Learning Some Stir-Fry Basics

For whatever reason, stir-fry is something that Steve and I never attempted or had an interest in making before this year, and not because we don't love Chinese food. And you'd think I'd be comfortable with it, since it's something that my parents made for dinner a lot growing up, in their red electric wok that I still remember with surprising clarity. I also have memories of avoiding snow peas on my plate and gunning for extra water chestnuts, which is absolutely something I would still do today.

But regardless of why we'd neglected it up to this point, the recurring appearance of bok choy and baby bok choy in our CSA this year sort of demanded that we take a stab at it. It seems like the obvious choice for bok choy, doesn't it? Back in the spring we made this simple Bok Choy Chicken dish, and it was fine. It just felt very, um, utilitarian. "We have chicken. We have bok choy. Let us cook them, together." By contrast, this more recent favorite of ours, even though it's full of veggies and lean chicken, is indulgent. I suppose we have those yummy noodles to thank for that.

Pan-Fried Noodles with Chicken on The Woks of Life

Used From Our CSA (Week 18)
red bell pepper
bok choy
onion
chicken breast

Guess what!? This concoction was made with some of our frozen chicken stock from earlier this year. Victory moment!

Thoughts on the Recipe

• Someday we'll be savvy enough to throw something like this together without needing to reference a recipe, but for now it made for a really helpful guide. We did go somewhat off-message to throw in some extra veggies (listed above), as well as a can of sliced water chestnuts, because yum.
• It's a very preparation-heavy dish, but as the recipe states, once you get underway with cooking, things really do come together quickly. We definitely benefited from having two sets of hands in the kitchen for this meal: Steve did all the cooking, and I helped with prep and did some dishes during that time. By the time it was ready to eat, almost all of the dishes were done (my favorite thing).
• Finally, let me state for the record that this makes a ton of food, which is lucky, because the leftovers are so good (also my favorite thing). 

Are there any stir-fry experts out there? Share your tips & wisdom in the comments!

If You Only Try One Spaghetti Squash Recipe...

Steve & I did a happy dance when we found out we were getting a spaghetti squash in our Week 15 box (along with another fall tease: apples!). We definitely already had something in mind for it, which brings me to the title of this post: if you only ever try one spaghetti squash recipe, it needs to be this one.

Stupid Easy Paleo Spaghetti Squash & Meatballs on PaleoPot

Of course, that's easy for me to say, because this is really the only thing we've ever made with spaghetti squash. It's not a very informed directive. But this slow cooker dish is both one of our favorite fall meals and seriously the easiest thing to pull together. And then there's the added bonus of the slow cooker, because what's better than being at work and knowing that dinner is going to be ready and waiting for you when you get home?

Okay, so this might not be the most appetizing looking meal out there, but trust me: your taste buds will not know the difference. This is straight-up, low carb comfort food!

Used From Our CSA (Week 15)
spaghetti squash
garlic

Thoughts on the Recipe

• If you work full-time like Steve & I do, this is one of those slow cooker recipes that I used to find terribly inconvenient for a weekday, because it only cooks for 5-6 hours. Pretty unhelpful if you're not going to be around at 1 pm to flip on your crock pot. Enter this $7 dinner-saver: an outlet timer! Pure genius, right? Maybe this is self-evident to everyone but me, but finding this suggestion online some time ago opened up a whole new world of weeknight slow cooker meals to us, since before that we were limited to recipes with an 8+ hour cooking time. It has become such a staple for us that we just store it inside of the clean crock pot, so it's always on hand when we need it.
  
• Pay attention to the funny business regarding the amount of sausage the recipe calls for. The ingredients list calls for 1 lb., but as the instructions admit, you're only going to be able to fit about 1/2 lb. into the pot. No need to run out for a whole pound, if you already have a half-pound on hand in your freezer (speaking from experience, here).  

Even though I clearly swear by this dish, I really hope that we get a few more of these squash in coming CSA weeks, because I am starting to feel an itch to try something different next time around. Here are three dishes, all some variation of stuffed spaghetti squash, that have caught my eye over the past few weeks:

left: Lasagna-Stuffed Spaghetti Squash

top-right: Sausage, Kale, & Spaghetti Squash Boats

bottom-right: Tex-Mex Baked Spaghetti Squash

What about you: do you have a favorite go-to dish for spaghetti squash?

Week 14 Overview

Yikes, where is the summer going? Between a surge in busyness and hosting my sister for a visit last weekend (yay!), I've been ignoring this space for a few weeks. I have some catch up to do, so each CSA week may have to be a one-post "overview" until I get a little more up-to-date. Here's the rundown for Week 14.

Red Cylindra Beets: when Steve picked up our box he thought these were potatoes. They do look pretty different from the other beets we had seen up to this point. And boy was he upset when he realized what they were! He would have swapped them had he known, but alas. Needless to say, they are still sitting in our fridge, having not been used yet.

Yellow Bell Peppers: gone! I ate these both myself throughout the week with some yogurt veggie dip. One of my favorite lunch items these days.

Mixed Cherry Tomatoes: gone! We used the whole pint in a vegetable gratin early in the week. They were such pretty fall-ish colors! By now we've made this recipe so many times (with slight variations) that we could probably do it blindfolded. Such a great way to use up lingering vegetables.

Baby Eggplant: gone! I'll share about how we used these in my Week 15 post, but Steve cooked up something fun with them, a dish of his own invention.

Green Bell Peppers: Steve kept one of these and swapped the others for a bundle of cilantro and an onion-looking vegetable that we believe is a giant shallot. It's gone: got munched with veggie dip. The cilantro was used to make the pico de gallo in Week 13. And what was left of that topped some zucchini & corn pancakes that we also cooked up during this week (we first made them in Week 9).

Red Potatoes: we're still hanging on to these. Though this is a good place to mention that we whipped up some more summer carrot soup during this week (a repeat from Week 10). That recipe uses a whopping one potato.

Red Tomatoes: oh, red tomatoes. Is it fair to say that this summer's amazing heirlooms have ruined plain old red tomatoes for me? Aside from one or two, I'm not sure we used any of these. And I know how egregious it is for me to say this, because tomatoes = summer and there are no less than one million things you can do with them! Sigh. They were starting to go bad (along with some additional ones we got in Week 15), so Steve took them to work yesterday to share with some veggie-loving animals. I guess that's something...?

Watermelon: (oops - I forgot to include it in my box photo!) We're still working through this second watermelon of the year. They take forever to eat, guys! Tonight's dinner plans should help us keep working our way through it with a cool summer salad.

Peaches: delicious, and gone!

Chicken Breast & Wings: we didn't make any chicken this week, so both of these went into the freezer with the rest of our chicken cache.


Even though Week 14 didn't have any new or revolutionary dishes in it, we made it through another CSA week, ate a ton of yummy stuff, and (I think) made pretty decent use of what we had on hand. All of that spells success in my mind. But do check back in for my next overview, because we did get to do some new and fun stuff with some of the great items that Week 15 delivered. It was a good one, and a few of the things we got even hinted at fall's approach, which made me downright giddy!

Week 13 Overview

I am going to try something new to share about CSA Week 13 (which I will repeat for Week 14). This is in part to help me get caught up with these two CSA weeks that I've fallen behind on. But also, as I mentioned in my last post, we've been repeating a lot of recipes recently, most of which I've already shared about in the past. So since I don't have much to say right now, this will hopefully be a good way to chronicle a couple of weeks and share what we've been up to with our produce. Here is what we received in our Week 13 box, and how we used it!

Heirloom Tomatoes: I am super sad to say that we did not make use of these particular heirlooms in time (and look how pretty they are! *sob*) We did use a few in Week 13, but they were carryover from the previous week. Together with our eggplant, we used them to make one of our very favorite standby summer dishes: a tomato eggplant bake. It's reminiscent of the vegetable gratin we've been coming back to all summer as well, but different enough that we can consider it to be its own thing. This is a dish I would definitely recommend, and it makes awesome leftovers too.

Italian Eggplant: gone! Also went into the tomato eggplant bake.

Tomato eggplant bake. How lovely are those yellow tomato slices in the middle?

Rainbow Carrots: we didn't use any of them in Week 13, but they were still in good shape heading into this week.

Green Zucchini: once again, we made some good progress on our zucchini stash, but we are nowhere close (yet) to using it all up! Repeating the ratatouille accounted for two of them. I also finally got around to making this Glazed Lemon Zucchini Bread that caught my eye several weeks ago on a friend's facebook wall. It is very tasty, and definitely a recipe I will hang on to. I'd love to make it again sometime as muffins. But it only used up one more of them. We'll see how it goes this week. So far this summer we have not had to throw away a single squash, even when it's taken some time to make use of them. Thank goodness for hardy vegetables.

Malabar Spinach: so here's what we learned about Malabar spinach: we don't like Malabar spinach. Okay, actually, we probably didn't really give it a fair shot. It never got incorporated in our meal plan but Steve did use some of it one night to whip up some quick omelettes for us (with tomato, feta, and some of the spinach leaves). But it turns out it's not really spinach - read a little more about it here. We felt like it was a little too fleshy (kind of slimy), both raw and cooked. Honestly, we'll have to give it another try sometime, and since it's supposed to hold up in soups better than regular spinach, that might be the way to go. But this time around, only a small portion of the leaves we had went to use.

Bicolor Sweet Corn: gone (kind of)! We had corn on the cob with dinner one night and cooked up all six ears. We obviously could not eat more than about three of them between the two of us, so the rest got sliced off the cob and frozen. We will have no trouble using it in the next few months. Like last time (Week 9) this batch corn was just okay, a little tough and not super sweet. Hrm. 

Green Beans: gone! We repeated the green bean salad from Week 10 (with actual green beans this time instead of the burgundy beans). Yum! That took care of them all.

San Marzano Roma Tomatoes: gone! And man, I did NOT think that would happen. It was a huge bag, and since I didn't have plans to do any canning or preserving (maybe someday), I was just sure that many of them would go to waste. Salsa to the rescue! I took what didn't get used in the 2nd batch of ratatouille we've made this summer up to my in-laws this past weekend and we were able to finish them off by making a double batch of this Chipotle-style pico de gallo. I even had to dip into my mother in-law's bowl of garden grown tomatoes, which made us all happy. We also got some cilantro in our Week 14 box, so that went to good use here too.

Peaches: gone! We are still loving these great summer peaches. Steve keeps saying that he wants to make a baked peach w/ custard recipe that he loves, but in the meantime I am not complaining about eating them as-is.

Red Seedless Watermelon: gone, but only as of today. It was pretty large and definitely took some time to get through, but it was tasty! We have a second one (from Week 14, in the background of the above picture) that we haven't even cut into yet. Yikes.

Chicken Breast & Whole Legs: We used the breast (and another bag that we'd already had), to make some of the crock pot pulled BBQ chicken (mentioned in my Week 8 Summary) that we love. Legs are still frozen. On a related note, we cleaned-out and inventoried our freezer last night. It is a chicken-parts party in there! We're working on it ... :)

I've been feeling like such a CSA failure lately, but really when I look back over this list, it is not too bad. I have similar thoughts about Week 14, so maybe when I write out that overview I'll be similarly encouraged. Also, last night we unpacked our Week 15 box, and are super excited about some of the new things that showed up in it. More to come, but let's just say that my wishes for fall fruits and veggies are starting to come true!

Week 12 Summary

Boy oh boy, I am pretty behind with my Week 12 summary (it wrapped up on August 15th, almost two weeks ago!). I kept a copy of our meal-plan on hand so I could remember how we ended up using everything that week! Here's the gist:

Baby Eggplant: gone! We used most of them to make ratatouille (recipe in this cookbook), which was a new dish for us. I had never had ratatouille before, and frankly had no idea what it even was until we made it. But we both really enjoyed it!

Heirloom Tomatoes: they are gone, but I think we used them both in our Week 13 meal plan. They were really good.

Garlic: we still have it, and have used a little bit at a time.

Hungarian Hot Wax Peppers: gone! We picked these and made most of them into the yummy grilled cheese I posted about last week. There were a few leftovers which I munched on and shared with my coworkers. They got a pretty mixed range of reactions, from instant love all the way to smoke coming out of ears - ha!

Mixed Yummy Peppers: these are gone too! The chevre stuffed peppers were such a hit that I made them again this past weekend for my in-laws (luckily they stayed fresh that whole time).

Red Tomatoes: gone! We made bruschetta with one and the other was used in the ratatouille. 

Green Zucchini: not gone. No, it feels like the zucchini will never be gone. We are still working our way through what we've accumulated this summer. But, we made good use of a few in Week 12: the zucchini spaghetti and ratatouille helped with that. We also made up these zucchini fries one night. They were awesome, but we were extra naughty and fried them up in oil instead of baking them. We needed an excuse to try out the new cast iron skillet.

zucchini fries with some honey-ginger wings

Gold Beets: still sitting in the fridge, untouched... I know, I'm getting predictable.

Peaches: gone! We keep getting peaches, but it seems they get tastier each week. Yes!

Cantaloupe: gone! It was perfectly delicious.

Whole Chicken: we haven't used it yet, but made two other meals this week with some previous cuts of chicken that were in the freezer. Some honey-ginger wings (pictured above), and lemon pepper seasoned legs (below, we ate them with the grilled cheese). When it comes to cooking any part of a chicken besides the breast, Steve has been the point guy so far this year. I need to get some serious practice in this category.

Week 12 Links
Chevre Stuffed Sweet Peppers
Zucchini Pasta with Creamy Lemon Chive Dressing 
Grilled Cheese with Pickled Hot Wax Peppers 


Truth be told, I feel like I've been in a bit of a culinary rut for the past couple of weeks. I can't complain because we are still eating good fresh stuff all the time, but I've been less inclined in the past few weeks to branch out and try new recipes. A lot of meals have been on repeat in our kitchen, but so has much of our produce (zucchini, eggplant, tomatoes, rinse, repeat). And I'm sure our busyness also contributes to the lack of creativity, since finding and trying new recipes definitely takes more time and focus than returning an old standby.

I'm hopeful that inspiration will strike again soon, and I'm also getting eager for the pending transition into more fall fruits and veggies. Squash! Apples! I think they will bring with them a new wave of excitement. In the meantime, what dishes have been inspiring you these days? Share your thoughts in the comments, because I need a nudge!

Grilled Cheese With Pickled Hot Wax Peppers

This ended up being the healthiest most fun dinner we've made in a while. Hungarian hot wax peppers for the win! One of my favorite things in the world is eating food as soon as it comes out of the frying pan and is piping hot. So digging into this grilled cheese while it was still all melty and super crispy was awesome in itself. The extra kick that came from the layer of peppers in there took this whole sandwich up to top-notch status. Not to mention that it is the easiest thing in the world to make - all signs are pointing toward the need for more fancy grilled cheese in my life.

These sandwiches were a slight variation of this Jalapeno Popper Grilled Cheese on Simply Scratch

Used From Our CSA
Hungarian hot wax peppers

Thoughts on the Recipe

The grilled cheese was part of our dinner last Friday night. But preparing for the meal started on Thursday evening, because we had decided to pickle our peppers. To do that, we followed the instructions on this page. However, since we only had six peppers, Steve cut the ingredients way down while keeping the ratios intact (1 part salt, 4 parts vinegar, and 12 parts water, by volume). We also skipped the corn oil part of the instructions, and just left them in the vinegar solution for the few days it took to work our way through them. Aside from the fact that I neglected to wear gloves while slicing these up (which trust me, I definitely regretted for about the next 16 or so hours), it was a quick and easy process and we stuck the whole bowl in the fridge to sit overnight.

As far as the sandwich recipe goes, grilled cheese is a hard thing to screw up. So the recipe was a perfect catalyst to helping us use our peppers, even though we didn't follow it exactly. For example, no jalapenos were involved, and we didn't grill the peppers that we did use. Also, I don't usually do the "stir the minced scallions into the cream cheese" thing, when I could just as easily sprinkle the onions over a smear of cream cheese and thereby not have extra or make up too little of the mixture. I'm in favor of keeping it simple wherever possible.

But speaking of cream cheese - adding it to grilled cheese is a genius move. I never would have thought of that.

It took me almost a week to write this post, and I've craved another one of these grilled cheeses every day that I've worked on it - torture! We are all out of peppers, so I think I need some other delicious grilled sandwich ideas to help distract me. Any suggestions?

Zucchini Pasta with Creamy Lemon Chive Dressing

Our plans for dinner last night started out with this dish from Martha Stewart's website, but I quickly realized two crucial things: 1) there is no actual spaghetti in this zucchini spaghetti and 2) there is no way we are going to get our zucchini sliced that thin without a mandolin at our disposal. I love the idea of a dish comprised entirely of julienned zucchini, but it just was not going to happen without that important piece of equipment. Still, since I thought it looked so yummy, and was intrigued by the dressing, I decided to improvise.

True zucchini pasta will have to go into the someday file for us. For last night though, I stuck with the lemon-chive dressing and combined a half-pound of fettuccine with a half-pound of coarsely grated zucchini. Yum yum! More about the recipe modification below.

Creamy Lemon-Chive Dressing from Martha Stewart
 

Don't mind that over-toasted baguette in the picture - we had some build-your-own bruschetta with dinner last night too.

Used From Our CSA
zucchini

Steve mincing chives (and doing so quite precisely, I might add)

Thoughts on the Recipe
-We prepared the dressing recipe as it was written, and cooked up a 1/2 lb. of fettuccine.
- This step is modified from the original zucchini spaghetti recipe: I grated a zucchini, enough to get 1/2 lb., and tossed it in a strainer with some salt. I let that sit for about 15 minutes and then squeezed the zucchini against the sides of the strainer to try to get out as much water as I could. Since it was grated instead of julienned, I didn't have to be so gentle (I'm sure Martha would be disappointed).
- The pasta, zucchini and dressing (we used it all) were tossed together in a bowl. Done!
- In the end, I think this could have done with more zucchini - why not? Since we have no shortage of it right now, grating another one would not have been a bad idea, and would have stretched this dish farther.

This was a wonderfully simple dish to pull off on a weeknight. I love the lightness that the zucchini brings to it. And I've said before that Steve & I don't normally gravitate toward pasta, but I would definitely make this one again. Hooray for finding another way to work through that zucchini!

Chevre Stuffed Sweet Peppers

This recipe was a great find for someone like me, who doesn't take much creative license in the kitchen without permission. Mostly because ideas such as "stuff some chevre inside those cute little sweet peppers" don't usually come to me on their own. But as soon as I spotted this idea on Pinterest? Total light-bulb moment. This makes for a quick and easy snack, but still feels pretty high-class if you ask me. I made them on Monday night for the ladies in my small group, and I think they went over pretty well! I just have one not-so-great picture today, but definitely click through to the original recipe to see just how endearing and enticing these are.

Chevre Stuffed Sweet Peppers on bell'alimento

Used From Our CSA
mixed yummy peppers

Thoughts on the Recipe
It was hard to mess this one up. I thinned out the goat cheese with a small amount of olive oil (partly to stretch it further and partly to make it a little less crumbly), and added some salt and pepper. I ended up with a little extra after all, so probably could have roasted a few more peppers.

I definitely recommend these guys for your next dinner party or social gathering. Does anybody have suggestions for something else I should fill a tiny pepper with? Tell me please, because I'm probably too dense to think of it myself.

Week 12 Delivery

Hey there, it's CSA Week 12! Here's what we got in our latest delivery. If you can't tell from the picture, it was an exceptionally heavy box (quite a change from the early weeks of leafy greens and scallions!).

Vegetables
baby eggplant
heirloom tomatoes
garlic
Hungarian hot wax peppers
mixed yummy peppers
red tomatoes
green zucchini
gold beets 

Fruit
peaches
cantaloupe

Chicken
whole chicken

Some initial thoughts about this delivery :
- More tiny eggplants, and now these cute, colorful peppers? I don't know whose idea it is to grow all these mini-versions of vegetables, but they are adorable, so just keep them coming! Not to mention that they taste great; it's like Christmas come early over here.
- I'm jazzed about the melon. Getting something new that you've been waiting on all season is always exciting. It's really yummy too.
- Hungarian hot wax peppers: say what?! I've never had one before. It seems that they are often pickled, and I think we will aim to do that with ours too. There is a grilled cheese sandwich in our plans this week that may or may not bring them into play. 

Has anyone else ever had a Hungarian hot wax pepper before? Also, tell me I'm not alone in my love of tiny vegetables...

Week 11 Summary

As predicted, Week 11 was very scant in the way of blog posts. But this post will include a few extra pictures to help summarize what we were up to with our CSA last week. Here's how things shook out:

Red Potatoes: there are still some left, but we made good progress with them this week! About 2 pounds got used: one in the lemon rosemary chicken, and another to make this pretty tasty red potato salad on Friday night. Neither Steve nor I are big into potato salad, so I think it's a good sign that we both approved of this one. I think the red potatoes helped, along with the lack of gobs and gobs of mayonnaise (it only called for 1 tablespoon).

red potato salad on the side of some improvised vegetable gratin

Green Bell Peppers: Steve does not like green peppers, so it mostly fell to me this week to work my way through them. A small amount went into the potato salad above, but I picked up a tub of my very favorite yogurt veggie-dip from Trader Joe's, and mostly ate a lot of pepper with my lunches. We have one left.

Yellow Onions: used here and there this week. I think we have one left.

Indian Cucumbers: I mentioned before that I wasn't sure at first what to make of these. See below for a better picture of what they look like, inside and out. When I cut them open, they were less like a cucumber and more like a melon, so I scooped out all the seeds with a spoon before cutting them up. Together with some yellow onion, I used them to make ice box pickles. They are the easiest thing in the world! Here is how to make them:

- slice up a bunch of cucumber and onion, however much you want of each. Dump everything in a deep bowl.
- add equal parts of white vinegar, water, and sugar; enough to cover all of the veggies. 
- stir well, cover, and refrigerate. I like to let them sit for at least a few hours before eating, to let everything soak in. The finished product is so tasty!

The Indian cucumbers were a bit tougher (or crunchier? I'm not sure how to describe it...) than a standard cucumber, but not necessarily in a bad way, just different.

Orange Carrots: Steve & I both munched these throughout the week with veggie dip and hummus. There are a bunch left, though!

Fairytale Eggplants: oh, my beloved fairytale eggplants. Sadly, our plan was to throw them into a vegetable gratin on Friday night. When we pulled them out of the fridge, most of them were already shriveled and turning brown. So we pulled out the ones we could salvage for our dinner, but had to toss most of them! I've definitely noted their shorter lifespan for next time.

Rosemary: the bundle of rosemary we received is so huge that we are not possibly going to be able to use it all. A bunch did go into the skillet chicken dish, however, and we used bit more of it last night in a Week 12 dish. 

Green Zucchini: we have officially reached zucchini coming out of our ears status. At my last count I think we had 8 of them in the fridge (that includes the ones we got for Week 12)! One fun and different thing that we tried last week was this recipe for zucchini bread ice cream (yep, you read that right). I actually modified it quite a bit, because I don't have patience for custard and I didn't think all the straining was necessary. The end result is really interesting - we think it actually tastes like pumpkin pie more than anything (I think because of all the spices in it). We used zucchini in a few other ways as well last week, including a vegetable gratin.

churning up the zucchini bread ice cream

Heirloom Tomatoes: I am so grateful for heirloom tomatoes! One of them didn't survive the week, but we managed to use up the rest between BLTs, the gratin, and a mini-batch of bruschetta. (Side note: I could hug the person who invented BLTs.)

Mmm, BLTs. Why not throw in some sliced avocado for good measure? (Ice box pickles showing in the background.)

Blueberries: almost gone - we are still working through them.

Peaches: gone! They were great.

Chicken Breast: gone! Both went into making the rosemary chicken dish.

Chicken Legs: still frozen.


Week 11 Link
Skillet Rosemary Chicken


So guess what happened last weekend? We finally bought a cast iron skillet! I did a little bit of browsing online to get a sense of their cost and they were far less spendy than I was expecting. Then I remembered that we still had some value left on a Crate & Barrel gift card that we've been hoarding since our wedding. So we swung by the mall on Sunday afternoon and finally picked up a 12" skillet, all with gift card funds. (Note: they sell it at Target for about $8 less, but being able to use the gift card tilted us toward C&B.) Yipee! We've already used it once and it worked great. I'm just super stoked to have one piece of cookware that is both oven and broiler safe, and can be used on the stovetop.

Thanks for reading about our CSA adventures in Week 11. Week 12 info is on its way!

Skillet Rosemary Chicken

Usually, the recipes I take the time to individually post about here are for new-to-us dishes. That's largely been a function of the CSA; since we're getting lots of new and interesting produce (new in the sense that we haven't cooked much with it before), the experience is lending itself to trying a lot of new recipes. But the dish I'm sharing about today is one that's been in our arsenal for quite some time, and it just so happens that the CSA stars aligned this week such that we got to return to an old favorite. Chicken: check; red potatoes: check; rosemary: check. We were already three-fifths of the way to having all the major ingredients covered!

But the funny thing about this dish is that we've altered it in a number of small ways over time, so that it doesn't much resemble the original dish any more. Most of the changes are due to our personal taste preferences, and one is because we don't have a cast-iron skillet. (Our lack of cast iron skillet is becoming an emerging theme on this blog. I think we must be approaching the critical point of taking the plunge to invest in one.) I'll outline our main changes below. But the main thing you need to know is that the flavors in this dish are truly wonderful. Lemon + rosemary = love.

Skillet Rosemary Chicken on Minimally Invasive 

Used From Our CSA
red potatoes
rosemary 
chicken breast

Right before going into the oven.

Thoughts on the Recipe
- We use chicken breast (usually 2) instead of the boneless, skinless thighs.
- We substitute green beans (frozen in this case) for the mushrooms. I usually just dump in half the bag. I love the way they taste when they get all lemony! Which brings me to the next change...
- I like to one-and-a-half the part of the recipe for the lemon marinade. That means 3 lemons instead of 2 and a bit more of the garlic, rosemary, and salt all get mashed up together on the cutting board. I love having that extra amount of tangy juice in the pan when serving this up. Especially because the potatoes will soak up most of it.
- To make this without the oven-safe skillet, we still get the chicken started in a regular skillet as instructed, and toss the cooked potatoes and frozen beans in the bottom of baking dish while that's in process. Then the chicken, remaining marinade, rosemary, lemon halves, and the rest of the lemon juice all go over the top. Having a cast iron skillet would definitely make that part easier and create fewer dirty dishes, which is always a good thing. Someday...

So there you have it: one of our favorite dinners, and all the wild things we do to it to make it even yummier. I really need to sit down and re-write the recipe with all of our modifications, so I don't forget the altered steps when we make it. Do you have any super-adapted or ever-evolving recipes that you love? 

Week 11 Delivery

Welcome to Week 11 of our CSA! Here's a glimpse at what we received in our latest box:

Vegetables
red potatoes
green bell peppers
yellow onions
Indian cucumbers (the round, gourd-looking fruit between the potatoes and carrots)
orange carrots
fairytale eggplants
red tomatoes swapped for rosemary
green zucchini
heirloom tomatoes

Fruit
pint of blueberries
bag of peaches 

Chicken
breasts
whole legs

A few thoughts on the items in this box:
- I think those fairytale eggplants are the cutest things ever. End of story.
- At the start of the week, I had no idea what an Indian cucumber was and was honestly having a hard time finding information about them online. Up to this point, that really hasn't been an issue with the more unusual produce we've had. I may share more about them this week, but ended up using them in a way I would have used a regular cucumber.
- The small heirloom tomatoes are also beautifully colored, and the ones we've had so far have been delicious.
- The peaches this time around are awesome. Finally (they've been a little hit or miss so far, even within the flavor of a single fruit)!

This CSA week may be a little blog-light because I was feeling a pull to keep things more simple with our meal plan. Thankfully, a lot of the produce in this batch is lending itself well to that. Lots of veggies & dip happening in our house this week. And I'm enjoying a little respite from our usual heavier cooking routine. More to come in the next few days!

Week 10 Summary

Here is an overview of how Week 10 wrapped up for us:

Ping Tung Long Eggplant: gone! Partly used in a variation of this vegetable gratin (a recipe we've been returning to again and again, since we can kind of throw whatever in it), and the rest were used up to make the tomato & eggplant galettes.

All Red Potatoes: we've only used one, in the carrot soup. However, we have more plans this week that will use potatoes, so we'll make some progress on them.

Green Zucchini: mostly gone, with a couple we're still hanging on to. We put one in the vegetable gratin, and also made this really fun grilled zucchini bites appetizer that I would for sure recommend. We don't own a mandolin slicer or a grill, so we made the poor man's less-pretty version, but still: so good. When you put goat cheese, lime, and mint all into one item of food, you are speaking my language!

Gold Beets: poor beets. Got ignored again. I checked on them last Friday and they had to go. We still actually have the red beets from the week before, so I guess maybe the gold ones have a shorter fridge-life? 

Purple Carrots: almost all used. Most of them went into the carrot soup mid-week. We've been munching on a few this week too. 

Heirloom Tomatoes: gone! One was used in the tomato & eggplant galette, and we made the tomato peach salad again last week with the other.

Royal Burgundy Beans: gone! We spent the weekend with my in-laws in Pennsylvania, and I took the whole bag up with me so I could make this dish as a contribution to Saturday night's dinner. It's technically a recipe for green beans, but it was yummy with these too. It was well received, and bonus: now I know how to chop/use a fennel bulb!

green bean salad made with royal burgundy beans

Peaches: all gone! Mostly just eaten plain, and one was used for the tomato peach salad again.

Plums: LONG gone! Man, were these good. I love plums, and downed them two at a time. 

Blackberries: also all gone. They were amazing. I don't always gravitate to blackberries because of their numerous large seeds, but these were so perfectly sweet and ripe that the seeds were totally worth it. 

Chicken Breasts, Thighs, and Drumsticks: these particular cuts haven't been eaten yet. BUT, we did better this week with including some chicken in our meal plan. Firstly, we made some Old Bay roasted legs to have with dinner the night we ate the carrot soup. Yep, we've made lots of chicken with Old Bay this summer - it is a favorite and this is Baltimore, after all. Also, we took a whole bird with us to Pennsylvania and Steve's mom made a beer can chicken with it, which was SO GOOD. I cannot wait until the day when we have a grill, so I can learn to recreate this amazing-ness. And our freezer is looking slightly better after using both those things up.

Look at that beautiful bird!

Week 10 Links
Heirloom Tomato & Eggplant Galette
Stuffed Zucchini with Pesto Couscous
Summer Carrot Soup


So aside from the sad beet-neglect that I seem to be falling into week after week, I'm calling Week 10 an all-around success! We ate some really yummy meals, and made good use of the majority of our items. Onto Week 11!

Summer Carrot Soup

This was our first experience making a soup that's served chilled. In this case, it turns out the process is not that different from making hot soup, but you stick in the in fridge when it's done - ha! We used the purple carrots from our Week 10 box, and the color of the final product was just too fun (side-note: less fun when you spill said purple soup on your white jeans ... thankfully it washed out). And BONUS: we were able to put the rest of our dill from Week 8 to use! Surprisingly, it was still hanging on after two weeks and I'm so glad we found a way to use it. 

This recipe was really easy, but we decided to make it a day ahead of time so we could give it the 2+ recommended hours to chill without eating a late dinner. Although you could always serve it hot as well. Both Steve and I enjoyed this a lot, but I liked it best somewhere between fridge temperature and room temperature; so slightly less cold.

Summer Carrot Soup on Nancy Baggett's Kitchen Lane

Used From Our CSA
purple carrots
red potato (just one)
dill

Thoughts on the Recipe
- We didn't have any chives on hand, and couldn't find them at the store, so just left them out.
- This recipe made way more of the yogurt garnish than we used. I would probably make less of that next time, because now it's just sitting in our fridge and I really don't know what to do with it! Maybe we didn't use enough of it in our bowls.

Has anybody else ever made a cold soup for summertime? Or done something else yummy with purple carrots?

Stuffed Zucchini with Pesto Couscous

On Monday night we made these cute stuffed zucchini for dinner. Because we still had four of the little 8-ball zucchini in our fridge from Week 9, I didn't want to pass up the chance to try something like this. It was not a difficult recipe but involved several steps so it definitely took some time.

I ended up feeling like a lot of the work for this dish was just for the added "awww" factor of the little zucchini bowls to hold everything, because I only ate a little bit of my zucchini shell. I would just as soon have shredded the whole zucchini and made a variation of the couscous to eat on its own. Steve ate his whole zucchini, so he disagrees with me here. But then again, I think I may have under-roasted the bowls (partly because I was rushing to get it ready). If they had been softer, I might have been more on-board with the whole concept.  But you have to admit, they are pretty cute!

Stuffed Zucchini with Pesto Couscous on Dishing up the Dirt

Used From Our CSA
8-ball zucchini
sweet corn
cherry tomatoes

basil (not from our CSA, but Steve picked it from the garden at his work. Win!)

Thoughts on the Recipe
Since I only had 4 of these zucchini and the recipe calls for 6, I two-thirds-ed the recipe. It made for some clunky conversions so I approximated just about everything. We were also a little short on basil, so it could have used more pesto. But no harm done with the final product.

No side dish on these plates, because I ran out of time to make anything else!

What are your thoughts on stuffed zucchini? To eat or not to eat the roasted shell? Would you rather go to the trouble, or just make the filling as a dish on its own?

Heirloom Tomato and Eggplant Galette

Here's a dinner from last weekend that made us feel super fancy, but surprisingly, came together really easily! Before we started our CSA this season I had never even heard of a galette. And now, two months later, I've made two different kinds: a sweet galette with rhubarb and this smart dinner version full of cheese and vegetables (and butter - oh my word THE BUTTER). And aren't they gorgeous?

Heirloom Tomato and Eggplant Galette on Fork Knife Swoon

Used From Our CSA 
heirloom tomatoes (1 from our box and 1 from the store)
eggplant

Thoughts on the Recipe
- My best advice for working with pastry dough remains some variation of: work quickly and remain calm/confident. A thin metal spatula is a great helper, too. I think our stone counter top must help a lot because it seems to always be a nice cool temperature. But even without that, this was a great dough recipe and was relatively easy to use. I rolled mine out directly on the counter and Steve used parchment paper and we were both successful on the first try!
- Since the price of Gruyere at our grocery store gave me a mild heart attack (about $9 for a tiny wedge that I don't think would have even been enough), I swiftly googled a substitute and landed on Swiss. And we thought it worked out great. Maybe next time with the fancy cheese.
- We split one of these for dinner the night we made them (which basically means we consumed heart-stopping amounts of butter), but the second one lasted us a solid three days as leftovers. And it was delicious reheated. I am such a fan of food that is leftover-friendly.

Sigh ... this is such a beautiful sight to me - is that weird?

So there you have it - a lovely savory galette. Is trying two different recipes of this pastry enough to qualify me as an expert? How about a gal-expert? (Ugh, sorry, that was terrible...)

Week 10 Delivery

Hello Week 10! Here's the list of what we got in our latest CSA box:

Vegetables
ping tung long eggplant (it's so lovely)
all red potatoes (hiding under the beets, in a bag)
green zucchini
gold beets
purple carrots (I pulled one out of its bag for a visual - between the blackberries & tomatoes)
heirloom tomatoes (yellow!)
royal burgundy beans

Fruit
bag of peaches
bag of plums (YES - these are my favorite!)
half-pint of blackberries

Chicken
breasts
boneless/skinless thighs
drumsticks

The items that I've been the most excited about so far this week are the eggplant, plums, and tomatoes. AND, somewhat surprisingly, the carrots as well, thanks to a summery carrot soup recipe I came across online. It's a cold soup, so we cooked it last night, chilled it today, and it's in the plan for dinner tonight. Spoiler alert: purple carrots = purple soup. And I must not forget to mention that there is officially have zucchini coming out of our ears, so we've been eating plenty of that in all forms this week.

Once again, the beets fall on the "meh" end of the spectrum for me. And ... once again, they have not yet made it into our meal plan for Week 10. But Steve did help me at least remember to incorporate some chicken into our meals this week (because believe it or not I had a completed list of meals in hand that once again used no chicken, which I had to go back and revise). So that's something.

I have to say, I spend crazy amounts of time in the kitchen these days. Some days it's exhausting, and on others I am jumping up and down with excitement over what's on the stove top or coming out of the oven. Either way, there's more to come on what we've been up to this week in the land of summer vegetables.

Week 9 Summary

Here is an overview of how our CSA went last week (Week 9):

Agretti: gone! It all went into the yummy lemon-y fettuccine recipe I posted about last week. Loved.

Chinese Purple Garlic: still hanging on to both heads. Thankfully, garlic lasts for ages so it's not going anywhere.

Green Kale: not quite gone, but it's all been used. I was happy to have the chance to repeat the Kale & Quinoa Salad that we tried back in Week 3, and it was great have along for a picnic with friends last Friday night. We're still working through the leftovers.

8-Ball Zucchini: of the six squash we received last week, 2 went into this favorite blueberry zucchini bread recipe. The other four have been worked into our Week 10 meal plan (finished them off last night!), so I'll try to mention how we used them sometime in the coming week. Bottom line: I love zucchini and am working to make up for years of avoiding it as a kid.

Red Cherry Tomatoes: like the zucchini, these have all become a part of our Week 10 meal plan, so more to come on how they got used.

Red Beets: these are sitting untouched in the fridge (sheepish grin) ... Part of the problem is that right now we are consistently getting more produce than we can reasonably consume in a week. When that's the case it is easy to focus on the stuff we're excited about, like kale and blueberries, and ignore the produce that we find daunting. Hence, our beet situation. I'll let you know if anything changes.

Bicolor Sweet Corn: gone! We used two ears last week to make the Zucchini Corn pancakes. The rest has gone into our Week 10 meal plan, so I'll get to that info later in the week.

Peaches: gone! I had one or two by themselves last week. The rest went into the Tomato Peach Salad we made last week, which was perfect: since they weren't in the best shape from the start, we could cut out the rough spots and use what was left in that dish.

Pint of Blueberries: gone! Those that weren't munched by Steve for breakfasts went into the blueberry zucchini bread (link to recipe above).

Jar of Blueberry Jam: we haven't cracked it open yet, but I'm eager to. I think a good loaf of fresh bread needs to be obtained first. 

Chicken Breasts and Whole Leg: I am making my poor husband crazy with our growing chicken problem. At this point in time, our freezer is almost full with various cuts of chicken. And we didn't use any of it this week! It's a meal planning challenge right now: we're getting so much produce and it always feels more urgent to me that we use what we can of that before it goes bad. So when I can write out a week's worth of meals and still not manage to include all the fruits and veggies we got, it feels even less economical to be using chicken in place of some of those other dishes, when it can just stay frozen until we have use for it. If we had a second freezer I wouldn't be worried about this at all. But as it stands, we're working on it.


Week 9 Links
Zucchini Corn Pancakes
Fettuccine with Agretti
Tomato Peach Salad


The CSA stops for no woman, so I'll of course be back tomorrow with our Week 10 delivery list. Onward!