CSA Week 2 :: Strategizing the Box

So we're in week 2 of the Prince George-Norwich Meadows CSA, which at this point has had two major components :: one, a lot of salad greens, and two, a lot of garlic scapes. This has proven useful, as it's given me the chance to make large sums of salsa verde, as done in Tamar Adlers delightful book The Everlasting Meal. In it, she sort of posits the long-run view of looking at both food shopping and cooking; namely, that doing one-off meals ain't the most efficient thing, but making some parts of a meal turn into the next can  be both rewarding and useful. 

This is especially true with the CSA. Since I'm doing a split with a friend, there's never much of the larger items -- like kohlrabi or turnips -- to do anything more substantial than either (a) nosh on them or (b) place them in the context of a larger dish. We did that last week, turning scapes, salad greens, and onion tops into a salsa verde that has graced eggs, toast, and soon to be a marinade; this week has become stew, with garlic greens, scapes, turnips + turnip greens and kale all being put together into a stew that'll last well into the coming weeks.Ultimately, you're asked to look at the box, look at your pantry, see what works, and add a few residuals to make up the difference...or innovate, as the cases calls for. 

I don't mind this kind of batching -- it sort of forces one to both think creatively and plan a little ahead in the cookery category -- as it makes for meals not just for now, but later too. And in a NYC kitchen, sometimes you don't wanna come home and cook, just get something out of the freezer and nuke it. 

The Recipes

Salsa verde is pretty straightfoward, as its simply about taking a lot of green items -- bitter salad greens, cilantro, mint, basil, chiles -- and blending them together with lemon juice (to keep the color) oil (preferably olive oil) and sometimes chile or nuts (which effectively would make it a pesto of sorts), until you have a smooth-ish paste or sauce. A personal favorite is a 3-2-1 method, using those proportions of salad greens, cilantro, and the garlic scapes, mixed with oil until a thick soupy consistency was wrought, and added a small handful of dried chiles de tepin for some kick and sea salt to season. 

The stew came from a a basic method: browning meat (in this case, chuck beef), adding succulents (the garlic stems and onions), waiting till they get translucent, then adding beans (Mackay beans) and their fluid, crushed tomatoes, chiles de arbol, and then all the greens, plus some of my chicken stalk for good measure. Seasoning is along the lines of a huntsman stew, so cinnamon, nutmeg, and black pepper for good measure. It's still bubbling away as we speak.