CSA Charleston: sometimes even i get overwhelmed

Another delicious week with our Pinckney’s Produce CSA!

Another great haul this week! Here’s the breakdown:

• 5 sweet potatoes
• 1 large head cabbage
• 1 bunch kale
• 1 bunch collards
• 4 small heads broccoli
• 2 heads cauliflower
• lots of various tomatoes

This was our next to last CSA box! I’m already getting sad about the season ending, and will do more of a retrospective on the experience next week.  I’ll also post a picture of the stock of food we’ve now accumulated in our freezer– at least one friend seems to be unable to believe everything I’ve said is in there fits!

We received our box on Tuesday but didn’t do anything with it as we had leftovers.  Wednesday night Jon made enchiladas, but the only thing I think he used may have been a tomato or two. Thursday night we ate out because my bus was late, so Jon came downtown to pick me up and we decided that traffic was too crappy to go home and we might as well hang out in a restaurant for a while.

I know I had planned to be more ambitious what with it being our next to last week and all, but I seriously can’t stop making the linguine with collard greens and bacon, which I made Friday night.  Every time we have collards, I have to make it. It’s just that good.  It also used up a couple of the tomatoes.  We ate it while watching “No Reservations” which unfortunately is the rom-com staring Catherine Zeta Jones, not the travel show featuring the hilarious Anthony Bourdain. Bourdain is way more entertaining than that movie was, though it wasn’t bad.

Saturday Jon was on call, aka in the hospital starting Saturday morning and not coming home until Sunday around noon.  I made a batch of cabbage and white bean soup with half the cabbage, and went ahead and froze it. For dinner, I made myself the world’s weirdest pizza.  Basically, get it out of your head that this is pizza at all.  It’s German food on flat bread.  I bet it would be amazing if you could make a giant soft pretzel crust.  Anyway, it was this bacon, cabbage, and gruyere pizza, which used up 1/4 of the cabbage.  Once I stopped expecting it to be pizza-y, I discovered it was really delicious.  It was also not bad cold for breakfast the next day.  Note: I made my own pizza crust instead of using a store bought crust.

Sunday morning I woke up and baked Jon a pie.  I had asked him Saturday, “If you could come home to any baked good in the world tomorrow, what would it be?” He answered chocolate chip cookies or an apple pie.  I went with this Pushing Daisies’ Apple-Gruyere Pie, which I discovered last year, and now I don’t make any other sort of apple pie.  I may never get over the cancellation of “Pushing Daisies,” but at least I’ll always have the pie inspired by character Charlotte Charles.  Maybe some of her homeopathic “vanilla” would help with the sadness.  Anyway, the pie is amazing, and you should try it, even if an apple pie with cheese in the crust sounds strange. I’ve also learned that outside the South, lots of people like cheese in their apple pies. I even heard the saying, “an apple pie without the cheese is like a hug without the squeeze.” I’d say if you’re talking Gruyere, I’d agree.

Sunday is also the time when I started to panic that we still had a ton of veggies to use and next to no time to use them in. This is when I gave up on using the sweet potatoes this week and focused on the more perishable items.  I decided to make 2 different batches of broccoli soup. The first was a sort of broccoli egg drop soup, which, had I not made a second soup, would have been impressive and delicious, especially since it has like a measly four ingredients.  But the second soup blew it out of the water.  The second soup was a broccoli, red pepper, and cheddar chowder, and wow, it puts the broccoli cheese soup attempt from last week TO SHAME.  I have a feeling that I could have left out the red pepper and just had a really delicious broccoli cheese soup, but this was seriously yum.

Monday night we took a gander in the fridge and realized we still had a ton of leftovers. At least one serving of enchiladas, leftovers of the collard pasta, and basically both broccoli soups (I took one for lunch on Monday) because I wasn’t sure how they’d freeze.  I knew I’d have to do something with the rest of the goodies and freeze it, because we had way too many leftovers to work on.  So I threw all the rest of the veggies, kale, tomatoes, and cauliflower, into a pot with some onions and potatoes, covered with chicken stock, and dumped in a bunch of curry powder.  Normally I like coconut milk in my curry, but we were strangely out. This yielded 4 gallon sized bags of veggie curry. INSANE.  It’s probably a good thing we only have one more week left of the family-sized deliveries, because our freezer really can’t handle much more!