Cooking Experiment – Weeks 5 & 6
Posted by Red | Filed under Everyday, Food
The summer keeps going; so does the food. We just finished up week 6 (can you believe we’re 6 weeks into the proper summer? because I cannot) with the CSA.
Week 5 was bountiful as always. The photo includes the produce in the box as well as a few items we picked up at the Wedge to round out the meal.
Notice the little brown bag in the back? Birchwood Cafe granola. Yum. Week 5 left us with a changing of the team. Due to a toddler who decided it was better to go to bed at 6:30p, one of the households had to drop from the experiment. No problems whatsoever because this summer is just that – an experiment. Didn’t work for them. Next summer should be better when Mr. Abi is 3.
So week 6. Ah, challenging week 6. The replacement household had a canoe trip that came up last minute. The other half of my household was sick. Household #3 was only half there since Mr. Nick ran off to the deep south for a bit of vacation. So two people tackling the box of food… This box of food:
CSA Week 3
Posted by Red | Filed under Everyday, Food
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!
