Banana melon, some 15 inches long. It tasted like a really sweet cantaloupe. I am SO tired of melons that taste like cantaloupe. What ever happened to old-fashioned watermelons that were sweet, juicy and red inside?
Posts Tagged ‘CSA’
As Pictured Below: Bowlful of Melon
Posted in CSA, Eats, Photographs, tagged cantaloupe, CSA, farm, food, melons, photograph, watermelons on August 28, 2010| 3 Comments »
Autumn is such a tease
Posted in CSA, Home, Photographs, tagged August, autumn, cat, CSA, fall, fireplace mantel, gourd, Halloween, marshmallows, Pier 1, trick-or-treat, trick-or-treaters on August 9, 2010| Leave a Comment »
No, Pier 1 Cat, it is NOT fair for something that is so reminiscent of fall to arrive in the CSA box during the hot, hot first week of August. We should be double-checking the marshmallow stocks and finding new ways to dodge trick-or-treaters with this gem on the fireplace mantel.
Tomato Envy
Posted in CSA, Eats, tagged CSA, food, grandparents, tomatoes on July 24, 2010| 1 Comment »
I’m finally getting tomatoes in my CSA box–they seem exceptionally late this year. Another farmer occasionally sets up shop out of the back of his pickup truck in the same parking lot where I pick up my goods every week, and I’m more likely than not to add some extras to my produce selection from his offerings. This week, he had a truck bed filled with $3 baskets of ripe, juicy tomatoes.
It’s been positively extravagant having so many homegrown, delicious tomatoes at the ready. I’ve had a sandwich. I’ve made a tomato-filled salad. I’ve served sliced tomatoes with dinner, garnished only with a sprinkling of salt and pepper.
Tomatoes aren’t a rarity, but good ones definitely are. I rarely buy grocery-store tomatoes any time of the year–they have no taste compared to the homegrown delicacies I grew up with at my grandparents’ farm.
I figure I only have three or four weeks of tomato season left, if that much. It’s fleeting, but it’s worth waiting for.
More eggplant excitement
Posted in CSA, Eats, Photographs, tagged cooking, CSA, eggplant, eggplant Parmesan, food, garlic, Italian, pasta, sun-dried tomatoes, tomato on July 14, 2010| 2 Comments »
I can’t believe I ignored eggplant until this summer.
This weekend’s creation was much simpler than Eggplant Parmesan, taking probably a third of the time to make and leaving me with no baked-on cheese to scrub away. I was worried that my half-Italian, tomato-living husband wasn’t going to touch the weird-looking Eggplant Pasta Sauce that I put on the table, but he gave it high accolades.
A word of warning: Mashed eggplant is a gray, oil-looking mess, but the sun-dried tomatoes and garlic give it a complex flavor that will overcome your initial impressions.
The Enigmatic Eggplant
Posted in CSA, Eats, Photographs, tagged cooking, CSA, eggplant, eggplant Parmesan, farm, food, grandfather, Martha Stewart, recipes, summer, tomatoes on June 28, 2010| 6 Comments »
The first CSA haul of the summer and I’m already faced with the unknown: eggplant. I guess because my grandfather never grew eggplants, I hardly ever ate them and certainly never had to figure out how to cook them.
Indulging my tendency to try things that are probably a bit too complicated, I settled on making Eggplant Parmesan, using a recipe from Martha Stewart.
That’s right. Martha Stewart.
It turned out delicious, even if it took the better part of two hours to make. I was unable to capture its deliciousness in a photograph, however; it’s one of those dishes that just looks like a big watery blob on the screen.
Next week I’m hoping for tomatoes, because juicy homegrown tomatoes have to be nature’s gift to us for putting up with heat like this.
Seriously, buy a salad spinner
Posted in CSA, Photographs, tagged Brady Bunch, CSA, food, greens, OXO, salad, salad spinner, Swiss chard on June 9, 2010| 3 Comments »
Listed among Things I Never Thought I Would Buy: a salad spinner. They always seemed very Carol Brady, although I guess they were really more Alice Nelson since Mrs. Brady didn’t do much of the cooking on that show.
I digress.
I spent last summer washing, drying and trying to properly store a weekly mess of Swiss chard and other greens that came in my CSA box. Never did it occur to me to look for a salad spinner.
This one caught my eye a couple of months ago because, frankly, everything OXO makes catches my eye. I researched, purchased and test drove it. Now I’m ready for this summer’s ridiculous amount of salad greens. Bring it on, CSA lady.
CSA time draws near
Posted in CSA, Eats, tagged childhood, cooking, corn, crops, CSA, Dennison's Family Farm, family, farm, farmer's market, food, grandfather, husband, ice cream, Iron Chef, LocalHarvest, mississippi, Mother Nature, South, strawberries, summer, tomatoes, watermelons on February 25, 2010| 9 Comments »
OK, I know I sound like a shill, but you should totally buy a share in a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program this summer.
I had the best time last year with my weekly pickups from Dennison’s Family Farm in Elora, Tenn. It really did turn into my own version of Iron Chef, having to work with whatever ingredients showed up in the box each week. And since there are few things scarier for my husband to hear than the statement “I made something new for dinner,” it’s somewhat of a miracle that he had a blast with it, too.
It’s a lesson in the natural cycle of crops for those who aren’t used to the whims of Mother Nature. For example, last year’s rains made for a very short corn crop, so I didn’t get nearly the amount of corn I had expected, but I got tons of tomatoes, chard and peppers of all varieties. And strawberries. Not those tasteless baby-fist-sized strawberries you get at the grocery store, but juicy, delectable berries, so many that you can’t eat them all and will be forced to make the best ice cream ever with them. Darn the luck.
Some folks tell me that they just prefer to go to the farmer’s market, which is cool if you like rolling out of bed before 9 a.m. on Saturdays. Which, truthfully, I have been known to do. But what I find myself not doing at the farmer’s market is buying something I’m unfamiliar with, or buying so much of something that I have enough to freeze for later. (I’ve got two more servings of zucchini/onion/garlic soup base in the freezer, and I just ran out of frozen bell pepper slices in January.) Even if you’re not going to get into canning, you can still have a little taste of summer when it’s 30 degrees outside.
Seriously, it was the best summer food-wise that I’ve had since that summer in the early 1980s when my grandfather and I grew a huge patch of watermelons and I ate my weight in fresh tomatoes.
Head to Dennison’s page on LocalHarvest for details on its 10-week program, or search for a CSA closer to you.
As Pictured Below: An Unbouncy Tigger
Posted in As Pictured Below, CSA, Eats, Photographs, tagged CSA, farm, food, heirloom, iPhone, melons on August 7, 2009| Leave a Comment »
This fragrant beauty was packed in the latest CSA box. The Tigger melon is an Armenian heirloom variety, and is sweeter than any melon I’ve ever tasted. It’s about the size of a softball, with the consistency and flavor of a cantaloupe.
It was almost too pretty to eat. But I persevered.
Is it hot in here, or is it just this awesome poblano souffle?
Posted in CSA, Eats, Photographs, tagged baking, co-workers, CSA, dehydrator, food, homemade, iPhone, photograph, souffle, vegetables on July 27, 2009| 5 Comments »
This week's CSA haul.
I’m up to my neck in CSA vegetables: Swiss chard, zucchini, cucumbers, poblanos, cherry tomatoes, squash and more. I made tiny souffles (my first ever) on Friday night with a recipe for Poblano and Cheddar Cheese Souffle from the 5 Star Foodie Culinary Adventures blog. I give credit to the Inspired Bites blog for helping me through the pepper-roasting process.
Oddly, I was more scared to roast a poblano pepper than I was to attempt a souffle. Go figure.
Truly, I could not handle this culinary adventure without the world wide web. Thank you, Internets.
You’ll note that there is no photograph of these alleged souffles. That’s because about three-quarters of the way through the 20-minute baking time, I realized that I WAS ACTUALLY MAKING A NOTORIOUSLY DIFFICULT DISH and I SHOULD BE SCARED and THEN THE TINY SOUFFLES ACTUALLY PUFFED UP and there was no way I was taking the risk that my first-ever homemade souffles would be served all sunken and non-poofy just so I could stop and take pictures.
They looked just like the ones here, and they were delicious. Trust me. I’m a woman who can make souffles.
I leave you with photos from the other half of this weekend’s food experiments: the Dehydration Debacle. Really, it was only half a debacle. Someone at work brought in some freeze-dried snap beans last week, and they turned out to be a crunchy, tasty snack. Having an excess of snap beans AND cucumbers crowding the CSA box, I decided to drag out my old-school stackable-unit dehydrator.
The results: crunchy bean curls that don’t really taste like anything, and thin cucumber chips that I would definitely pay good money for. I put just a slight sprinkle of salt on top of most of the slices before cranking up the dehydrator, and it seems to draw out the cucumber flavor.
Next weekend, I’ll bring out the dehydrator again to take care of all the pesky zucchini and squash taking up room and dealing out guilt in the hallway closet.
Dried snap beans.
Dried cucumber slices.
As Pictured Below: Okra Stars
Posted in As Pictured Below, CSA, Photographs, tagged Apple, CSA, food, iPhone, okra, photograph, ToyCamera on July 21, 2009| Leave a Comment »
Okra slices, shot in natural light with the iPhone.
Okra slices, shot in natural light with a random filter applied by the iPhone app ToyCamera.
OMG, iPhone. After downloading the ToyCamera app, I worry I may never want to pick up my regular digital camera again.
What’s the matter with the digital camera companies that they can’t make regular photography this much fun, with so little effort on the user’s part? Does Apple have to do EVERYTHING?
This is a sampling of the okra from last week’s CSA delivery, BTW. It got dropped into a simmering pot of onions, zucchini and tomatoes. Six more weeks of CSA deliveries, and my no-fry rule is getting more and more difficult to enforce.
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