weekly delivery 09/30

In this week's box:

1 melon

1 bunch red grapes

1 small bunch red leaf lettuce

6 gala apples

1 bunch red chard

3 red beets

6 Yukon gold potatoes

1 bunch green beans

2 kabocha squash

4 heirloom tomatoes

6 peppers

Capay on NPR

Check it out: Our CSA farm, Capay Organics, was featured on NPR today!

chard and chickpea burgers with quick pickled veggies

Ingredients:
Burgers:

1 bunch chard, roughly chopped

1 can chick peas, drained

1/2 cup all purpose flour, possibly more

1 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
4 Tbsp canola oil (or less, your choice- it won't really make a difference in frying texture, only time)

Pickled Veggies

2 beets, peeled, and thinly sliced

2 cucumber, thinly sliced

1 onion, peeled and thinly sliced
2 cups hot water, not boiling
1 cup apple cider vinegar
1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp salt

For the veggies: Put the onions and cucumbers into one bowl, and the beets into another... unless you want them all pink, then hell, just use one bowl, do less dishes. Mix the sugar and salt into the hot water, then add the vinegar, and set aside to cool. When the pickling liquid has cooled, add the liquid to the veggies, just enough to cover them, and then cover the bowls and place them in the fridge.


For the burgers:
Put all ingredients (minus the oil) in a food processor or bender and blend until incorporated. Seasonally, you made need more or less flour depending on your greens, or you could even substitute gluten free flours if you so choose. When it looks like its ready to be pattied, wet your hands and get ready to rock. Put 3 Tbsp of oil into a sauce pan and add the pattied burgers, flipping after 2 minutes on each side. Put on your favorite buns, top with pickled veggies and some Wildwood Garlic Aioli, or Veganaise and some greens. Eat them up!

honeydew sorbet

Got melons piling up? Yeah, so do we. I had an idea to make a melon sorbet with the honeydew but we don't have an ice cream maker. Wait a minute, ice cream has been around way longer than ice cream makers! Well, thanks to David Lebovitz, I learned how to make sorbet and ice cream with an immersion blender!

I also used this recipe from Better Homes and Gardens as a guide.

Ingredients:

2 honeydew melons, rinds removed and cut roughly into cubes

juice from 1 orange

1/4 cup cane sugar

1/2 water

Boil the water in a small pot and stir in the sugar until it dissolves. Set aside to chill. Use a blender or food processor to finely puree the honeydew. You made need to work in batches. The orange juice will help liquify the honeydew but won't alter the taste of the sorbet. When your melon is uniformly pureed, add the sugar syrup and pulse. Pour the mixture into a large glass baking dish. Freeze for 3 hours, until the mixture has begun to freeze around the edges. Take the dish out for the freezer and dump the mixture into a bowl and beat with an immersion blender for just a minute. You just want to break up the frozen bits, without melting the whole thing all over again. Return to the dish and freeze again. If you want very fine grained sorbet, you can repeat this process of freezing and beating once or twice more. When you are happy with the consistency, freeze overnight. Remove the dish from the freezer and allow to sit at room temperature for 10 minutes before serving.

weekly delivery 09/23

Here's what we got from our CSA this week:

1 head red leaf lettuce
1 head romaine lettuce
2 bunches black seedless grapes

3 red beets

2 huge! red onions

1 gala melon

1 cucumber

5 sweet peppers

1 bunch rainbow chard

8 heirloom tomatoes
1 pint cherry tomatoes

potato leek soup

We've made a couple of potato soups at this point. Last year, we made a vegan sweet potato soup; and in January, Kenny reinvented an old family recipe with vegan cream of potato and chard soup. But ya know what? We're not sick of 'em yet! This one's for the omnivores!

Ingredients:

5 slices of bacon (Fatted Calf!), roughly chopped

1 lb potatoes, peeled and sliced

2 leeks, white and green parts only, thinly sliced

1 cup milk (Want to use cream? go for it!)

1/2 lb frozen petite peas

4 cups vegetable stock
salt, pepper to taste

Add the potatoes to a large pot of boiling, salted water, and cook until fork tender. Strain and set aside. In the same pot, over medium heat, add the bacon and cook until all the fat is rendered out and the bacon is crispy. Remove bacon with a slotted spoon and set aside for later on a paper towel. Fight the urge to eat the bacon. Saute the leeks in the bacon fat until translucent, about 5-6 minutes. OK, eat a piece or two of the bacon. Add the potatoes, vegetable stock, and some salt and pepper to taste. Cover and cook until simmering. When the soup is hot, blend ingredients together with an immersion blender, and once smooth, slowly add the milk or cream while still blending, until incorporated. When the soup is creamy and delicious, add the peas and continue to cook for 3 minutes. Taste and season again, and then top with the reserved bacon, and serve with some crusty bread.

vegan lasagna feat. Daiya

Ingredients:
no boil lasagna noodles
4 or 5 decently sized heirloom tomatoes (about 1-1/4 lb total)
3 cloves garlic
2 Tbsp olive oil
4 peppers, small dice
1-1/2 blocks extra firm tofu
juice from 3 lemons
1 bunch chard, leaves roughly torn
1/2 lb Daiya vegan cheese
salt and pepper to taste


We are going to start by a making a super fast sauce. Just add the tomatoes and garlic into your food processor, season with salt and pepper and blend while drizzling olive oil in until the sauce is finely pureed. Add this to a pot and cook on medium heat until the sauce reduces to about half it's volume, about 30 minutes. To make the tofu ricotta, add the tofu, lemon juice and chard leaves to the food processor and blend until smooth, seasoning with salt and pepper. To assemble to lasagna, spoon some sauce on to the bottom of a casserole dish, then add a layer of lasagna noodles, next spoon on some of the ricotta, then more noodles, a layer of peppers & cheese, and so forth until you've used everything up! Bake at 350 degrees, covered with tin foil, for about 1 hour and 15 minutes, removing the foil for the last 15 minutes so that the cheese on top gets nice and melty!*

* I usually find vegan cheeses repulsive. The many different textures and off-putting flavors I have experienced over the years have jaded me, and made me never want to stick anything labeled "vegan cheese" anywhere near my eating hole. But then @vegansaurus couldn't stop raving about Daiya, and we dig them, so I figured I would give it one more go around and hope not to have to hold my nose to get through dinner. To my astonishment, it's good! It melts! Wait- did you hear me? IT MELTS!!! Not the kind of melt that firms back up in 30 seconds after it loses all its moisture and turns into plastic either. It freaking melts for real and stays melted. And it tastes pretty good too! Is it cheese? No. Is it the best vegan cheese I have ever had after eating them for 13 years? DAMN STRAIGHT. So get down to Rainbow, look past the $9.99/lb. because really, it's not that expensive, and if you're vegan, it's well worth it. I want to try the cheddar flavor so I can make grilled cheese!