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!