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.

Scape Artist: A Deluge of Vegetables

I know I mentioned recently that all these weeks have been running together a bit, and that we're posting all of these photos and recipes after the fact. We get a lot of vegetables from the CSA, and while we have managed to eat it all so far, sometimes it takes more than a week to get through a week's worth of vegetables.

And sometimes we just throw the contents of our entire fridge into one dish.

Right around week three in the CSA we began getting squash and zucchini. A lot of squash (and zucchini). Well, between week three and week four, we found ourselves with several pounds of squash, as well as quite a few garlic scapes. (We still hadn't actually used the garlic scapes from week two yet, but they held up  very well, and we got more garlic scapes in week four.)

Side note: I am a huge fan of garlic in all forms, but before receiving them in my week two loot, I had never even heard of scapes. Garlic scapes are the curly flower stalks that grow up from the bulbs of some kinds of garlic. And they taste (surprise!) like garlic, but milder. They can be eaten just about any way that you would eat garlic, and some that you probably wouldn't, like raw, chopped, on a salad. Unless you'd eat garlic raw, on your salad, in which case I wonder about you.

The few. The curly. The scapes.

So Brian and I were looking at the small mountain of squash in our kitchen, pondering how we were going to consume it all, and suddenly, without a word, Brian leaped into action. He threw some olive oil in a pan, and began chopping, dicing, and slicing like a madman.

The dish that emerged from the frenzy in the kitchen used just about all our remaining vegetables (that week, anyway, we're never low on veggies for long these days), and thanks especially to the shallots and scapes, it was ridiculously delicious. We consumed every last ounce.

It's surprisingly simple, and can easily handle, apparently, very large quantities of squash.

Sauteed Squash and Zucchini with Shallots and Garlic Scapes

Ingredients
Shallots, finely chopped
Summer squash and zucchini, sliced
Garlic scapes, cut into 1-inch segments
Olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

Steps:
1. Heat olive oil in a large pan
2. Sautee shallots in oil
3. Once shallots are translucent, add garlic scapes and squash
4. Sautee until squash is soft, add salt and pepper to taste

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.