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.