CSA – Stuff I Ate

Grill-rosted garlic scapes and red bliss potatoes

During the first summer of the pandemic we did a local CSA vegetable share. I like the idea of a CSA share better than the actual shares themselves, because too often the veggies die before you can eat them all, or they’re something you don’t like, or the umpteenth time they included the same squash. So I probably won’t ever bother with them again and just go to the assorted farmers’ markets where they usually have the same growers offering the same produce, but you can pick and choose what you get.

Having said that, once in a while they would throw in something that was new to us or just surprisingly good. These garlic scapes were a novelty AND they were utterly delicious in this application. They were lightly tossed with olive oil and some small red potatoes, salt and pepper, and then roasted in a foil packet on the grill. A great side dish with steaks when you want to do your cooking outside.

Borscht

I love the idea of having a CSA share in the summer for fresh vegetables, but every time we have tried it, we’ve ended up with more things than we can use up in a week, or too many of one thing or another, or just nothing that we felt like eating. This was from our last go-round with a local CSA, and the vegetable we got a lot of for a while was beets.

I don’t mind beets at all. There are several ways to prepare them that I like, and we certainly went through all of them that month. I had never made borscht before, in fact had never even eaten borscht, but it seemed like it was worth a try.

The recipe I found used beef broth as the base and included other vegetables in the soup, notably carrots. You can see that there’s also quite a bit of dill, which I love. I had expected it to be more like a puree of beets, not a beet-flavored vegetable soup, but we enjoyeed it rather a lot and I was pleased to have another way to use up the surplus.

Tag: CSA

Dinner 6/24/2020

Dinner 7/26/20