This week’s box includes: Okra, potatoes, apples, cucumbers, summer squash, heirloom tomatoes, turnip greens, eggplant, white sweet potatoes, and muscadines! You can see a photo that can help with identification on our Facebook page or check out our weekly video on Instagram.
Need storage instructions? Visit our fruit & veggie home pages. Click on the pic and a new page opens with storage instructions and a list of recipes curated by Conne Ward Cameron over the years.
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Sweet potatoes! Muscadines! Greens! And a coda of our favorite summer veggies: summer squash, cucumbers, tomatoes. Life is indeed good. Snack on those muscadines straight from the container while you consider your options for this week’s haul. Those sweet potatoes will store for months if you need to prioritize, say okra.
This eggplant recipe arrived in our inbox last week from a subscriber attesting that her toddler *loves* it! I wish Black Pepper Tofu and Eggplant from the Smitten Kitchen had been part of my childhood. Sounds delicious, and is queued up for dinner tonight.
Some of this week’s heirloom tomatoes were on the soft side – use them quickly. If yours at all soft, make use of Conne’s excellent suggestion for preserving okra and tomatoes together: “Stew up a big pot of okra and tomatoes. Now you’ve got something you can freeze and use as a basis for vegetable soup or gumbo. Or to serve all by itself over rice as my family did for all the years I was growing up. Or add cubes of beef or pork or lamb to the thawed okra-tomato mixture and you’ve got a great stew.” Brilliant.
On to the new.
White sweet potatoes are the first sweet potato variety to make an appearance this year. Compared with the more common orange variety, these are drier, more dense and less sweet. Yes, you can substitute them in any sweet potato recipe, but know that since many sweet potato recipes play up to the sweetness of the orange variety, you’re not going to get the same result.
Better yet, play up to white sweet potatoes’ good side. Their density and lower moisture makes for better oven fries, crispier roasted potato chunks, baked or even mashed potatoes since they’re dry enough to mash without turning to mush.
White Sweet Potato Oven Fries
3-4 white sweet potatoes
2 Tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
2 Tablespoon cornstarch
1 1/2 teaspoon paprika
Salt & pepper
Preheat oven to 425 F. Wash sweet potatoes (if necessary), peel if you’d prefer. Cut into fries 1/4” square and however long you’d like them. Toss with cornstarch, oil, paprika, salt and pepper. Spread in a single layer on parchment over a rimmed baking sheet. Bake 15 minutes; flip and bake another 10 minutes until starting to brown. Remove from oven & serve.
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Just like their sweet cousins, the white variety bursts with nutritional value other than the high beta carotene levels that the orange ones boast.
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Enjoy the bounty. It’s week #22 and we’re firing on all cylinders. Only 8 more deliveries on our dance card this year. Can you believe it? Still feels like summer.
~Suzanne