culinary challenge

mint and salvia boquet from our garden

Our new CSA started a few weeks ago, and this year, unlike last year, I'm determined to not let a crop go to waste.  Last summer, so often tomatoes turned to mush because I thought I didn't have the time to "deal" with all of them.  Now that I have learned to can (through the help of the lovely ladies in my food co-op), and life with Mathilda has become more normal (to a degree, of course), I am determined to make time to better save and store our uneaten staples, and to challenge myself to make better use of our CSA produce.
Thus begins my CSA cooking challenge.  Each week I am going to make one new recipe, incorporating as many CSA ingredients as possible.  It might sound crazy- I know that I have a lot on my plate as it is.  But cooking is something that has in the recent past begun to give me a lot of joy.  Often the day is crazy, and the baby has been fussing, and I have not had the chance to shower.  Then Reggie gets home from work and takes over parent duty allowing me the time to start and finish a project (a near impossible feat while baby tending all day) that is a healthy and tasty meal is really pleasurable.
For this week I made 3 new dishes. All simple.

1- sauteed chard (from the CSA) in a pan with some garlic and olive oil. so simple and delicious! I generally put greens like chard into soups, but this way was much easier and gave instant summer gratification.

2- I took the stems from the chard, chopped them up, and did the same to mint, cilantro, basil (all from our garden), sugar snap peas (garden), a cucumber (soon from the garden!), garlic scapes (CSA), and a yellow onion.

I then cut a brick of tofu into matchsticks and cooked it in some oil and about 2 Tbsp of soy sauce with the garlic and onion. I let that chill.

Then mixed all of the veggies and the tofu-onion mix in a bowl with 4 Tbsp hoisin sauce and some chopped peanuts.  I put a few large Tbsp of the mixture into large leafy Romaine lettuce pieces (CSA), and rolled them up for very summery, healthy, wraps.

3- It was Reggie's bday so I made an non-traditional cake: shortcake topped with strawberries (CSA), honey, and some powdered sugar.

Because it was a sweet for my sweet I cheesed it up as much as possible and baked it in a heart-shaped pan.

recipe (courtesy of Don Kretschmann, our CSA farmer):
Sift 2c. flour, 3 tsp. baking powder, 1/4 tsp. salt, 2 tbs. sugar.  Mix in 1/2 c. oil well, until evenly distributed.  Beat 1 egg and 5/8 c. milk and mix with dry ingredients.  Pat out with oiled hands or use a plastic spatula to spread dough onto an oiled cookie sheet about 1/2 " thick.  Bake @375 deg about 20 min.

In related culinary news, friends of ours had a pig roast over father's day weekend.  It was amazing!  Our friend is German in every wonderful way when it comes to meat- he selects the pig from a local farm, then prepared it for 6 days before it ended up on the spit.  I think Mathilda enjoyed her first pig roast, as did we. 

i cant look!

not so sure about this pig on a stick thing