CSA Week 5

French toast omelette with raspberries from our CSA

This week we found in our box peas, rosemary, swiss chard, golden raspberries, basil, cucumbers, breakfast radishes, scallions, and lavender. We purchased at the grocery store baby carrots, full size carrots, cauliflower, cherry tomatoes, onions, broccoli. Our garden has begun to produce in earnest so we also harvested zucchini, chives, cucumbers with tantalizing promises of green beans, tomatoes, and swiss chard coming any day now. The garden also gave us a salad of purslane, which everyone except my oldest daughter rolled their eyes at, figuratively or literally.
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I'm not a fan of my food tasting "floral" and I didn't think my family would be enthusiastic about eating lavender either. My kids do like to drink tea though and the idea of lavender tea seemed like the best way to make the most out of this item. If they enjoyed it, we have the opportunity to make many more cups in the future from the three baby plants in our garden, once those plants become more mature. I spiked the tea with chamomile and extra honey to give them the familiar flavors and appeal of a sweetened drink. My husband and 7yr daughter turned down anything more than an initial "shot" of the tea but the other kids came back for full mugs and drank down the rest of the quart of tea.
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The idea of a CSA filled with week after week of radishes was one of the reasons I waited this long before buying one. No one in my home cares for them and they aren't versatile in cooking like onions or scallions or even chives. I wanted to find a way to tame their pepper so I, at least, might enjoy them. I considered fermenting them since the all-knowing internet suggested that that might reduce their spice, but every time I look in our fridge the sauerkraut stares back at me: the sauerkraut that no one else in my family will eat. It's good sauerkraut but it's "sauer", and a family that turns up their nose at it, and pickles, and other fermented vegetables isn't likely to suddenly enjoy fermented radishes. So, I was still trying to figure that vegetable out as the week progressed.
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I once again made compound butter with the rosemary and basil, combined with some garlic cloves and garden chives. I used a cube of it on our lamb steaks on Saturday night. The cucumbers and peas went into a vegetable tray for a potluck along with tomatoes, baby carrots, broccoli and cauliflower. I tossed the raspberries with some fresh strawberries (from the store, unfortunately) and served them for breakfast on Friday as the fruit portion of our "French toast omelettes". The peeled scallion bulbs went into a beef stew for Thursday's dinner and half the greens went into our Friday dinner stir-fry along with all the chard (stems and leaves), radish greens, and the last two garlic scapes from two weeks ago.
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I love that even my toddlers can identify a wide variety of vegetables. They might identify them as being items that they don't like, but at least they know them by sight.