My favorite way to eat cucumber

You have probably seen a fair number of cucumbers pop up in the last few weeks. I am also casting my gaze into the future and can promise you many more cucumbers in the weeks to come. Pounds and pounds and pounds of cucumber.

You may not see a lot of cucumber recipes on this blog, and there's a very specific reason why. The vast majority of our cucumbers have been and will be eaten one way in particular. My favorite way, bar none, to eat cucumbers. Because cucumbers are delicious and amazing and positively divine served this way.

Without further ado, I present to you the best way to prepare a cucumber:

Sliced Raw Cucumber

Just remember - you saw it here first.

What's left of week 3

All that's left of week three's loot, if anyone is keeping track, is the lettuce and the carrots. (The basil was actually used in a recipe from week two. I checked.) We did something very simple with the lettuce and carrots. It was fresh and delicious.

Seriously, it was just lettuce with sliced carrots on top. You could even get a little bold and throw on some salad dressing if you feel like it. If you can't figure this recipe out, I don't know how to help you.

Update:

The actual salad photo has been discovered. The people responsible for locating photos of salad have been sacked.

Turnip Puree and Other Lies

Brian decided to try something different with the turnips we got this week, so he made a turnip puree. A delicious dish that tastes and feels somewhat like a tangy, buttery, mashed potato.

The only time I've ever encountered a turnip puree was in a very fancy restaurant. It was the kind of tiny-portioned place where your serving of turnip puree is just a tablespoon or two artfully smeared on the plate underneath your very expensive ounce of steak. It seemed the kind of dish usually served with asparagus and mushrooms whose names I can't pronounce. Or, for some reason, with frisee.

Naturally, I assumed that turnip puree was something Really Fancy. And that being Really Fancy, turnip puree would be complicated to make. That it would require more than 3 ingredients.

Lies, all lies. Turnip puree is one of the easiest recipes we have tried.

Turnip Puree

Ingredients:
Turnips
Butter
Salt and pepper

Steps:
1. Boil turnips until soft
2. Put turnips in food processor, add salt, pepper, and butter to taste, and puree

Kale 2 Electric Boogaloo, This Time with Garlic

We picked up some kale again this week, although this time it was Russian red kale. I'm really not sure what the difference between regular kale and Russian red kale is, except that Russian red kale looks suspiciously like a kind of lettuce.

While regular kale, if you recall, does not.

Brian pointed this out when he got home that evening, and I swore up and down that I grabbed the bag labeled "kale" at the farm stand. In his defense, this wouldn't have been the first time I mistakenly grabbed the wrong veggie, but I was extra careful this time. "I swear I grabbed the kale. Like there was an arrow pointing to it with the word 'Kale!' With exclamation points and everything."

So we agreed to just cook it as if it were kale, and, lo and behold, it worked. Because it was kale.

To mix things up a little, we did not use bacon this time, but whipped up a delicious garlic butter kale. It also happens to be an Insanely Easy Recipe.

Butter and Garlic Kale:

Ingredients:
Kale
Garlic
Butter
Salt and Pepper

Steps:
1. Melt butter in pan
2. Add minced garlic and kale
3. Sautee, stirring frequently, until kale is wilted
4. Add salt and pepper
5. EAT

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.

The turnips were the first to go

First to be devoured were the turnips. And let me say, turnips, when prepared well, will always be the first devoured.

We took lovely shots of all of our vegetables before and after cooking this week. However, as a result of some technical difficulties or possibly just some technical stupidities, we lost most of our pictures. In the place of photos, please enjoy these lovely artist's renderings.

I have never had turnips before, that I am aware of.  Brian, however, has, and could hardly wait to get his hands on them.  With only a few simple ingredients, he turned them into these.

Here's how (this one's easy):

Sauteed Turnips

1 Tbsp butter
Turnips

Step 1: Sautee turnips in butter.

Done!