CSA Booty - Week 8

This week's share was made up of:

• Plum tomatoes
• 2 bunches of bright lights chard
• 1 bunch of kale
• 1 bunch of amaranth
• 1 head of lettuce
• 1 bunch of basil
• 1 bunch of spring onions
• 2 bunches of broccoli
• Parsley, chives and rosemary
• a lovely lily stem - so fragrant

So here's what I think I'm doing with these items:

• I think I'm going to make this kale pasta again - it was really good and super easy to put together. I'm out of pancetta, so I'll make it with bacon.
• I'm going to try a Mexican recipe of chicken in amaranth sauce (it uses both the green and the grain which is sorta neat) with the amaranth greens
• The lettuce is either going to be a salad (maybe), but I didn't make lettuce wraps last week and I think I might want to this week.
• The basil is going into pesto to sauce some trofie pasta I bought last week. Hello Genoa!
• The onions are going to be added into many dishes: they are super thinly sliced and raw in various dishes.
• I think I'll make a quiche with the broccoli and some of the chard.
• The rest of the chard ... hmm ... maybe Swiss chard tacos? I might take some of the larger leaves and use them as a wrapper for fresh fish on the grill.
• I'll just slip those tomatoes in here and there for color and flavor.

So how'd I do with last week's haul? Here's what we ate from the CSA last week:

• This past week was super busy, so I decided to stock the freezer with a few soups to tide us over for future weeks: the lettuces all went into lettuce soup and the amaranth into callaloo. Each batch yielded 3-4 servings of soup.

• The kale went into pasta with kale and pancetta - make this pasta (pictured left), it's a great use for kale and because you slice the leaves thin, the kale isn't as assertive as it can be sometimes.
• The tomatoes went alongside a burger (with some grilled lettuce and chard pickles), into breakfast hash and a tomato salad we served with grilled mackerel.
• The broccoli was turned into a salad along the lines of this one from the NY Times.
• The spring onions were sliced thin and shredded over and it various dishes, like the pasta dish, the burger and the tomato salad.
• The chard went into a frittata with some leftover pasta, peas and goat cheese.
• I have to confess that I didn't get to the bok choy in time and it went into the compost bin. Made me sad to waste it, but it's the first vegetable from the CSA I haven't used, so I think that's pretty good.

This Summer, I am chronicling my first CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) experience. My CSA share is from Arrowhead Farm, a farm based in Newburyport, MA. Each week, I am posting about what was in my share and what I'm doing with it. By way of full disclosure, I won my share through a raffle and am not paying for it. However, Arrowhead did not know I was entered in the raffle, and I received no special consideration because of this blog. I paid for my livestock share.