Tag Archives: csa

Broccoli and Green Garlic Soup, Chilled or Hot

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Here’s my high-tech approach to tracking the many recipes I find online that I’d like to try: I open a new tab in my browser with the recipe I want to remember and leave it there until my computer slows to a crawl because I haven’t rebooted in days.  Then I shut my computer down and start all over again.  Efficient, right?  (I do technically have a Pinterest account, but I guess I’m a slow adopter.)  (There’s also this list.)

Luckily, this chilled broccoli soup recipe from Sassy Radish appeared at just the right moment in my life, and I was able to press it into action right away.  Nash’s graced us with both broccoli and green garlic in our CSA box this week, Seattle provided us with soup weather today, and the rest, as they say, is history.

We ate the soup warm the first time, as eating a cold broccoli soup would have required either advance planning or patience, neither of which I could muster today.  But now that it has thoroughly chilled in the fridge, I can confirm that it also makes an excellent chilled soup as intended.  Either way, a crusty chunk of bread and a soft cheese alongside will make this a a nice summer meal. Continue reading Broccoli and Green Garlic Soup (click for recipe)

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Whole Wheat Pancakes with Sweet Cherries and Pecans

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We picked up our first box from Tonnemaker’s fruit CSA this week and–I’m almost sorry to say, for those of you where cherries are already over or not happening at all this summer–I have remembered how good a cherry can be.  We got three varieties this week, each better than the last, each cherry firm and impossibly sweet and dripping juice.  The kids’ hands have been purple since Tuesday.

It was J’s stroke of genius to slice some of the cherries into pancakes, which he did with the girls on the 4th of July.  It’s a weekend and holiday tradition of theirs, making pancakes or waffles for breakfast.  J seems to have inherited this sweet habit from his own pancake-making dad, which makes it doubly sweet.  The cherry on top, so to speak, is that I usually wake up just in time for breakfast (or just leftovers, if I’m really lucky). 

This recipe is J’s standard buttermilk pancake recipe (from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone), which he made on this occasion with 2/3 whole wheat flour, those outstanding cherries, and some rosemary candied pecans we had lying around.  The result was so good that we ate them plain; the cherries were like built-in jam.  You could also serve them with butter and maple syrup, of course.  You won’t be sorry either way. Continue reading Whole Wheat Pancakes with Sweet Cherries and Pecans (click for recipe)

Grilled Eggplant with Cumin-Basil Yogurt Sauce

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Seattle being Seattle (read: located above the 47th parallel), we are expecting almost 16 hours of sunlight on the summer solstice this week.  These long hours of light don’t always herald summer’s arrival, though.  We usually say that summer starts after the Fourth of July in Seattle.  We hope.

You know what else doesn’t start until July?  My CSAs.  Yes, that’s right, plural, CSAs.  Two big boxes of gorgeous produce–one mostly fruit and the other mostly veggies–for twenty weeks.  I can’t wait.

For those of you in the Seattle area who haven’t thrown your lot in with a CSA yet, there are lots of great options in our area, but I truly love the two that we are getting this year.  The first is from Tonnemaker’s organic farm and orchards, which provides a weekly box of unbelievably fragrant and impossibly delicious summer fruit: cherries, apricots, peaches, melons, pears, and apples were some of the highlights last year.  They grow many varieties that I had never heard of, let alone tasted, and a few months of their fruit was enough to make me truly mournful about having to get through the winter without it.  Tonnemaker’s is located in Eastern Washington, so they also provide some of the hot-weather produce that we’re starved for on this side of the Cascades: Tomatoes!  Eggplants!  Peppers!

The other CSA, our old standby now, is Nash’s Organic Produce.  They’re located out on the Olympic Peninsula, but they deliver to a few Seattle farmers markets.  Nash’s hooked us years ago with the Sweetest Carrots I Know, then reeled us in with greens galore and broccoli that tastes like a different vegetable from what you buy in a store.  Nash Huber and his team are also known for their activism and innovation in environmental conservation and protecting farmland, for which Nash received the 2008 Steward of the Land award from the American Farmland Trust, so that’s nice too.

Of course it’s not too late to sign up for either CSA!  Just click those links above (or–you’re so lazy!–click here for Tonnemaker’s and click here for Nash’s).  And once those boxes start rolling in, we’re going to be in veggie heaven around here.

In anticipation of summer vegetables, I grilled a couple eggplants based on this recipe from Food and Wine that my mother-in-law recommended.  I could have eaten the marinade with a spoon, but it was quite subtle in the finished dish, so if you want to take the easy way out you could just sprinkle the eggplant with olive oil and salt.  Most of what you’ll taste here is the smoky eggplant and cooling yogurt sauce with a background of cumin and big, herbaceous basil flavor as you crunch into the torn leaves.  In other words, it tastes like summer.

Continue reading Grilled Eggplant with Cumin-Basil Yogurt Sauce (click for recipe)