blog of testiclese this is where the shit went down, but before you got here

Can it be summer squash?  It is!  And those are tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, onions, a lone green pepper, cabbage, arugula.  Not easily visible are some great smelling herbs, rosemary and dill, along with a thing of fennel.  We ate one of the tomatoes, it was good.  This is one of the first boxes we’ve gotten where we feel like there’s a majority of vegetables we like to eat, instead of things we had to experiment with, like kohlrabi.

Stir fry broccoli with anything and it’s bound to be delicious.  I wasn’t around for the saucification, but I remember there being bottles with sesame oil, tamari, and hoisin sauce on the counter at some point.  Also included were shrimp, onions, carrots, and beet greens, served next to some exotic red rice.

Apparently we do.   I think there was kale, and some carrots, onions, garlic, and maybe chicken broth reduced down.  There was still a lot to the kale, but it was pretty good.  There’s something wholesome and satisfying to chewing a vegetable for a while, and getting flavor the whole time.  The same does not apply to steak.

Some real nice looking vegetables this time, carrots, zucchini, broccoli, beets, onions, kale, raddiccio, and some lamb’s quarters, which is apparently a weed that got thrown in for fun.  We ended up using it in a banana / mango smoothie, and it was pretty potent.  When I say potent I mean it tasted like grass.  It was the first time I actually followed a recipe though, and the consistency was near perfect as far as smoothies go.  We also got some really nice raspberries, super juicy.

Easy steak salad, with some leftover steak from Erica’s parents house on Sunday.  Topped with a corn and tomato and green onion salsa / dressing, along with olive oil.  Very delicious!

Monday means more vegetables, and we got some fun surprises this week.  More delicious strawberries, the best I’ve ever had.  More awesome broccoli, green onions.  There’s more turnips that we don’t know what to do with yet, as well as kohlrabi, which neither of us have even tried.  We’ll see how it goes.

Salad for lunch, real simple, real good.  Spinach, figs, walnuts, and some amazing bleu cheese from Trader Joe’s.  I think the figs are also from Trader Joe’s.  The salad was (eventually) topped with a balsamic vinaigrette.

These first couple weeks from the CSA we’ve gotten a LOT of greens. This is a good thing, cus they rock all kinds of good fiber and nutrients, and that’s something my body needs anyway. The problem is, there’s two of us, and so much greens, we’d have to eat salads for every meal to make it all the way through the stuff, and that’s just not going to happen. Jeff said that they make ‘green smoothies’ — and I’d seen them at the store as well, Naked brands whozits, green goop in a plastic container. I looked online for some recipes, and they seemed pretty simple, whatever type of green you have, some fruit, a little bit of whatever, and whatever else you feel like. I took a banana, and some strawberries, it seemed like a good start to trying out a green smoothie. There weren’t that many strawberries at the end, though I did add a couple more after the picture. One banana, for the whole thing, and it still really came through. I added a whole crapload of lettuce, what you can see in the picture, pushed in, and then do that two more times. There is a whole ton of lettuce in there.

For as much lettuce as I put in there, it really blends down.  This was all I got out of a big bag of the stuff.   All in all, it was really tasty, though I could have used a spoon, as it’s pretty thick.  One thing I would like to try is adding some fresh coconut, for some creaminess, which I saw on one of the recipes online.

Funny story, Erica and I were talking about what to make with the broccoli, and I remembered I had previously made this broccoli / squash / black bean sauce type thingy, and the flavors worked really well together. The ideas kept coming, and we worked out a plan for broccoli and bean enchiladas. This eventually evolved into enchilasagna, due to the fact that our corn tortillas were pretty small, and rolling them all up would have been a serious pain. The day of, Erica found a recipe online, with the same basic principles involved, so our fate was set.

The broccoli, carrots, and onions got cooked up a little first, and seasoned with chipotle powder, garlic, a little oregano, and a little “Slap yo mama” powder from New Orleans. We would have used cumin normally, but it turns out we’re fresh out of the stuff. Then we put in the beans, some black, and some pinto, because that’s what we had. One can of each, and we had what we needed.
We put the enchilasagna together in layers, corn tortillas cut into quarters to lay better, on top of that went our veggie mixture, to which we added a little green salsa. On top of that went some cheese, and repeated the process once more until we ran out. On the top went more tortillas, topped with green salsa and more cheese.

It baked for maybe twenty minutes to half an hour, I think at 425. The cheese was melty, the tortillas were crunchy, and the enchilasagna was delicious. Together with a simple green salad, it was a fantastic dinner. Even the next day, for lunch, the veggie mixture melded together a little more, and was still great. The only thing we both would have changed, was make the broccoli a little bigger; it faded into the mixture a bit, and this broccoli was so good, it should have been able to stand out and shine. We also would have added more of the green salsa to the veggies, to keep them from getting dry.

Dinner on Monday, was a bean / bok choy soup. The soup has pink beans, spinach, bok choy, and turkey kielbasa. I only supervised the cooking of this, so I don’t recall exactly went into it. It was really hearty though, we ate it with some light sour cream, and tortillas. Fun fact, there was a little bit of soup left, but not enough for a lunch, so I rolled it up in a tortilla and made a bean soup burrito. Go Burrito!