Week 6 of 24

Fresh produce is starting to roll into the local farms around Westen NY and our CSA distributions at farmthisway are getting exciting.  

In my family, we plan most of our meals around the produce in the distribution for that week.  This past week we received Cucumbers, cabbage, and 2 more flats of strawberries, plus eggs.  

The strawberries have been made once again into jam, frozen for future use, sliced with sugar for shortcake and just eaten plain.  One of my favorite things to do with the strawberries in the freezer is to make smoothies.  We use these for breakfasts, lunches and snacks.  One of my favorites is the "Banana Split" smoothie.  Greek yogurt, frozen strawberries, banana, Ovaltine (or your favorite chocolate milk making powder/liquid), and milk.  Another frozen strawberry favorite is a simple strawberry milkshake.  Berries, ice cream or frozen yogurt, and milk in the blender is great for dessert. 

The cucumbers never usually make it to dinner, unless we slice one or two on our salad.  They are often just sliced and eaten either plain or with a little salt.  Sometimes if we have a lot of them, I like to make a cucumber salad, with sour cream/vinegar dressing and some sweet onion, or if we also have fresh tomatoes, we use the cucumbers, tomatoes, sweet onion and a little Italian style dressing.

A lot of people fear the cabbage.  My family was never really a big cabbage family until we started getting it from our CSA.  It was something I just never bought because I didn't have many standard recipes for.  We have grown to enjoy it though...and found many tasty ways to prepare it.  Whether a fresh cabbage slaw, or sauteed with onion and bacon, stuffed with ground beef and rice for cabbage rolls, or made into sauerkraut, there are way more uses for cabbage than I had ever imagined.  This week, I used some of mine to make an Asian style stir fry of cabbage, onion, and thin sliced beef, tossed in a little sesame oil mixed, and finished off with toasted sesame seeds, soba sauce and some fresh garlic chives chopped out of my herb garden that was part of an earlier distribution (and that I have miraculously managed to not kill!).