What’s In The Box with Recipe Suggestions
Green and/or Yellow Beans: Fresh beans are kind of like fresh new potatoes; the flavor just can’t be beat! Fresh green beans are delicious when lightly steamed, sautéed or roasted with just a little oil, salt, pepper and garlic.
Green Beans and Cucumbers with Miso Dressing
Sautéed Green Beans with Garlic
Green Top Chioggia or Gold Beets: Eat the whole vegetable—roots, stems and leaves! Beet greens are rich in vitamins and minerals. Eat them raw, cooked or blended into a smoothie. When cooking the root, it’s best to cook them whole, unpeeled. Once cooked, cool enough to handle and then rub off the skin.
15 Creative Ways to Use Beet Greens
One-Pan Baked Brie & Beet Greens Frittata
Red Lentil Soup with Beet Greens
Broccoli: Consider preserving a portion of your box for later use. Frozen broccoli is a nice treat to have during the winter when local green vegetables are limited. Simply blanch the broccoli (stem and florets) in salted, boiling water, then shock it in cold water to stop the cooking. Drain off excess water and pack it in freezer bags to pop in the freezer.
Broccoli and Ricotta Toasts with Hot Honey
Roasted & Charred Broccoli with Peanuts
Sweetheart Cabbage: This is a salad cabbage with a pointy head. This cabbage is well-suited for eating raw, but it may also be cooked. Use it as the base for a main dish salad.
Vinegar Slaw with Cucumbers and Dill
White Cauliflower: Roasted cauliflower is one of our favorite ways to prepare this vegetable. Cut the head into equal sized florets and toss with oil, salt and pepper.
Cauliflower, Chickpea and Chard Curry
Rainbow Chard: Chard is a nutrient packed green that is actually in the beet family. It’s high in vitamin K as well as antioxidants and a whole host of other vitamins and minerals. It is a great green to eat raw or cooked in the heat of the summer when lettuce and other salad greens are less available.
Green Curry with Brown Rice Noodles & Swiss Chard
Swiss Chard & Lentil Soup with Herbed Kohlrabi Yogurt
Green and/or Silver Slicer Cucumbers: Not sure what to do with cucumbers? Did you know you can cook cucumbers? Check out the recipes below!
Fresh Garlic: This garlic was dug early this week….so it’s truly fresh! You’ll find the skins to be a bit more tough to peel back from the clove because they haven’t dried down yet. The cloves however are plump, juicy and have a bright, fresh flavor! Store your garlic at room temperature in a dry environment until you’re ready to use it.
Pan Baked Brie & Beet Greens Frittata
Red Lentil Soup with Beet Greens
Sierra Blanca Onions: This variety is a mild, early onion meant for fresh eating as opposed to long term storage. They don’t form thick skins, so we like to deliver them freshly harvested. Slice them thinly and use them raw in salads and on sandwiches.
Purple or Green Scallions: We are nearly done harvesting both of these varieties. Both are mild enough to eat raw, but flavorful enough to cook them as well. Use the green portion of the leaves as well.
Cauliflower, Chickpea and Chard Curry
One-Pan Baked Brie & Beet Greens Frittata
Green and/or Italian and/or Yellow Scallopini Squash: Zucchini season won’t last forever, so make it count while we have it!
Grilled Cheese with Zucchini, Basil & Gruyere
Vegetable Feature: Green & Yellow Beans
Green beans (or haricots verts, if you want to be French about it), is a term that applies to several varieties of beans that are eaten fresh in the pod while the beans are still young and tender. Other varieties of beans may be shelled and eaten fresh, (such as lima beans), or dried. Beans are native to the Americas, but once they made the trip across the sea to Europe, they became popular in the cuisine of many counties, particularly Italy and France.
Green beans are actually just immature beans, which means both the pod and seeds are tender enough to eat. Although I say “green” bean, there are actually other colors of beans, such as yellow and purple. Beans are a crop that prefer warm weather for growing. There are many different varieties of beans, which allow us to select the varieties we want to best suit our growing conditions and needs. Did you know that bean seeds come in different colors from black to brown to white? The green and yellow beans in your box this week were grown from a black seed variety. Richard chose this bean for the first planting because it will germinate in cold, wet soil. Not knowing exactly what kind of weather you might get in the spring, you always plan for the extremes.
Tender, young beans are well-suited to light cooking techniques such as sautéing or steaming. Beans higher in starch or fiber require longer cooking times and more moisture to achieve tenderness. These beans are great in soups, stews, and casseroles.
Green beans are quick and easy to prep; simply trim off the extreme ends of each bean and cut to manageable-sized pieces (generally about 2”, depending on your recipe). Beans store well in a plastic bag in the refrigerator for a week or longer as long as they are kept dry; moisture in the bag will cause them to turn slimy.
Short & Sweet Weekly Farm Update
A brief update on our Food Safety inspection, so far, so good. Our inspector is more of a teacher and has a great deal of information and ideas for us to implement. We are working on some new written plans that he would like to see in place. Mellissa and Richard will be working on that in the coming days!
Richard is checking the weather regularly and is ready to pull the rest of the garlic out of the field any day now. The field is dry enough now, but the garlic is still growing a little more so we are waiting! The sweet corn has ears and is starting to tassel, so we could see them in a couple more weeks. On top of that, the eggplant could be ready as early as next week. And we will be digging the new potatoes and possibly carrots next week too! We are certainly staying busy. I foresee full CSA boxes in all of our futures!!
4 Responses
excited for some green beans this week! However, i cant access the bon appetite recipes since that is paywalled. Any other way to access these?
Josh, thank you for pointing that out. I will email you a screenshot of that Green Beans and Cucumbers With Miso Dressing recipe!
me too please! Was drawn to make that same recipe. Thank you, Kelly.
Absolutely Marnie, I will email that shortly!