CSA Week 3

 

Scheduling a group of people for an entire summer is a tricky thing.  Especially the group that we’re in the CSA/Meal Share with.  So this week, being a holiday week (Happy Canada Day & 4th of July everyone!), the crowd was small.  Just three adults and a toddler around the dinner table.

Still tons of food though!

This week the box brought:

  • lettuce
  • sugar snap peas
  • escarole
  • bok choy
  • turnips
  • arugula
  • kohlrabi

We had some radishes left over from last week and the daycare co-op sent over a pile of fresh bread.  Once again, the counters were full to the brim.  Menu a bit different too:

Italian Sausage Soup, Tofu & Bok Choy stir fry, kohlrabi with herbs, green salad, and espresso bread pudding for dessert.

Sounds good, right?  Well it was for the most part.  We were given a small kohlrabi this time, so it went into the stir fry instead of a dish on its own.  The soup was bitter – our first attempt with escarole didn’t turn out as well as planned.  So we looked it up (after cooking of course) in our handy dandy cooking chemistry book (On Food and Cooking – read it – great reference for the experimental chef) and turns out you need to cut the flavor of bitter cabbages, like escarole, with something in the onion family and salt.  Next time the soup will have more sea salt and some scallions.

The soup is excellent to dip bread in, though.  So that’s what I did.

The stir fry turned out fabulously.  Big hit all around.  That and the bread pudding.  Mmmm fresh bread pudding.

Next week I won’t be able to be around for the meal as I’m teaching an Intermediate Outdoor Cooking class at an outdoor facility that evening.  Hopefully someone will take the camera and snap a few of what was going on.  It’s the Big Guy’s turn at the menu planning – should be fun!

 

Call for Help from my Talented Friends

 

Alright folks – this is me admitting I’ve fallen behind.

Last night, I attempted to ‘tweak’ my WordPress theme for my little website here and failed.  I have kept up with trends in webdesign since 1995 – until now.

It is clearly time to re-shine the space here.  Heck, I even took two artistic friends out to dinner a while back to get their input on design changes.  But I can’t do it.

So here’s the call – I am looking for help.  If any of you are talented designers who are willing to work with a perfectionist with little extra time on her hands and like to take amateur photos (that’s me), please drop me a line in the comments.

Thanks everyone!

 

Embarking on a Summer Cooking Adventure

 

Community Supported Agrigulture (CSA).  While this isn’t a term not everyone is familiar with, my little circle is diving deep into it.  Food.  Loads of food.

Read more »

 

Spring Flowers

 

The flowers are blooming around the house!  Some serious hard work on the lilac bushes paid off.  They were being choked out by a vine and were overgrown when we moved in.  So we dug and cut and cut and cut some more.  So much that they looked thin by the end of last summer.  Oh goodness did it work!

The blossoms are just now starting to open up.  Our yard is about to be filled with fresh lilac scent.  The bushes on the outside of the fence are producing super dense blossoms – we’ll see how it looks once they open completely – see for yourself:

 

Where Has thatredgirl Been?

 

Apparently I’ve been ignoring my little website here.  I haven’t run off into the woods to disappear… oh wait – I did.  That and much more!

The last two months have been full of work, graduate school, training, volunteer work, swimming, playing with the dog, painting, travel…and yes, running off into the woods for a few days.  I have piles of photos to sort through once things calm down a bit – until then, let me leave you with a photo taken with my blackberry yesterday in St. Paul.  I have done absolutely no edits to this photo and the wind made it turn out kinda cool.  So enjoy a snapshot of the MN State Capitol and sit tight while I finish up the semester of school.