Loot: Week 4 and How I Keep the Flowers Fresh

This week we found a lot of repeats at the farm stand. Not that repeats bother us, of course. Beets are still beets, whether they're the first beets you've eaten this summer or not. Beets, summer squash, lettuce, cabbage, and garlic scapes we've seen before this season. New this week were the green onions, mint, and cucumbers.

We got, of course, another beautiful bouquet of flowers as well.

The flowers have been lasting quite well, especially considering the fact that the air outside most closely resembles boiling soup. All I do to keep them perky all week is mix some sugar and some vinegar into the water, and change the water every few days.

Insanely Easy Cabbage Recipe

Cabbage is awesome. It's healthy, versatile, and tasty. You can eat it raw, steamed, pickled, sauteed, braised, stewed, and probably about a hundred other ways. It's got all kinds of vitamins in it, apparently, and can sometimes help fight off cancer. Or prevent cancer. One way or the other, it does something bad to cancer.

The head of cabbage we got this week was, in a word, adorable. It is the tiniest head of cabbage I have ever seen, and I would like nothing more than to give it a tiny hug. Actually, that's a lie. I would rather eat it. (Fortunately, I can do both.)

I know this picture does not effectively illustrate the adorableness or tininess of this cabbage. So I will.

Brian has been itching to make stuffed cabbage leaves, but with a cabbage this small, they'd end up being the size of postage stamps, but it's early in the cabbage season, so we'll wait on those until the cabbages have gotten a wee bit bigger. I love a good steamed cabbage, which also happens to be an Insanely Easy Recipe. Perfect for a hectic week.

Steamed Cabbage

1. Wash and chop your cabbage, and toss in a pot with a vegetable steamer and a couple of inches of water in the bottom.

2. Cover the pot and boil until cabbage is tender. Serve hot, with butter.

Loot: Week 2

Week 1 of our CSA experience went well. We ate well, had fun, and got through all our vegetables.

Week 2 was a little tougher. This is for quite a few reasons, none of which are particularly interesting, or related to the CSA. Jobs, small children, real life kind of stuff. We didn't feel much like cooking, so we took week 2 a little easier. Used simpler recipes, ordered some takeout (and wrote blog posts way after the fact).

Regardless of how we felt all week, the bounty from the CSA continued. We got fennel, beets, garlic scapes, red russian kale, cilantro, frisee, snap peas, cabbage, and of course a beautiful bouquet. None of these are particularly unfamiliar or difficult to prepare, so they're perfect for a lazy week.