CSA Weeks 20 & 21: Pizza!

Here’s Week 20’s festival of greenery:


Pizza was easily the best thing we made during these two weeks, so I’ll tell you all about it. We bought a crust and can of sauce, because figuring out what to do with all these random vegetables week after week has made us lazy. We did sweeten up the sauce with some extra garlic, mind you. As you see, we chopped some spinach and arugula, then added sliced tomatoes and Daiya mozzarella. I believe some fresh thyme and oregano were involved, too. Props go to our new salad spinner for being the awesomest use of plastic since, I don’t know, plastic isn’t used for very many awesome things, but the salad spinner is one of them. See below for delicious pizza noms:


Oh, it was tasty. I think we finished it off the next day. The tomatoes made it a little soggy on the bottom, but so what. Soggy pizza beats no pizza at all.

Umm, what else did we have this week? Thyme. We froze it. Cilantro. We tossed it, because we have a ton of it and it’s tough to give away cilantro. Try it if you don’t believe me.

We had a veritable roasted vegetable orgy: beets, white radishes, acorn squash, butternut squash, sweet potatoes, and broccoli! Not all in the same pan, but close enough for an orgy. Here’s my plate, sans beets and radishes because I don’t really swing that way:


You’ll notice some parsnips and carrots among all the squash and sweet potatoes, because we used Vegan with a Vengeance’s Ginger Roasted Winter Vegetables recipe and they really do add to it. I love that flavor combo so much.

In this week’s biggest fail—and really, we haven’t had all that many fails since this CSA experiment began—we tried to reinterpret Vegan Soul Kitchen’s Yam and Mustard Greens soup using escarole. Oh, sweet merciful kittens, I did not like it. Sweet potatoes work fine in this soup, but mustard greens have a je ne sais quoi that is really essential. Escarole is just too…lettuce-y? I made Red eat it. He’s the best.

Onto Week 21 (or rather a continuation of the above, as both weeks really just smushed together):


I think we were still eating the roasted root veggies and broccoli, so not much new on that front.

See that weird-looking cabbage? Okay, maybe it’s hidden behind more of that goddamn escarole. Anyway, we got this cabbage that looked like it had come out of the cabbage mold all funny. It didn’t look sick, just misshapen. Pointy, like this:

Ripped from Hub UK. Don't sue!

As you will no doubt be unsurprised to learn, it is a pointed cabbage. Or sweetheart cabbage, if you want to be romantic like that. It behaves just like a normal, round cabbage, so don’t let its looks deter you. Red made coleslaw with half of it, and the rest was once more smothered with mustard seeds à la Vegan Soul Kitchen. That really is a delicious way to eat cabbage, and I recommend you try it.

It was pizza time again, this time with lovely green peppers and kalamata olives:


This pizza was even better, with the notable exception that I threw up right after eating the last piece for Sunday breakfast. I don’t know if the spinach or arugula got poisonous or what, but I was seriously pissed that our toilet got to enjoy the pizza longer than I did.

This, on the other hand, was a triumph. Veganomicon’s Sautéed Seitan with Mushrooms and Spinach is really delicious, but Red wanted tofu instead, so tofu he got. I crisped it up, then went ahead with the recipe. We had it over rice, and it was amazing.


You’d think we’d have been happy to get mustard greens given the disaster with that escarole soup, right? Well, we were, until we forgot about them in the back of the fridge and they got too wilty to salvage. I hang my head in shame. As for the new batch of escarole, I pawned that and the radishes off on my parents. Papa Burnout loves radishes, and Mom is always willing to try a new vegetable.

After that, we still had some green peppers and mushrooms left, so we thawed some spaghetti sauce (made back in the summer when we got tomatoes every week!) added the veggies, and voila! Super-quick weeknight meal. Sometimes simple really is best.