Two introductions...

At least another two weeks have gone by, which means two additional bags of fresh veggies to experiment with and talk about. The past two batches have each contained one vegetable that we had previously neither eaten nor even heard about, which is always exciting. We have now acquainted ourselves with the purple kohrabi and yellow cucumber.

Week 4's harvest (the kohlrabi are the small purple and whitish bulbous things in the center)

introducing the purple kohlrabi (taste and inside is the same as the white kohlrabi but the bright purple skin is just an added aesthetic bonus)

Many people talked about eating kohlrabi raw with a little salt, but I tried doing that and honestly didn't really like it. Kohlrabi also seemed to pop up in a lot of Indian and curry recipes so I parboiled them and then added them to some green curry, tofu, and other veggies and they were a great addition.

Week 5's harvest (the yellow cucumber is the almost excessively bright round yellow centerpiece between the green peppers [which were really tasty raw] and golden beets)

Other things in the bag were red onions, green cucumbers, and leek.

The lemon cucumber's solo shot

There was also a lot of talk about eating lemon cucumbers raw and unlike with the kohlrabi, I do concur that this cucumber variety is very delicious when eaten raw. It's got all the benefits of a good, crunchy raw green cucumber but with a bit more sweetness and non of the bitterness you can sometimes get from a green cucumber if not lucky.

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Though the spotlight has been on these two new veggies, we did enjoy the rest of the bags' goodies, so to close this post, here's some of what we've made at home in the past couple weeks.

lots of beets..simply roasted for about an hour in a foil covering with some olive oil, salt, pepper, and fresh thyme...nothing else needed.

roasted red onions with a bit of a mustard, lemon juice sauce (based on an Ina Garten recipe) but only using the red onions we got and adding the green spring onion tops

zucchini and chickpea pasta (thanks to a recipe from the August Real Simple magazine Lakshmi was reading on her flight up to visit us)

the steamed green beans from the CSA were merely a side dish in this meal featuring a roasted pork tenderloin with apples, but it was a good one and maybe worth posting

straying from the CSA topic even more, nothing in this tart came from either week's bag but the raspberries were from a local farm so I guess it still fits into the eating local category and it was a tasty tart (though once again I ask, can anything with almost two sticks of butter in it be bad?)