Week 4 - Around the World Asia to Switzerland to Cuba

 

Kate picked up Week 4 for me and I found myself a bit overwhelmed with squash and greens!  The first night I decided to use up those two zucchini and some of those Asian ingredients I bought last week to make zucchini fritters, conveniently a recipe straight out of this month's Bon Appetit. www.bonappetit.com/recipes/2013/07/zucchini-fritters

I threw in some fresh chives and cilantro from my garden and fried them up in the sunflower oil from Week 1.  Dipping sauce included rice wine vinegar, soy sauce, sugar, and red pepper flakes.

 Tuesday night, I made a quick impromptu summer pasta dish with (believe it or not!) only ingredients I already had.  This included onions, cherry tomatoes from last week, corn, white beans, chopped up Swiss chard from this week, and a splash of white wine.

Topped my plate off with fresh basil from the garden.  Yum.

  
I gave Andrew the roast to cook to his own delight and he chose a Cuban pot roast from this recipe here: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/ropa-vieja-in-a-slow-cooker/ with Cuban style yellow rice: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/cuban-style-yellow-rice/

I can't take any credit for this one aside from pouring the water in the pot to cook the rice.  All Andrew!  And it was delicious. 

Also, no Cuban meal would be complete without mojitos!

Happy eating!
Michelle

Week 3 - Wrap it up

Sorry for the late post.  Week 3 delivered a sirloin - once again something else I have never made before! I also had eggs, more cherry tomatoes, subbed out something else to get squash, blueberries, and some lettuce.

Somehow, I got stuck on the idea of beef lettuce wraps, so instead of just using what the CSA provided, I went out and bought all the fixin's required for an asian dish - sesame oil, siracha, and rice wine vinegar: I already had soy sauce, and the "grocery store" at my parents provided me with hoisin sauce and minced ginger.  Now I was ready to use the steak and red leaf lettuce from HH.

I mashed up a couple of different recipes to come up with these, and boy were they tasty.  Extra siracha and red pepper flakes gave 'em some heat!  Topped them off with some julienne carrots to add some crunch.

Happy eating!
Michelle

Roast & Cheese?

Well, last night was the first time in a long time that I've had roast and it was awesome. If I'm gonna eat meat, it might as well be the natural stuff. My mom sears the roast first on all sides, and then boils it on the stove top, meaning the entire house smelled delicious all day. Torture I tell you. We had mashed potatoes and gravy, carrots and salad to go along with it. Simply wonderful.

Earlier in the day I decided to try out the Pepper Cheese. Mystery solved, it was definitely the veggie peppers and not the spice pepper. Pretty much exactly how you'd think of Pepper Jack. I'm not a huge fan of pepper jack cheese, but this stuff will get eaten :-)

-Kate

Kate's week 4

Ok weather, you are seriously messing with my CSA vibe. But! check out the newest product in the CSA bags....flour: Ceresota flour from Newton, KS. Oh dear, what am I going to do with you? Maybe cookies? Maybe blueberry muffins? Recipes here: http://www.heckersceresota.com/recipes.html.

Got the roast, think it is going to be a Sunday dinner with the fam. Pot Roast dinner on Sundays is something my mom's family used to do when she was little, and we haven't eaten red meat in quite a while, but we've got it, so might as well enjoy the goodness.

Trying a new Good Natured Family Farm cheese: Cheddar Pepper. I am not a fan of spicy stuff, so we'll see if this pepper cheese is hot red peppery or...well normal black peppery. Honestly not a fan either way, but no judgment on the cheese until I try it. Cheese has a mysterious way of winning me over. I'll report back.

As for the blueberries and squash....they'll get eaten swiftly. The milk? Probably already gone.

-Kate

A little catching up but a lot of great food

It's a sad truth when you get fresh, amazing food every week yet haven't been able to prepare a dish with any of the fresh ingredients! The key word here is YET! I haven't yet, but at some point during this summer I know I will make a glorious meal and take several photos and for that glimpse in time I will call myself a foodie!

However, I would like to say that Kansas farmers ROCK! The food I've been getting has been rich in color, pure in essence and an awaking to my taste buds that have been desensitized by dull food.  Here's a glimpse of my past three weeks...

CSA Week #1

 

I was informed this cheese was money. It must have been because Dave ate it all before I got to try it!

CSA Week #2

These Dill n' Spicy Hot pickles are delicious! They'd go with just about any sandwich made on Farm To Market 'Grains Galour' bread!

CSA Week #3

I'm not 100% sure what these leafy greens are but I know a good batch of blueberries! Yummy!

Thanks Kansas farmers!

HLT!

I haven't really gone vegetarian, just trying to cut a bit of meat out of the diet. Plus, I didn't have any bacon. Instead, I made an HLT. You have until the end of this post to decide what the H stands for. 

I used the grains galore bread, toasted. Then added the lettuce and tomato, all from the CSA bag. You can see in the picture some of the Farmhouse cheddar sliced on the side and even the million dollar pickles. Talk about a CSA bag meal. The only component of this that wasn't in the bag was the H. Which stands for.....

Hummus. 

-Sean

Bok Choy

I decided to dive right into attempting a meal with the bok choy. I searched and found a recipe for Braised Bok Choy. After another Google search on what parts of the bok choy stalk to eat (all of it, except for the bottom which is cut off a little above where it is broken from the bunch) I was set to begin the meal prep. This recipe used the bok choy and tomatoes from the CSA bag today. If I would have taken the bread I could have used it also, but ended up using a baguette.

First ingredients? Garlic and olive oil. Really, does anything that starts with garlic and olive oil end badly? I'd argue not. After those were sauteed properly, in went the chopped up bok choy, and I threw in onions for good measure.

 After ample time to let it soften, then went in the tomatoes and the kalamata olives.

I modified the recipe so instead of adding in the bread and cheese into the pan, I just sliced the baguette, then put the bok choy mixture on top and covered with Swiss cheese instead of Gruyere.  

Here's the finished product and I have to say it was pretty yummy. The bok choy was just a bit crunchy, which I really liked. The Kalamata olives gave it a nice kick every few bites and the swiss sets it off with a nice flavor. 

Here's the recipe:

 http://www.eatingwell.com/recipes/braised_bok_choy_with_tomatoes_gruyere.html

-Kate  

Veggies Galore!

Week 3 bag brought a little creativity. I decided not to take the sirloin steaks or the Sourdough bread. We haven't eaten much meat lately and we still have chicken and ground beef from the previous two weeks. I'm not a huge fan of Sourdough bread, and since I was picking up the bag, decided to swap it out. Instead I got double tomatoes, blueberries and then some honey! 

It's round 2 of bok choy, which will take some internet searchage for a recipe, but I'm sure we'll make it work. 

I'm really looking to the free-range farm fresh eggs for Sunday breakfast and might just have to have some of the delightful looking blueberries on the side. 

The best way I know to eat cucumber is on rye bread with cream cheese and dill, so I'll start craving that now and see where that yummy appetizer falls in the week. 

Happy CSA day and weekend!

Kate

Say Cheeeeese!

I love this cheese. Sometimes I just slice it and eat it. Nothing fancy. No crackers. Just cheese.

Kate

Week 2 - Don't be a chicken

Good news: Week 2 delivered a whole free range chicken.
Bad news: I had no idea how to cook a whole chicken.

Enter: Mom.

I decided to partner up with my mentor in cooking, Ms. Colette for my first venture in fixin' a chicken.  I say "partner up" loosely, as it would probably be more accurate to say she did most of the work...but I watched closely and I am confident I could replicate the steps on my own next time!

We decided to try beer chicken for the first time and it turned out quite well.  Appreciation to my brother and sister-in-law for lending us their official beer chicken rack so we wouldn't have to manage balancing the bird on a can without support.  I did assist in drinking down the beer an inch so that it wasn't quite a full can!

We seasoned the chicken with a Jack Stack BBQ rub mixed with paprika and set it atop of a Bud Light.  Then, it was onto the grill for about an hour and a half to 180 degrees.

I still had some beefsteak tomatoes, so we whipped together a caprese salad with fresh grow basil from my parent's garden.

Even with 3 people eating a chicken, there was still a bunch leftover so I made a sandwich the next day with Grains Galore bread, tomato, and lettuce from last week, as well as an avocado I picked up. On the side I sautéed some onions, yellow squash, and zucchini. (I subbed the half gallon of milk this week for the squash).

Happy eating!

Michelle

Kate's Week 2!

Whenever chicken is in the bag of the week, it means that the rest of the bag is a bit smaller because the value of the chicken is so high. These are free-range chickens though, so well worth it. The weather has been so crazy this spring that the veggies are about two weeks behind, so not as much to choose from in these early bags.

I don't mind though because I'm telling you, this cheese is AWESOME. I ate about a sixth of the block in one sitting just by slicing it up. Delicious. I have had many varieties of this Good Natured Family Farms cheese Farmhouse Raw Milk White Cheddar Cheese from Wiebe Dairy.

I'm also a huge fan of the honey sticks, such a perfect treat.

Happy week 2 everyone!

-Kate

Week 1 Bag

CSA week #1 always is exciting. It kind of feels like Christmas, but in the summer with the CSA it happens every week! 

I do my CSA with my family because I don't cook at home enough to eat it all myself. The picture above was what we got for week one. We aren't big meat eaters in my family, but we took the ground beef this week and put it the freezer for another time.

The bok choy was an interesting addition to the bag. We'd never really had it before, so of course we took to the internet to find a recipe. This is the one we ended up with: http://www.chow.com/recipes/28071-sauteed-bok-choy. Had an interesting kick at the end of it, but a great first foray into bok choy. 

For our first CSA dinner we had a salad with the lettuce and tomatoes, the bok choy from above, the pickled beets and Copper River Salmon (wasn't included in the bag). Pretty delightful first CSA meal of the summer! 

-Kate

Week 1 - Create with the classics

Warmer weather, the smell of fresh cut grass, baseball, & local produce.  Must be summer. 

The first CSA pack delivered some classics to whet our palettes for the season.  Sometimes, you just need to fix something you know is going to be good. 

Here's what's cookin' at Chez Michelle....

Green leaf lettuce salad with beefsteak tomato, green onion, sprinkle of fresh grated parmesean, topped with an olive oil/balsamic vinegar dressing.  

Ricotta & beef meatballs with Cascone's marinara sauce, spaghetti, and fresh basil grown from my backyard:

Who can beat a classic BLT made from Farm to Market Grains Galore, beafsteak tomatoes, and green leaf lettuce with a side of Good Natured Farms Sweet & Hot Dill Pickle spears.

Happy eating,
Michelle