Friday, 22 June 2012

CSA - First Basket of the Season

In between the beer store and Rachel's place for a swim before the storm, Tim and I popped over to the By the Bushel office to pick up our first haul of CSA goodies!


A few of these things are easy. Snow peas I would put in just about anything. They'll probably get stir-fried with the bell peppers we already have in the fridge. Green onions are another no brainer, they go in everything.


The sprouts I'll probably throw on a sandwich like this one - home cut artisanal bread, and a thick layer of goat cheese. Maybe some roasted red peppers like they do at The Planet. 

We don't eat a lot of salads, but the mesclun mix could become any (or all) of these beauties:







Then we get to the hard things: the radishes, the garlic scapes, and the Chinese cabbage. One of the reasons I love the CSA idea so much is that you get random vegetables like this - I like to try new things. 

I have never really liked radishes. They're too much for me - too pungent, too sharp, too hit you in the face. I don't find they play nice with other flavours.





Just like with onions and garlic, I imagine cooking them, as shown above, could mellow the flavour. 

There's a gentleman at the market who sells garlic scapes and he seems to love them most in pesto. I think making pesto with them would be a good inaugural use of the Magic Bullet Sarah got me for my birthday. I also wouldn't mind trying a few of the following recipes - we got two big bundles of scapes, so we have the opportunity to do some different things. 








And then finally we have the Chinese cabbage, which is the only thing that I look at and have no clue about. I was originally thinking cabbage = slaw of some kind, but the leaves are pretty leafy. I haven't tried it yet, but I have it in my mind that they might be too tough/bitter to eat raw. Tim's opinion is that Chinese vegetables are almost all braised or stir-fried. After a little bit of research, I found out that Chinese cabbage is also known as Napa cabbage. It can actually be eaten raw. Here are a few recipes I might try:













Part of me kind of wants to attempt making kimchi, but all the recipes make a LOT, and I've never even tried it before. 

Lots of things to try in the next two weeks before we get the next load - time to get cooking!!

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