An unexpected benefit of a CSA membership, and things Elaine cooked from the last CSA harvest.

I really don't think of myself as a good cook most of the time, and certainly not as an experienced one.  However, with our CSA subscription, I've been forced to invent, look up, or otherwise figure out recipes for cooking a variety of vegetables I'd never have chosen for myself: cauliflower (yes, it's tasty, but somehow it's just not an ingredient I pick up of my own accord), beets (same), kohlrabi (not only is the name weird, but the vegetable looks like a little alien spacecraft!), daikon (it's the radish god!), and many others.  I still refuse to cook with fennel (tastes like black licorice) or collard greens (just...no) or a few other greens that I just don't much like, but on the whole, I feel like I've become a better cook simply by trying to use up my CSA share every week.

So, on that note, I figure I should probably actually talk about cooking!  We got weekly share Wednesday, but since we were going to a play (turns out The Great Gatsby is far less terrible when it's not being forced on you), I didn't end up cooking 'till Thursday.  The share consisted of a nice variety of things: carrots (as mentioned in the last post), beets, turnips, mustard greens, green garlic, collard greens (which we traded for extra garlic), fennel (which we simply left as a donation to the CSA), and romaine lettuce. I also had some a bunch of leftover veggies from before, as well as some stuff that we got over the weekend (mushrooms and tomatoes), knowing that I'd cook with them later in the week.  I've also been trying to keep something of a pantry, with staples like onion and garlic and such.

My goal for this week was to use up as much of the produce as possible in a few different dishes so that we'd have some variety for the coming week.  My challenge often is to use up veggies before they go bad -- if I don't cook them all in one go, it can be hard to remember/get the push to find something to do with the rest.  Plus, I find that it's much easier to motivate myself to cook once for several hours than to spread it out over a few days.  Thus, the plan was to make a polenta sauce (well, and a polenta, but that's easy), a minestrone-style soup, and a fresh salad.  Oh, and some roasted beets and carrots!  The goal was ambitious, but I mostly stuck to it!  The only thing that didn't happen (and hasn't yet happened, despite it being Sunday), was the fresh salad.  I'll probably throw one together today or tomorrow. 

So, a successful week of cooking!  I'll post my recipes in a separate post, I think, since this one has gotten long.  I'll also try to get photos next time, so it's not just a wall of text here!  Also, stay tuned for more details about my fundraiser next month!