Fifth and Sixth Charlestown Farm Pickups

Thursday, July 02, 2009

I’ve been so busy cooking with the veggies in our CSA shares (and working in the garden) that June just flew by!

Last week we picked up more lettuce (both loose leaf and head), some arugula, some young kale, bok choy, broccoli, garlic scrapes and some carrots. Off to the left you can see some of the strawberry jam we made two weeks ago.

Broccoli was not one of my favorites as a kid, and my husband used to only eat it with cheese sauce.  Actually, it was more like he’d eat cheese sauce with a sprinkle of broccoli.  But last fall we tried out Heidi’s recipe from Super Natural Cooking - and now we both love broccoli and it gets eaten up right away! It’s really hardly a recipe at all, just cut the broccoli into bite sized pieces, leaving plenty of stem. Then toss them with olive oil and a little salt. Grill for a few minutes until they are crisp-tender, then toss with lemon juice and ground flax seeds. Yummy!

This week marked the beginning of summer with our first tomato! I’ve been craving tomato salad for months and I can’t wait to devour this one! The share also had one head of lettuce and some bok choy (boy am I glad to get down to a sane level of greens), broccoli, celery, scallions, beets, turnips, garlic ramps, and herbs. We also got to pick one sunflower and a small bouquet from the u-pick flower garden.

Off to the left is one jar of black raspberry jam that we made last weekend. We went out to Linvilla and picked 7 qts of black raspberries. I’m a huge berry lover - we used two qts for jam, two qts for a crumble and the rest were just for eating straight   We also got a few early summer peaches (not nearly as good as the later ones, but still tasty), and about 4 qts of the last strawberries of the season.