We’ve been busy here at Greek-o-Rican world headquarters, so I apologize for not having any exciting recipes to show of late. We were out of town last weekend, and I had a friend pick up the CSA box for us, so today I’ll give you a quick update on two weeks’ worth of CSA goodies.

No meat in the last two boxes–meat only comes once a month. We got eggs on weeks 2 and 3, but we gave eggs #2 to our friend for picking up our veggies. Eggs #3 are their usual selves — a dozen high quality eggs from pasture-raised chickens — so I decided that it didn’t make for a particularly exciting photo.

Anyway, here’s what we got over the past two weeks. Still mostly greens, but we’re starting to get some of the exciting stuff!

Our week 2 box had been sitting in a fridge for almost a week by the time we got it, and since our farmer doesn’t always bag his produce, it was a bit limp when we got our hands on it. The veggies were still mostly delicious by the time we got them, though.

Week 2:

Top row: mesclun greens, lamb’s quarters
Middle row: onion scapes
Bottom row: lettuces of some kind, assorted radishes, mixed hardy greens

Notes:

• lamb’s quarters. What the heck is lamb’s quarters? It’s in the amaranth family, making it related to chard, beets, and quinoa (who knew?), and is often considered a weed. But it’s super delicious and quite nutritious. It’s tasty both raw and cooked; we ended up using it in a soup.
• Onion scapes are basically the stalks of growing onion plants, and they’re quite tasty–a bit milder and greener than raw onion and good as a garnish or in salad. They’re also invincible — these scapes were unbagged in a fridge for about a week without losing any crispness or drying out in any way. We’ve had our latest scapes unrefrigerated on a counter for better than a day and they are equally buff.
• The lettuces in the lower-right were hard-suffering. I managed to restore them a little but there was a bit of bruising to them and I had to sacrifice a bit of them. They were tasty nevertheless.

Oh, here’s a tip if you’re ever faced with limp veggies. Soak them in water in which you’ve put a good dose of white vinegar. After a few minutes they’ll start to perk up. This works best with hardy greens but it works OK on lettuces too.

Week 3:

Top row: Red lettuce, green lettuce, baby escarole
Middle row: Yellow summer squash
Bottom row: Mesclun greens, many onion scapes, kohlrabi

Notes:

• This box had tons of stuff! We were quite impressed with the volume of veggies we got this week. We’ll have to do some serious salad making to manage to use all those lettuces and the mesclun.
• These onion scapes included the onion blossoms. I have no idea about how edible onion blossoms are. I guess I will find out.
• Kohlrabi is kind of awesome. I think it’s a member of the cabbage family. You can cut the leaves off and cook them like regular hardy greens, and I’ve heard you can shred the bulbs into a slaw, or roast them whole like turnips. I’ll have to try something fun with them, maybe with a roast or something?
• So, kohlrabi, escarole and squash… things are starting to get interesting. This is the point in the CSA cycle where stuff will start arriving in our box faster than we can come up with clever ideas of what to do with it. I’m quite excited.

Hopefully this week I will have an actual recipe for you. We roasted a great chicken last week — the chicken from our meat CSA — and it was quite delicious. I wish I’d photographed it. But this week I think I’ll try to give you a proper recipe, maybe the puerco pibil I alluded to earlier, and perhaps I will also give a chicken update. The girls are easily four times the size they were when we got them, and they make proper clucking noises. My little girls are all grown up! Soon their combs and wattles will come in. Isn’t parenthood just so moving?