This week’s box included: Carrots, Napa cabbage (or bok choy), sweet peppers (the orange ones), bell peppers, sweet potatoes, mustard greens, apples, radishes with tops, tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, heirloom tomatoes, cubanelle peppers. You can see a photo that can help with identification on our Facebook page or check out our weekly video on Instagram.
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Suzanne here, pinch hitting for Conne this week.
These fall deliveries have been simply amazing! This week, boxes contained either a huge head of Napa cabbage, or a similarly behemoth bok choy. And carrots – fun! I got so distracted by the riot of colors in this week’s box that I didn’t notice that this is the first week in modern memory that we did not receive any cucumbers. Can it be true? Have the cucumbers ended for the year?
Fall is fully here despite the bounty of tomatoes in this week’s box. You likely don’t need any inspiration to enjoy your tomatoes. Still, I can’t resist sharing my favorite tomato sandwich recipe: toasted whole wheat bread, lightly rub a raw whole garlic clove on one side of each slice (save the leftover), layer on slabs of tomato, sprinkle of Maldon smoked sea salt, and Dukes mayo. Eat over the sink.
Charlotte shared that the peppers will continue through the end of the CSA deliveries. This week’s peppers are all sweet: cubanelles, the longer red & green peppers; red bell peppers; and cute little orange “lunchbox” peppers. Eating a crisp pepper fresh from the bush like an apple is a joy.
You owe it to yourself to try Steven Satterfield’s Greens Grilled Cheese sandwich recipe published in his most recent cookbook, Vegetable Revelations. (If you didn’t think your floor joists could hold one more cookbook, this one’s worth the risk.) The recipe uses an entire bunch of mustard greens. Any other green that you have on hand will also work, but the mustard greens add a satisfying bite that cuts the richness of the cheeses. Looking at you, mustard greens: the recipe’s simple cooking instructions for the greens is worthy of feature on its own especially for non-Southern born cooks like me whose attempts to cook greens yield inconsistent results.
We already have a few vegetable pancake recipes on our website. Here’s another one featured on today’s NY Times Cooking homepage, this one Korean. Vegetable pancakes require 4 cups (or more) of shredded veggies. Not only do they use a lot, they’re flexible enough to use most of the vegetables that you have on hand. This week’s red peppers, cabbage (or bok choy), mustard greens, and carrots will make for colorful party on the plate. In addition to adding a fried egg to round this out for dinner, Melissa Clark also suggests that you can incorporate cooked leftover vegetables. So flexible, so delicious.
No kimchi on hand? Try this recipe. Bonus: it’ll preserve that Napa cabbage for weeks.
Vegetable Pajeon (Korean Scallion Pancakes With Vegetables)
New York Times Cooking
For the Pancakes
½ cup all-purpose flour
½ cup potato starch (or ¼ cup each white rice flour and cornstarch)
¾ teaspoon fine sea salt, plus more as needed
½ teaspoon baking powder
¾ cup ice water
1 large egg
¼ cup finely chopped kimchi
4 cups finely chopped or grated mixed vegetables (carrots, zucchini, bell peppers, kale, whatever you’ve got)
4 scallions, cut into 2-inch-long sections and thinly sliced lengthwise
2 tablespoons grapeseed or peanut oil, plus more as needed
For the Dipping Sauce
3 tablespoons soy sauce
2 teaspoons rice wine vinegar, plus more to taste
1 teaspoon finely grated fresh ginger or garlic (optional)
½ teaspoon sesame oil, plus more to taste
Pinch of granulated sugar
Prepare the pancakes: In a large bowl, whisk together all-purpose flour, potato starch, salt and baking powder.
In a medium bowl, combine water, egg and kimchi. Whisk kimchi mixture into flour mixture, and whisk until smooth. Fold in vegetables and about three-quarters of the scallions. (Save the rest for garnish.)
In a large nonstick skillet over medium heat, heat 2 tablespoons oil. Scoop ¼ cup portions of batter into the skillet, as many as will fit while not touching, flatten, and fry until dark golden on the bottom, about 2 to 3 minutes. Flip and continue to fry until other side is browned, 2 to 3 minutes. Transfer to a paper towel-lined plate and sprinkle with a little more salt. Continue with remaining batter.
Before serving, make the dipping sauce: In a small bowl, stir together soy sauce, vinegar, ginger or garlic (if using), sesame oil and sugar. Sprinkle sliced scallion over pancakes, and serve with dipping sauce on the side.
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Carrots appeared this week for the first time this fall. There are over 3 dozen recipes on our website, including intriguing Sorghum-Glazed Carrots and Carrot Candy that contains no sweetener other than those in the carrots. Sticking with the pancake theme, there’s also a recipe for Carrot Cake Pancakes with Honey Butter.
Finally, radishes returned to the boxes this week. They’re the fastest growing vegetable there is – from seed to harvest in 3 weeks, reportedly. For radish inspiration, I turned to one of my favorite cooking books – Louise’s Leaves by Louise Frazier. There are no recipes in the book. Instead, each vegetable gets a page of suggestions based on Louise’s experience with biodyanmic growing, healthful eating, and running a restaurant that practiced these methods in Germany.
Louise’s comments on radishes include mention of their application as a digestive aid. She shares “Europeans serve grated radish on whole grain bread for breakfast, as well as later for lunch,” thus explaining the prominence of the breakfast radish as a means of jump-starting the digestive track. She cautions that too much salt can cause the radish to feel like lead in the stomach.
Keep your radishes rinsed and stored whole in the refrigerator until you’re ready to grate or slice them into a salad or sandwich. Radish tops, or a whole radish perched on top, are a colorful addition to salads.
Hope your week is a delicious one.