Tag Archives: spinach

CSA Week 5

2 Replies
GD Star Rating
loading...

So Morley and I just went to pick up our CSA box and it’s like Armageddon in Chapel Hill, NC. We had thunderstorms roll through this evening and some of the traffic lights lost power.  There were car horns and sirens everywhere (which Morley likes to imitate by howling at them).  To be fair this is how it gets every time there is weather down here; North Carolinians can’t handle it. Or maybe it was just a free-for-all mob-style protest of the passing of Amendment 1, I can’t be sure…

But anyway, Morley and I did manage to eventually get our veggies home. You can tell this stuff is fresh. It was dirtier this week than the last couple of weeks, probably because of the rain today.

I didn’t do a Week 4 post because everything was a repeat of something we had previously. I still have some lettuce and spinach from last week that I am trying to quickly finish up now that the stocks are replenished. I’m also super-excited that we just bought a food dehydrator. I can’t decide what to dehydrate first! Looks like there are some possibilities here. So here’s a list of the contents. Quite a bounty this week.

  • 1 pint of strawberries – Still strawberry season here in NC. No complaints from this guy. I might try dehydrating these.
  • 1 head of cauliflower
  • 1 lettuce
  • 3 onions
  • 1 bunch of turnips – The onions and turnips are easy. I was really excited to see these. I see a breakfast casserole in our future made with grated turnips, diced onions, eggs and farm sausage.
  • 3 green/3 yellow squash – Another option for dehydrating. I want to try me some zucchini chips.
  • 3/4# spinach – I’ve been eating a lot of spinach lately. Will have to think about this one a little more.

Chili-Glazed Pork with Sweet Potato Hash

Leave a reply
GD Star Rating
loading...

So first off, I have to admit, I didn’t make up this recipe; it’s from Real Simple. But I wanted to share with everyone since it’s paleo-friendly and just so good! Sean and I have broiled the pork in the oven before, and it works great, but we found that it does take much longer than the recipe says it does (it took us ~30 min to get the internal temp to read 145-deg). Recently we acquired the “Big Easy Infrared Oil-less Turkey Fryer” (and yes, it’s as awesome as it sounds), so in the picture you see we cooked the pork in our new infrared “grill”. And by “we” I mean Sean, he’s the grill-master :-)

My job was to take care of the sweet potato hash. The recipe has you grate the potatoes and cook it in oil, but when we tried that in the past the hash always got too mushy; it never got crispy like it looks in Real Simple’s picture. So instead of grating the potatoes I cooked them in the microwave until tender and then cut them into cubes. I cooked the shallots and then added some grass-fed butter to the skillet to help give the sweet potatoes some nice color and crisp.

I love this hash. It reminds me of a healthier paleo-friendly version of the homemade hash my parents used to cook me, my sister and brother on Saturday mornings (with pancakes and eggs of course)!

ps – Our favorite hot sauce to douse this in is Texas Pete. Usually we are fans of Frank’s Red Hot, but the hint of sweetness in the Texas Pete really adds something special…

 

CSA Week 1

3 Replies
GD Star Rating
loading...

We received our first CSA box this week from Maple Spring Gardens in Cedar Grove, NC. It came two weeks earlier than they have ever started before, due to the unseasonably warm winter accelerating their growing schedule. It was a good first box with nothing too exotic to start off with. Here’s what we got this week along with some ideas of what we have done or will do to prepare them. I’ll try to link the most interesting and successful ones to separate recipes as we prepare them.

  1. Strawberries – We ate these almost as soon as we got home. Too good to resist.
  2. Arugula – salad with roasted beets, goat cheese, pistachios and a honey mustard and onion vinaigrette.
  3. Spinach - sautéed with toasted coconut and spiced with red chili flakes, mustard and cumin seeds, served inside a thin omelet. Also folded into a sweet potato hash served alongside ancho chili and maple rubbed pork tenderloin.
  4. Salad mix – unimaginative but delicious. Topped with veggies and served with a roasted whole chicken.
  5. Field onions – oven roasted with balsamic vinegar. Served broiled pork chops.