Week 2 Summary

Here is where things stand as we approach the end of Week 2:

Green Leaf Lettuce: partly used as the "wrap" of the Thai lettuce wraps. But we still have some left. Planning to make a side salad tonight with dinner.

Collards: gone! We used the whole pound to make this Indonesian-style curry recipe (halved), with some basmati rice. It was good (and our first time making curry from scratch, which we were super proud of), but at the end of the day I think that collards are just not my favorite green. Their tough and bitter qualities are hard to overcome.

Rhubarb: half was used in the roasted rhubarb jam last weekend. I hope to use the rest to make a rhubarb galette this weekend, but I spied it the other day in the fridge and it was not looking great. In any case, Steve snagged another bundle of this from the week 3 swap box yesterday, so all is not lost.

Dinosaur Kale: one-third to one-half of it has been used, all in green smoothies so far.

Chives: we have not even touched these yet! What should we do with them - any suggestions?

2 Chicken Breasts (it was actually closer to 3): gone! All used in the Thai lettuce wraps.

Bag of Chicken Wings: planning to make Old Bay wings tonight for dinner!

gulai sayur (curry) on Sunday

Week 2 Links 
Roasted Rhubarb Jam
Simple Green Smoothie
Thai Chicken Lettuce Wraps

rhubarb jam and ricotta on toast

I'll be back tomorrow to share what we got yesterday in our Week 3 box. It was quite a bounty!

Thai Chicken Lettuce Wraps

Last night we made these yummy lettuce wraps for dinner. And Steve was only a few bites in when he declared that this is the second best thing we've made so far this year (right after bacon pancakes, a snow day favorite). Bold statement.

But I agree: this made a great dinner. And despite the long-ish list of ingredients, everything came together pretty easily, especially with two of us working together. We also learned to poach and mince a chicken breast, which there is nothing difficult about at all, but still: life skills! It was a little tricky to find a lettuce wraps recipe that looked just right: a lot of them seemed either so simple that they weren't really going to get at the flavors we were hoping for, or so complex that they really couldn't have made a practical weeknight dinner for us. This one seemed like it would strike a happy balance, and we were not disappointed.

Thai-Style Peanut Chicken Lettuce Wraps on the cozy apron 

Used From Our CSA
chicken breast
green leaf lettuce
red scallions (from Week 1)

Thoughts on the Recipe
-There are a handful of semi-unusual oils and sauces required for this recipe, and if you don't have them on hand (which we fortunately did) this meal might start to add up cost-wise. However, most of them have a pretty long shelf-life, so if you like cooking with Asian flavors, they might be worth the investment.
- Along those same lines, we actually skipped the peanuts in this recipe. We didn't have any, don't use them much, and felt like the peanut butter would carry that flavor just fine.
- I also skipped all the garnishes. Wednesday night dinners call for realistic food-prep if you ask me. Apologies if these photos suffer from lack of flair. Oh, wait: here's a picture with a flower in it:

This will also make a great lunch today. I'm looking forward to it!

Steve is bringing home our third CSA box tonight. There are several things on the list this week that I have never even heard of! The challenge continues...

Simple Green Smoothie

Today I actually have a recipe of my own to share - if you can even call it a recipe when you throw a bunch of ingredients into a blender and turn it on.

I'm pretty new to the green smoothie game (born in January out of that lovely post-holiday feeling of: i-am-going-to-punch-myself-if-i-don't-eat-something-that-is-not-a-baked-good-or-piece-of-candy-real-quick) and have only tried a few different recipes. Nothing too fancy yet. Part of the problem is that our "blender" (read: cheap novelty smoothie maker) is really not the best and every time I use it I worry that the little machine is about to take on its last frozen banana. Poor thing even struggles with the ice cubes. Maybe someday we'll front the money for something more legit, but until then I'll probably keep things pretty simple in the smoothie department.

Makes a great on-the-go snack!

Used From Our CSA
dinosaur kale

I really like the chocolatey-peanut taste of this smoothie. It's something a little different, and is a nice go-to if you don't have a ton of other fruit immediately on hand. I find this to be a good snack-size portion for me, but it could easily be doubled to be shared or serve as more of a meal replacement. It's also been a great way this week to work through our CSA kale, which we didn't make any other specific plans for meal-wise.

Ingredients
- 2-3 pieces of kale, stemmed (or 2-3 handfuls of fresh spinach for a milder flavor)
- 1/2 frozen banana
- 1 T natural peanut butter
- 1 T cocoa powder
- 1/2 c. almond milk
- 4 ice cubes

Blend all ingredients together and add more almond milk as needed, to get your desired consistency.

My advice is to cut and peel the banana first and throw it in a plastic container or bag in the freezer. Your future self will thank you when you are not trying to peel a rock hard, ice cold banana. See the above picture and learn from my mistakes, because half the time I forget to do this and it is never pretty.

Do you have a favorite green smoothie recipe? Feel free to share in the comments.

Roasted Rhubarb Jam

I had a revelation this weekend. I feel like there are so many plant foods in the world that are botanically a fruit, but nutritionally, we think of as a vegetable (tomato, cucumber, avocado, squash, etc). On the other hand, I can only come up with one botanical vegetable that we tend to classify, cook, and eat as if it were a fruit: the lowly rhubarb.

So since fruit wont be part of our CSA deliveries for another week yet, I was pretty jazzed that Steve could swap for this fruit-ish vegetable last week. As a great lover of dessert I wanted to spend some time in the kitchen cooking up something sweet! We got roughly a pound of rhubarb, and I found two intriguing recipes that each called for that amount. So I made the obvious choice and decided to make a half-recipe of each of them (totally obvious and not overkill, right?).

Rhubarb recipe #1, this roasted jam, was executed on Saturday. And it was good. Make you wish you didn't half the recipe good. I can happily affirm that this is awesome on vanilla ice cream, and it's awesome on toast (I took a cue from last week's tartines and spread some ricotta first - perfect).

Roasted Rhubarb Jam on Simply Scratch

Used From Our CSA
rhubarb

Thoughts on the Recipe
- This one was pretty straightforward. I didn't have the vanilla sugar (and have actually never made/used it before), so I followed her suggestion and just added in some vanilla bean paste with the sugar.
- After it cooled I put it in our mini food processor to get the sauce consistency.

This is a recipe I would definitely return to (and make a bigger batch of) in a future where I have more rhubarb on hand. I am saving my other half-pound for now because this weekend I have plans to attempt a half-size galette. Wish me luck...

What's your favorite thing to make with rhubarb? My mom sent me a rhubarb sangria recipe yesterday that looked pretty fun! Do you know of any other vegetables that we actually tend to think of as being more fruit-like?

Week 2 Delivery

Here are the items we received in our Week 2 delivery on Thursday:

Vegetables
green leaf lettuce (in the middle)
collards (large flat leaves at the top)
red scallions Steve traded them in the swap box for the rhubarb
dinosaur kale (dark green leaves at the bottom)
chives

We were pretty confident that the lettuce was the lettuce, but definitely had to use our friend Google to correctly identify the collards vs. the kale. I know, we're dumb. But now we know!

Chicken
2 breasts
bag of wings

Every Tuesday we get an email from our CSA group listing some loose (but not guaranteed) predictions of what we will get that week. Then sometime in the morning on Thursday we get a second email with an exact list of what is being delivered. And I'll admit that when I got this week's itemized email my heart sank a little bit. Greens and onions, greens and onions. We had a lot of that last week, too, but it was fun to have the asparagus and radishes in the mix. Something a little different. But, it makes sense: this is what is ready now. I'm interested to see the contents of our weekly boxes evolve as the season progresses.

But still, when Steve texted me that there was rhubarb in the swap box, I said GO FOR IT! And he put back our red scallions, since we got some last week and have a few left yet. There were also some apples in the box, but he reported that they were not in great shape so left them behind (though now that I think about it there are a ton of great things you can do with old apples, right?).

So that's Week 2; we'll see how it goes. I meal planned last night and it should be interesting - all new-to-us recipes. We have some internationally-inspired dishes in our plans this week, and some dessert ideas in the mix too, thanks to the rhubarb. Stay tuned!