Friday, July 13, 2012

The triumphant return of the CSA

Ok, so actually, it's been CSA season for a few weeks now, but I was out of town, getting married and not eating vegetables, so this is the first CSA share I really have time to enjoy. And that means, the return of the food blog! Hooray!!

Let's get started. Check out this insanity:
This week's share includes:

  • Cucumbers
  • Zucchini
  • Kale
  • Collard greens
  • Broccolini
  • Onions
  • Scallions
  • Beets
  • Purple kohlrabi
  • Rosemary
  • Peaches
  • Apricots
  • Two cats (white and black - one each)
For dinner last night, I cooked up the collard greens with some sweet Italian sausage, roughly working off this recipe. I didn't have any beans, so I just skipped that part. There's not a lot to say about the recipe, so instead, I want to talk for a minute about the sausages.

Once upon a time, +Queendeb Starr was in town, and we made Shabbat dinner. Now, the thing you should know about me is that I love vegetarians. I'm not a vegetarian, but I play one on TV. Some of my best friends are... well, anyways, vegetarians will never go hungry at my house.

Unless they don't tell me that they are vegetarians, and then Queendeb and I make Meat Shabbat, where absolutely everything from the soup on down contains meat, and the only vegetarian foods are the hummus and the dessert. And then those stealth vegetarians tell me that, well actually, they're not really vegetarians, but they only eat kosher, free-range, sustainable meat, and therefore will not eat anything I made for them anyways (which was kosher, but not any of the others).

The moral of my story is, don't be a stealth vegetarian! Come out, be proud!

But maybe the real moral of my story is this. I recently started ordering meat from Grow and Behold, a kosher meat delivery service run by a husband and wife in upstate New York. They work with small "pastured" farms, which seems to mean that the animals are treated humanely and fed things like grass instead of corn and animal by-products. Their meat is insanely expensive, but so far, pretty delicious. And if said stealth vegetarian ever ends up at my house again (which, uh, not likely), s/he could partake too.

Anyways, the sausages that I made last night are from Grow and Behold's Sausage Sampler. The sweet Italian sausages are quite sweet, and taste mildly like fennel and caraway seeds. I used two in last night's dinner, and may try grilling the rest, but I think they really want to live in tomato sauce. They were pretty good with the collard greens:

I tried taking mid-cooking pictures, like a real food blogger, with ingredients being prepared and whatnot, but they came out pretty stupid-looking, so instead, I leave you with this picture of Phredward, frying sausages and being cute.

2 comments:

  1. What are you gonna do with the broccolini? I'm a bit stumped.

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  2. Already eaten, although totally uncreatively. Steamed, then topped with tahini.

    I'm making kale pesto out of the kale, though, so that should be exciting. http://www.loveandlemons.com/2012/03/16/kale-pesto-pasta/

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