I am Finding it Very Difficult to Keep Myself from Making a Presto/Pesto Joke Here, So Instead I Will Give this Post an Unnecessarily Long Title

Is your refrigerator overflowing with greens? Big greens, small greens, curly greens, flat greens? Are you starting to wonder whether it's even possible for a person to eat this many greens? There is a solution for your problem! You can make your greens tasty all through the long CSA-less winter! PESTO IS YOUR FRIEND!

Now I know there are some skeptics out there who are thinking "Pesto? That stuff is made out of basil. I have plenty of good ways to use basil." Not so, my friend! All your lovely leafy greens can be mushed and crushed and grinded into a tasty paste! Today I used arugula and kale with walnuts, but let your imagination go wild combining greens and nuts and cheeses! Pesto making is not by any means an exact science, but somebody asked me for a recipe for this stuff so I'm going to do my best to tell you exactly what I did.

Start by peeling garlic - I used about half of a large head. Toss it in your food processor with a big pinch of red pepper flakes and a teaspoon of salt, and give it a quick pulse. When the garlic is in nice little pieces, throw in your nuts - I used about two big handfuls of walnuts. Depending on the greens you're using, you might choose the traditional pine nuts, walnuts, cashews, almonds, pistachios, or even sunflower seeds. Grind it all into a thick, nutty garlic paste. Mmmmmmmm.

And now in go the greens! I used three bundles of kale, stemmed and coarsely chopped, and a small bundle of arugula. I used to think that the tougher greens like kale needed to be cooked before putting them into pesto, but it's not true! Works just fine raw. Put a handful or two at a time into your food processor and pack it down. 

Sometimes you might need to scoop up a bunch of the already-pureed stuff and put it on top of your greens to get the kale down where the blades will find 'em and chop 'em. Keep adding greens and pulsing until it's a uniform paste, and then grate some tasty parmesan cheese and add that in too - I used about 1/4 cup. Now turn your food processor on low and slowly pour in olive oil until you reach the consistency you want.

Now you have a whole lot of pesto! Before the summer's over you'll probably have a whole lot more, and that's AWESOME! Don't just put it on your pasta - smear it on your sandwiches, spead it on your pizzas, stir it into your soups and grain salads, or do what I did tonight and just throw a little onto some fresh sauteed veggies for a quick and easy meal. You cannot go wrong with fresh corn, crisp green beans, and some delicious fresh pesto.

But even with all those way to use pesto, you'll probably have some left over. Lucky for us all, pesto freezes beautifully and can last you all winter! Freeze it in ice cube trays to make little pesto bricks that are perfect for two servings of pasta, and enjoy all winter long!

The end of last year's pesto.

And today's fresh batch!

Having a Plan

The only way to make it through these summer months with their piles and piles of vegetables is to have a plan. For me, the weeks that end with sad unused veggies in the trash are almost always the weeks that I didn't sit down the day I picked up my vegetables to figure out exactly what I was going to cook.

Every week before I hop on the bus to JP to pick up my CSA box I do a quick inventory of what's left in my refrigerator. This week it was a bundle of kale, a couple of cucumbers, and some beets. Pulling all those veggies out of the fridge is also a great time to do a little cleaning - if you clean out all those little vegetable bits and wipe the condensation off of your vegetable drawers regularly, your vegetables will stay happy and fresh longer!

Once I get home with my vegetable haul the real planning starts. This week my box was full of blueberries, peaches, kale, cucumbers, summer squash, red leaf lettuce, mesclun mix, beets, green beans, potatoes, arugula, and corn. Yum!

I try to start my weekly menu planning by prioritizing any leftover veggies from the previous week - get those out of the way quick! Then I choose a few recipes for large meals that will leave leftovers for lunch, decide what will be prepped to store for the winter, and leave a few things out for quick meals, snacking, and salads. This week I knew I wanted to make some easily freezable kale and arugula pesto, and I also decided to roast and freeze my growing pile of beets. And it's going to be another hot one, so a nice big jug of lemon cucumber water in the fridge will be welcome. So that takes care of last week's leftovers plus a little bit of this week's pile. And there are some things that obviously go into the salads and snacking piles - peaches, berries, lettuce, and mesclun mix, I'm looking at you! 

Washed and ready to go in my tummy!

Washing your lettuce right away, drying out your salad spinner and lining it with paper towels, and just throwing the whole thing full of greens into the fridge is a great way to keep your salad greens fresh and make it easy to put together a quick salad anytime. Anything like this that you can prep at the beginning of the week is one less thing you'll have to worry about later!

I know that I'll have NO PROBLEM coming up with quick and easy meals for the corn and green beans, so I decided to do my meal planning with the summer squash, potatoes, and the alarming large pile of cucumbers. There are a couple of things to keep in mind while you plan your meals - your grocery shopping and your cooking methods. Since I already know that I'll be turning on the oven to roast some beets, I might consider a recipe that needs some roasted vegetables - might as well get plenty of use out of that hot oven and hopefully only have to turn it on once this week. And since I know I'll be buying walnuts for the kale and arugula pesto, I might consider other recipes that will use walnuts. 

I settled on a couple of tasty looking grilled summer pizzas and a lemony, minty bulgur salad with lots of cucumbers in it. And since I've got it all planned out, hopefully I'll just need one trip to the grocery store and just a few solid cooking nights to get me through the week. Now lets see how much of this plan actually gets done before the next pile of veggies shows up next Saturday. Wish me luck!

Grain Salaaaaaad!

All summer long I'm chewing on piles and piles of grain salad. They're the perfect summertime meal - no oven necessary, quick and easy, good served cold - and that's part of why they're one of my favorite ways to use up those CSA veggies. They're also healthy and super versatile - eat 'em up hot or cold, mix in leftovers, pour different dressings over them - a grain salad doesn't have to feel boring by the end of the week. And they're great for potlucks - this one came with me to a house concert in my friend Khrysti's backyard.

Whenever I'm getting to the end of the week I take a look around at my vegetable leftovers, and usually they can be pulled together into something new. Maybe they can go into a frittata or an omelet, maybe they would be great tossed with some pasta or cooked onto a pizza, maybe they would make a good centerpiece for a leafy green salad. But usually the first thing I think to do is to throw them in a bowl with some yummy whole grains. I try to stop by a local co-op every few weeks during the summer to stock up on bags of bulgur, barley, kasha, quinoa, or wheat berries so that there are always some good choices in my cupboard  ready to be mixed up with my CSA veggies.

This week when I looked around my fridge I found a couple of already-roasted beets left over from a meal, a little pile of sauteed green beans left from a different meal, and a couple of nice fat little cucumbers. Chopped 'em all up and threw 'em in a big bowl.

In my cupboard there was a bag of quinoa that I cooked up with a little salt, tossed in there with the veggies, and mixed together. The beets made the whole thing turn a pretty pink color, especially after a night in the fridge. For a dressing I mixed together some apple cider vinegar, lime juice, olive oil, and plenty of chopped garlic. And done! So easy, super filling, and a great way to use whatever's left in your fridge.

Picked up another big box of veggies this afternoon - here's a peek at what will go into my meals next week! Tomorrow I'll let you know how I prep my fridge, get my veggies ready once they've arrived, and make a plan of attack so that all the fruit and vegetable goodness will find a good home in my freezer or my belly before they go bad.

My Mediocre Meals

There are kitchen days when all the recipes just turn out right and it feels like everything my whisk touches turns to gold. Then there are days like Sunday. Sunday was a kitchen day where everything my whisk touched turned to "meh."

I started the day turning some of my beautiful CSA blueberries into a batch of vegan blueberry muffins for a picnic brunch with friends.  And since I was all out of egg replacer after last week's glorious chocolate beet cake, I looked to the internet for a new vegan muffin recipe. I found this one, which uses the reaction between baking soda and vinegar to get the muffins to rise and turn nice and fluffy. Sadly, even after almost half an hour of extra cooking time my muffins were still a little soggy in the middle and did not rise properly. The taste was good, but the texture just wasn't cutting it. Luckily, everything is better when it's served (and chopped to pieces!) by an adorable baby.

After a lovely brunch with some mediocre muffins, I came home to make something tasty and full of veggies that could come to work for lunches all week. Ah, I said, a cheesy baked thing with layers of polenta and chard! That sounds perfect! I decided to double the chard and add in some zucchini, and things seemed to be off to a nice start.

But sadly, even with extra veggies and the addition of some herbs and extra garlic and red pepper flakes, it turned out kind of bland and very mushy, with a layer of mozzarella on the top that was so tough I could barely chew through it. Also unattractive!

Seriously, this was the best picture I could get of this pile of mush. Pretty it's not!

But I had a plan to salvage something out of this unfulfilling day in the kitchen. Monday night I cooked up a good, quick standby - chicken sausage and green beans sauteed together with plenty of garlic and a little salt. It would be hard to mess this up!

I made sure there were plenty of leftovers, and I mixed them into that mushy polenta mess. Sausage fat and garlic added a punch of flavor, and between the chewy sausage and the crunchy green beans my meal now had some texture! I think I can stomach eating it for a few more days so I don't have to feel guilty about wasting food, hooray! I hope your kitchen time has been tastier than mine, and I hope I'll have something more pleasant to share soon.

Keeping it Simple

Now anyone who knows me will tell you that while I love me some veggies, the one green thing that I absolutely will not touch is the dreaded pea. I find them so texturally offensive that I will open up samosas, pick the peas out one by one, and put the samosa back together again before I eat. Peas are mushy, unpleasant little creatures and I will not abide them in my meals.

EXCEPT! When they are beautiful fresh peas that have just been popped out of their pod. Fresh peas taste NOTHING LIKE those horrible mushy little bombs of unpleasantness that come out of freezers and cans everywhere! They're crisp and sweet and deserve to be at the very center of your meal! I love to see peas - shell or sugar snap - in my CSA box.

There's nothing like a few good, fresh ingredients put together in a way that lets the flavor of your tasty farm-fresh veggies come through, and good peas are perfect for meals that keep it simple. Two weeks ago my box had a big bag of delicious sugar snap peas, and I just sauteed those suckers in a little garlic and butter and then ate them like they were candy. This past week it was shell peas - yum! I looked around my cupboards and pulled together a handful of ingredients - peas, butter, couscous, and pinches of salt and saffron. And in fifteen minutes (not counting pea-shelling time!) the peas were lightly sauteed in butter and stirred into some saffron couscous, and I was happily opening a summer ale and starting my dinner. Couldn't be easier or more refreshing.

Now I have to figure out what to do with all of THIS!

Vegetable Magic!

I can do magic. Don't believe me? With a wave of my spatula I can turn these:

Into <poof> THIS!

That, my friends, is a chocolate beet cake. Yes, it tastes like chocolate and tastiness. Yes, it is full of roasted beets. Try it, you'll like it! I used this recipe from Joy the Baker, with a few changes for veganization. The beets make your cake seriously moist, with the added benefit of turning your hands a color that will make you mutter Lady Macbeth quotes under your breath!

"What, will these hands ne'er be clean?"

Mixing the beets into the batter - and later into the frosting - is the second most fun part. Nature's Red Dye Number 2!

But without question the most fun is making your friends guess what's in their slice of cake. They'll never get it! They're too busy making noises about how delicious it is!

And while these may not be magic, they are simple and delicious:

Some tasty CSA green beans, a little curry powder, some slivered almonds. You could toss this over some rice or some nice whole grains. But if you're like me you'll be too lazy and will just stuff them into your mouth. Don't worry, I won't tell.

Loooong Day Dinner

Let's say that it's Monday night. Let's say that it's the kind of Monday night that makes you wonder if there's any way to make it through the rest of the week that doesn't involve hard drugs or playing hooky. Let's say that it's the kind of Monday night when the thought of working hard for a meal is the WORST THING YOU CAN THINK OF, and when a salad for dinner is definitely not going to cut it.  Take a deep breath, open a beer, chop up some bacon and toss it in a pan. The bacon, not the beer. You are drinking the beer. Ahhhhh. Aren't you feeling better already?

This is one of my go-to-lazy-night-but-gotta-use-some-of-those-CSA-veggies meals. Leave a little bit of the bacon grease in your pan and throw in a sliced onion. Let that sucker simmer along with some red pepper flakes, whatever herbs you're feeling, and enough garlic to make your house smell like heaven. And while it simmers, start up a big pot of pasta. When your onion is beautiful and caramelized and making your mouth water, toss in a nice big pile of chopped greens. Chard is my favorite, but half of your CSA can probably go in here - kale, beet greens, spinach, collards! After your greens wilt, pour in a tablespoon or two or balsamic vinegar and however much salt and pepper you need, and let the whole thing simmer for a few more minutes.

Toss your pasta with some olive oil and then dump it into your pot of greens. Throw in those crumbly bits of bacon and give it a stir. Grate a boatload of parmesan on top. 

Ahhhhh. You're going to make it through the week after all.