CSA Week 14: This should be more exciting.

I mean it should be more exciting for you guys. I, for one, am having a blast picking out our veggies each week and cooking them up, and I am already enjoying being back on a regular schedule (see: no more class), but this most recent week might seems a little pedestrian to you. No matter! Pedestrians are better than the rest of us, because they walk while we drive our stupid polluting cars.

We already had quite a bit of food in the fridge, so we basically grabbed our One Straw stuff and went home. There you see another humongous sweet potato—even bigger than the one from the previous week! they grow them HUGE at One Straw!—some chard, a stalk of broccoli, and an average-sized butternut squash. I think it was average, anyway. Seeing it next to that mutant sweet potato makes me doubt myself.

I flaked out on the pictures, my darlings. The broccoli we steamed, and you don’t really need to see that, do you? I should have really done better on the rest of our meals, because Red took the lead this week, and his efforts are always exceptional. Example: We had that chard, some onions, and random portabella stems in the fridge. I had meant to sauté them, but I got busy or tired or sad or something and went to my last class after leaving him with vague instructions to…do something with our orphan veggies. When I came home, he had diced and stirred and simmered everything with marsala and Bragg’s for a lovely improvisational meal. It was excellent over rice. And you can’t see it, because I suck.

He brought the noise again on Friday, while I sat in traffic for two hours trying to get home. (It was rain, Baltimore. Not the zombie apocalypse.) Friday happened to be the autumnal equinox (remember?), so of course we wanted our food to match. While I sat at red lights and read random articles on my work phone (I still hate you, Crackberry, but you stopped me from committing rush-hour homicide), my awesome husband mashed that sweet potato into submission and popped our first risotto of the season into the oven. Soon after I finally stumbled through the door, we enjoyed cinnamon-spiced mashed sweet potatoes and that fabulous butternut risotto with sage and red onions. I didn’t get a pic of the mash, but here’s the risotto in all its glory:

If you get right up close to the monitor, maybe you can smell it.

He is a fucking keeper, I tell you what.

CSA Weeks 11, 12, and 13: Potatoes and power outages.

Week 11 looks to have been a bust, since I evidently forgot to take a photo. Sorry about that. I’m guessing we didn’t make anything too special with it, either, because I only have this one meal photo:

And honestly, I think those were Week 10’s potatoes that we made a nice little pan of hash browns out of. Look at those beautiful matchstick potatoes—Red is a magician with the mandoline. The peppers, onions, and mushrooms were a great mix. I wanted to toss them with the potatoes, but someone likes his potatoes separate. And covered in ketchup.

Week 12 was much better:

Most photogenic peach ever.

Doesn’t all that stuff look fabulous? And we scored it all during the quickest-ever trip to the market, because Hurricane Irene was coming to visit. Luckily, she didn’t stay long and didn’t make too much of a mess, but we did lose power for two days. This was not impressive to me, because thanks to Hurricane Isabel in 2003, my personal best for rocking out sans electricity and hot water is six days. It was not as terrible as you might imagine, either. Bottom line, I was immune to the panic-shopping and hoarding of bread/water/toilet paper that heralded Irene.

(My poor husband. He hates extreme weather. But he tolerated it well and I am very proud of him.)

Cool thing number approximately one million about being vegan: When the power goes out, your food spoils much more slowly than your omni friends’. Soymilk? Fine! Produce? A little wilty, but totally edible. Ice cream? We ate it all as soon as the freezer crapped out. We lost a container of hummus and that was it. And, let’s face it, that hummus might have been fine, because it tends to smell kind of weird anyway, but I didn’t want to roll the dice on it.

A few weeks back, we had picked up an American Flatbread Vegan Harvest frozen pizza on a whim, so we slapped that baby on the grill:

It was okay. I mean, it was a frozen pizza. Vegan or non-, they are only so titillating.

We also had leftover spaghetti and un-chicken seitan cutlets in the fridge, so we heated all that up on the grill too for a fabulous dinner:


Aside from that, we just chilled. We read a lot, and snuggled Lucy, and took naps with the windows wide open to feel the breeze. I barely missed the Internet, and you know I love all of you very much.

We got the biggest sweet potato I have ever seen during Week 13:

That sucker must have weighed three pounds. Seriously, it felt so wrong to cut it up, like the biggest knife we have wasn’t sufficient. I needed a sweet potato butcher to do my dirty work for me, which was fine because Red was there. He slew the beast, and we roasted it with ginger and a drizzle of maple syrup. It tasted like fall, and I was happy.

Red had a birthday that weekend, so for breakfast, we roasted potatoes and made another pepper-and-onion hash. Here’s his plate, with the demon ketchup:

(I don’t mind ketchup, actually, but I wouldn’t be sorry to never eat it again. A little vinegar on my fries? Yes please. Ketchup? Away with you.)

Fall continued to creep up on us with the season’s first winter squash. I roasted this lovely spaghetti squash simply, and it was very warm and comforting. Of course, we’re still having 80-degree days here, but not long ago the temperature was topping 100, so it’s starting to feel rather autumnal indeed.

I’ll be back soon with more bloggy goodness. My summer class ends in two weeks, so feel free to poke me about getting back on a regular schedule, my darlings.