." Bookmark that link: you will need it, should you ever encounter a garlic scape.

I decided to make garlic scape pesto. I immediately encountered a problem, though: how much of each scape should I use? See that slight pale protrusion about a third of the way in, with its long tapering tip? Is that the flower? Is it the part to use? Should I use only the part that looks like a green onion? Or should I use both?

Only way to find out: eat some. OK, the long pointy ends of my scapes were not very chewable. The green tubes, were, however. And yowie! Did they ever assert themselves!

These are the ends I cut off and discarded.

So I cut off the flower ends, and then I took the long green tubes and chopped them into short pieces. I put the chopped-up scapes into my food processor along with the other ingredients the pesto recipe calls for (do check the link) and chopped everything further before adding the olive oil in a slow stream.

This is the finished garlic-scape pesto.

Cyberspace does video and audio really well, but this pesto must be tasted to be believed. One sample taste and I was a true believer. I stirred about 1/3 of the pesto into 4 ounces of cooked spaghetti and served it for dinner, along with leftover Brussels sprouts mixed with leftover marinated garbanzos (see yesterday's post) and tiny sliced bell peppers for color.

This was dinner.

If it looks good to you, I'm sorry: I have no idea where you'll find garlic scapes. But do start looking immediately. They must be harvested young, in late spring.

Oh, and one small caveat: Remember that this is garlic. If you eat it, probably everyone else in your household should too. Not that it will be hard to persuade them.