Time to talk produce and yummy eats!
Last week was week 2 of our CSA program at work. Our delivery included beets, red onions, another big tomato, baby bok choy, bunched spinach, collards, lettuce, red russian kale, thyme, and radishes.
Oh and the best strawberries I’ve ever eaten in my life. No joke.
I must admit that meal planning and food prep is still a little challenging. We used to meal plan, grocery shop, and do the majority of food prepping on Sundays. With our busy summer schedule and the switch to a Tuesday delivery day, it’s hard to prep much on the weekends now. We also don’t receive the newsletter from the farm telling us what we will be getting until Monday late afternoon. Now that I’m not teaching on Tuesday nights, that’s when we’ve been doing our grocery shopping, but I’m starting to adjust to making a couple of grocery trips during the week. It’s just too hard to meal plan for the weekends! We’re still trying to get into a groove.
Here’s how we used up some of our produce last week:
First, I wanted to tackle the collard greens. Have you guys ever seen collard greens?! They are ginormous. Like bigger than my head ginormous.
That’s me being a total loser while holding the biggest and smallest items in our delivery. Anyways, I remember bookmarking a recipe for Kenyan braised collard greens and ground beef a long time ago, so we gave it a whirl. I couldn’t believe how much the collards cooked down! We added kidney beans to this recipe, and it was a hit. It had a little kick from all the spices, and it was very filling.
We enjoyed this dish for dinner Tuesday night and lunch on Wednesday. Pretty, right?
One of my favorites from the week was this balsamic glazed chickpea and kale salad. This was one of the recipes the farm included in its weekly newsletter, and I had it for lunch on Thursday and then for lunch on the beach again on Saturday.
These chicken skewers with bell pepper and yellow onions lasted us a couple of meals as well.
The farro salad on the side incorporated the radishes, bok choy, and the leftover scallions from the week before. The farro salad was also perfect for a small dinner on its own when I didn’t feel like cooking anything else.
Tim busted out his mandolin that my parents gave him for Christmas to slice the beets into pretty strips. We topped the lettuce from the share with the sliced beets, some of the tomato, chickpeas, avocado, and goat cheese. We also incorporated the thyme into the dressing. This lasted for a couple of meals as well.
Besides all the produce, we also signed up to receive farm fresh eggs each week. We only signed up for a dozen, but we’ve been getting 18! That’s a lot of eggs we need to use up. We both eat a TON of hard-boiled eggs for protein anyways, and we tend to make a lot of egg sandwiches on the weekends, but since I’m not baking so much in the summer, I don’t think we’ve been using as many. To use up the leftover eggs for lunch this week, we threw together a batch of our avocado egg salad. I love my egg salad best served open-faced on Ezekial bread. Yum.
I think we did pretty well, and I’m happy not too much has been going to waste. I think that’s the most common reason people DON’T typically sign up for a CSA program. We didn’t end up using the bunched spinach, but it still has some life to it. I think I’ll use it in smoothies this week since I keep bookmarking smoothie recipes like it’s my job. The only other thing I want to start being better about is not letting some of the vegetable greens go to waste. We had big plans to make pesto out of the radish greens to freeze for later, but we waited too long. They turned yellow last night. Lessons learned!
Yesterday was our week 3 delivery, and we received more strawberries (YES), beets, turnips, lettuce, butter lettuce, peas, baby bok choy, broccoli raab, russian kale, red mustard, kohlrabi, and mint! We brainstormed some cool meals to make last night, but the only thing on my mind right now is putting that mint to use… in homemade mojitos during our staycation week next week! Just gotta get through a couple more work days!
–Let’s chat–
I want to hear about some of your eats lately. What foods have you been loving for summer? Have you had any kitchen lessons learned? What would you have done with the produce I shared? Any ideas for what we can make with our stash this week? Fellow CSA members, share some of your creations in the comments!
For more on my summer CSA experience:
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