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

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!

We got another big batch of veggies, a whole lot of green leafy things, but some other surprises as well. There was more bagged and cleaned salad mix, bok choy, scallions, spinach, and radishes we’d seen already. The surprises this week were broccoli, and garlic scapes, as well as oak leaf lettuce. We’ve already used some of the broccoli, and it was amazing. Kind of makes me feel bad for all the store bought broccoli that I’ve been eating up to this point. We cleaned up the veggies, and bagged them all. Welcome to Monday’s for the summer. Feel free to ignore the fact that it’s actually Friday when I’m writing this.

Say that ten times fast! We needed to use up some of our delicious CSA produce this weekend before another delivery monday. So I woke up on Sunday morning hankering for a delicious Fritatta. So I set out to use our brand new frittata pans that were gifted to us for the wedding by Tj’s parents. I sauteed up the chopped garlic in some butter and oil and cubes of kielbasa. When everything had good color, I tossed in a giant bag of fresh spinach. In a bowl, I beat four eggs, and another 3 or 4 egg whites with a couple tablespoons of sour cream and some parmesan cheese. Next, I poured that on top of the pan and cooked over low heat. When the eggs came together, I put on the top pan and flipped over to let cook another couple minutes. This worked perfectly making a fluffy, yet solid, eggy, delicious treat. We served them with English muffins for the perfect breakfast.

As a side note, leftover frittata works well on a salad with tomatoes, olives and light caesar dressing!

I was looking at stuff to make with arugula, and I found a recipe on the Cooking Light website that looked good. Their website is pretty handy, you can search recipes for a few different magazines by ingredient, and other criteria. The sandwich itself was pretty simple: arugula with a light dressing of olive oil / salt / pepper, grilled chicken that had a rosemary / sage / garlic / yogurt rub or marinade, onions, and chopped kalamata olives. The recipe also called for the rosemary / yogurt mixture to be spread on kinda like mayo, but I kinda forgot about it. When I make this again though, I won’t skip that step. I also grilled up some brussel with olive oil, salt and pepper, and they make the crunchy go.

Here’s the link to the actual recipe.

Yesterday was the first day for the delivery of our CSA produce from La Finca, and we were excited as all get out. My co-worker Jeff has been a customer of these guys for a while, and he hooked us up with their information when the sign-ups came out. They had some examples of what we could get from the farm, but it was still basically a mystery box to us. I stopped by Jeff’s on the way home from work, put the check box by my name, and took my box and went home!

Erica and I started digging through our goodies, and we find salad mix, arugula, bok choy, green garlic, radishes, spinach, and red leaf lettuce. As is her nature, she decides to clean and bag everything, so it’ll be ready when we need it. She claims this is not something she learned from Rachel Ray (lies). All the produce looks really good, even though we’re not entirely sure what to do with all of it. A couple taste tests though, and we come up with some good ideas.

The majority of what we got this week was greens, which is understandable, since it’s early in the season. The first thing that we make is a lunch salad, with mixed greens, fake crab, avocado, pine nuts, and sliced radish. This was all Erica’s idea. The salad was delicious though, and I’m looking forward to eating the rest of the goodies we got.