This week’s box included: Okra, Garlic, Cucumbers (salad + Kirby), green pepper, watermelon, potatoes, delicata squash, acorn squash, tomatoes, turnip or mustard greens
Last night when I realized I still had several peppers left from last week and my little bag of okra – and an eggplant from the week before! – I popped them all in the oven with a serious drenching of olive oil and roasted them all together. In another roasting pan I did the same thing but with the little red potatoes from recent boxes. A quick way to get everything cooked and now I have my favorite lunch available – a dish of roasted vegetables. It’s embarrassing that I hadn’t gotten those vegetables cooked in other delicious ways, but my conscience was clear as I unloaded this week’s box.
This week’s box crosses seasons beautifully. An acorn squash and a delicata squash sitting side by side with five tomatoes (one yellow!), four cucumbers (two slicers, two Kirby), a watermelon and one pepper. There was also a somewhat wilted bunch of mustard greens. But a quick soak in a bowl of water and the mustard greens perked right up. We have lots of mustard green recipes at grassfedbeef.com including this one from Eddie Hernandez of Taqueria del Sol for greens, tomatoes, and ham. Maybe you still have a hot pepper left from last week?
Are you new to Riverview this year? Then you may not be familiar with delicata squash, the pretty long yellow and green striped squash in the box. I think last year we didn’t get any because the weather just didn’t cooperate, but most years they are the first squash (after spaghetti squash, I guess) to appear and I think they’re a favorite of Charlotte’s. They’re the easiest of the “winter” or hard squashes to cook because there’s no reason to peel them. Just wash them off, cut in half and remove the seeds, and bake. They lend themselves beautifully to stuffing or one of my favorite ways is our recipe for Brown Rice with Delicata Squash. You’ll find almost 20 recipes for delicata squash at grassfedcow.com. I saw a photo of the delicata squash harvest on another farm’s website. Looks like it was a great year for delicata so I expect/hope we’ll see some more.
What about the acorn squash? We don’t receive those very often so there’s no group of recipes on the Riverview website (at least not that I can find) but at our house, I cook it the way my mama did – cut it in half, cut a little sliver off the bottoms so they’ll sit upright in a baking dish, scoop out the seeds and then add a tablespoon of butter and another of brown sugar (which was my mother’s recipe) or use a drizzle of olive oil and a little maple syrup which is maybe the way she’d make it these days. These roast until tender and scoop the roasted flesh right out of the shell for dinner.
And if you happen to have that spaghetti squash left from last week, consider Spaghetti Squash Pie. I like making it because it always surprised people but also because it’s a good lesson that spaghetti squash doesn’t always have to go into savory (or healthy!) dishes.