CSA 23 and 24.... Spot the differences

Here are our last two CSA boxes... very similar boxes, which is why part of the title is spot the differences.

The challenge is to spot the three items in each picture that are not in the other picture.

Try it!....

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The items that are present in both are: Swiss chard, oranges, celery, green onions, green beans zucchini, and lettuce.

In the top picture (i.e. CSA 23) we received dandelion greens, cilantro, and rosemary.

In the bottom picture (i.e. CSA 24) we received apples (so good!), sprouts, and feijoa (the oval green things in the back that I identified by searching "oval green fruit").

I'm having trouble remembering exactly what we ate last week... but I know I used some of the vegetables last week in a shrimp stirfry, and in a pumpkin stew. The swiss chard was used in the sausage, tomato, pasta, swiss chard recipe that I have made before many times.

This week we have another pumpkin dish coming up, green beans will be used in a chicken salad, and I plan on attempting zucchini bread as something different with the zucchini.

When I think of fall dishes/ October/November dishes, I always think of pumpkins!


So last week I made a pumpkin dish (really good, everyone that saw the leftovers in my lunch during the week wanted a copy of the recipe) and I also went to Starbucks one day, and got a Pumpkin Spice Latte, a piece of Pumpkin bread, and a pumpkin muffin! Did I mention I enjoy pumpkin?

Blake enjoyed the pumpkin seeds last week enough that he asked if we could have more pumpkin dishes, and I was more than happy to comply.

In other news, we got our chest freezer for our bison! Two weeks from today we are picking up half a bison worth of meat and need a place to store it! We looked at Best Buy, but they didn't have any in the size we wanted, and the next size up was more than we wanted to spend.

So we kept looking, and ended up at the Sears Outlet. They had a model almost identical to the bigger, more expensive one at Best Buy, but a hundred dollars cheaper. It has cosmetic damage... but what do we care about the looks of our freezer in the garage?

Csa 22

So... we get the next box Wednesday... in two days... and I am just now talking about last week lol.

However, the benefit of taking this long to post is that I know more about what happened with the food and my commentary on it.

The zucchini and the green beans went into the Emerald Green Risotto I talked about before, and is a great go to recipe for almost any green vegetables that come (snap peas, asparagus, broccoli etc. all good in it).

The black eyed peas (two bags of them this week) went into Texas Caviar which was SO good, Blake and I ate way more of it than we intended. It sounded good in the recipe... tasted better!

The dandelion greens (hard to see in this picture, one of the greens in the top right corner) joined an onion, bacon, and molasses as a baked potato topping. We combined this with a side salad that featured a purple heirloom tomato from our garden (a plant that is still doing great well into Oct. now!). This dinner sounded great, smelled better than it sounded and tasted as good as it smelled!

Tomorrow we are going to have a soup with the swiss chard and sorrel (which worked out great because in this rainy gloomy weather now soup sounds great!)

That leaves a little lettuce, which always disappears, and the oranges which I am pretty sure are already eaten or will be soon.

Maybe I'll keep waiting to post my box until I can add commentary to what delicious dishes we cooked up this week.

When life gets busy... you fit things where you can: CSA 20 and 21

CSA 20


Its sad to me that I didn't even feel like there was time for me to blog last week about my little CSA box. It doesn't take THAT long to do... But its not that I didn't have free time in there... I just had different priorities with it... like spending many hours this weekend reading a novel. Time well spent... but not on this blog. Oh well... better late than never.

Last week's box was somewhat light and unexciting. Swiss chard, which we enjoy, but have had a lot lately. Tomatoes, lettuce, sprouts, cilantro and oranges, same thing, they taste good, we are happy to have them, but not that exciting. Cantaloupe, Blake loves, but I don't really enjoy any melon, and the one I like the best is watermelon, so I didn't really care about it.

The swiss chard went really well into a tomato/ swiss chard saute, and the carrots and tomatoes were combined with chicken and chickpeas (and a few other things) for a Moroccan chicken stew.

I think the point is that last week's box was so terribly unexciting, I didn't feel like it was worth a precious chunk of my time to write about... but it can be a part of this week's post... which is an AWESOME box!



This week had all kinds of exciting (i.e. new, different, unusual) items!

But first, the standards- lettuce, tomatoes, oranges, sprouts (although, noteworthy that these sprouts were broccoli sprouts which Blake likes as opposed to the radish ones which our pet worms eat).

Somewhat less than standard, delicious and tasty but not the "featured items" - swiss chard, green beans, and zucchini.

We got sorrel again this week, which is great! If you have never tried it, I wholeheartedly recommend it! It tastes like lemon... seriously! I would never guess it to look at it, but its lemon spinachy tasting. Very nice in salads and sauteed, and actually I made a nice salad dressing with it too.

Only once before in our box have we gotten passionfruit (those are the 4 wrinkly red things in the front), and we were so excited to see that not only did we get it again.. but we got 4 this week! Yay, so good!

AND we got two totally new things this week! We got black eyed peas (we have to shell the dried out green bean looking things in the back) and dandelion greens! So I'll get to try those.

Fabulous, big, full week. I am excited to plan with it.

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On a totally different note, I wanted to talk about coffee. I LOVE coffee. (Although Blake chides me because I like cream and the sugary Starbucks drinks and says I don't really like coffee if I have to have it one of those ways... anyways...)

I didn't grow up liking coffee, neither of my parents really drink it. My mom would rather have a soda in the morning if she HAD to have caffeine for some reason and my dad drinks a few sips in the morning to wake up... not coffee drinkers.

Then in high school, there was a coffee shop that we went to for study hall (long story) and I got introduced to the world of coffee with a vanilla frappuccino (I know... not really coffee lol). Then I tried a sip of my friend's mocha, and I started having frozen mochas frequently at many places. From there I started having hot mochas at places like Starbucks (and still my favorite, regular drink is a non-fat white chocolate mocha, no whip cream at Starbucks... and they know it... and me... by name... every time I come... its bad... lol).

I still remember when I first had a "regular" (home brewed with cream and sugar) coffee. I had slept over at my friend Erin's house, and her sister Heather offered to make me a coffee with cream and sugar since I had never had it, and I enjoyed it.

When I first started brewing my own coffee at home, I was a total Starbucks snob... only their coffee was good enough. Then I got practical, and started trying cheaper brands, and would buy any coffee that tasted good that was relatively inexpensive.

Fast forward to when Blake and I started shopping at Sprouts. We would always buy from their bulk section. Especially it was on sale. That is... till we watched Food, Inc. (it seriously impacted us). So then we started shopping their organic section. Good stuff... but expensive. We also bought one pound from the San Diego Zoo when we went there because some of it goes to the animals, as well as being organic and free trade.

That got me thinking about this awesome website- Greater Good Network. It is a store with many great items, but every purchase ALSO goes to help something as well. The link above is the rainforest store, where each portion helps a certain amount of feet of the rainforest, but if you change the tab at the top of the page, the store will be the same, but will have a portion that gives cups of food, mammograms to women in need, healthcare for kids in need, books to kids, or food to animals in the shelters.

I looked, and sure enough they sell organic coffee, so I ordered a bunch. Check it out for gifts this Christmas, or birthday presents, or your coffee needs etc. because you will buy stuff anyways... why not have it do some extra good?

CSA 19 and illness

I have an excuse for the extreme delay in this post... I got sick :-/

We got swiss chard, sorrel, lettuce, tomatoes (lots of them!), cantaloupe, cilantro, limes, carrots and oranges.

Three of the ingredients were put into an amazing enchilada casserole (limes, cilantro, tomatoes) with some of our fresh peppers from our garden (which as a side note is still doing great and giving us lots of produce).

The swiss chard and sorrel were put into a pasta and sausage dish (which also used some more tomatoes, and onions, it was great, but I accidentally used the spicy chicken broth from our freezer, and it turned out quite spicy between that and it being a hot Italian sausage anyways).

I can't remember where the lettuce disappeared to... a salad? The cantaloupe was eaten by Blake (although I eat tons of different stuff, I have never been a big fan of any melon), and he said it was amazing. The oranges are mostly eaten with lunch or dinner, although one of them joined the carrots, and some of our habaneros from our garden to make a hot sauce tonight. It was joining a taco salad.

But yeah... I would have said this earlier, but Wednesday night got busy. No big deal, I could do it Thursday... but I came down with a really bad headache... little did I know it was just scratching the surface of what was to come. I wrote it off as just a one night thing. Well, the next morning, it was still lingering... again, I didn't think too much of it, and I worked through it. Friday night was game night at our house, and I wasn't about to cancel it for a little remnant of a headache... and a slight sore throat tickle thing... right?

So we have game night, lots of fun, and Saturday morning... it hits... full force. Still have somewhat of a headache, but now I have a throat that is killing me, I am coughing and my nose is running... fabulous. I spend the majority of Saturday sitting on the couch, watching movies or reading, when I am not resting. I miss a family gathering Saturday night. Sunday, I felt just as bad, if not worse, so I miss the gym and church, and watch a mini marathon of Meg Ryan movies (You've got Mail and Kate and Leopold). I had to get some work done Sunday as well. The main thing I had to do was prepare the notes for a sub so that they could cover at short notice.

Around lunch time Sunday I realized that there was no way I was going to be up to teaching on Monday, so I called a sub. I then had to e-mail her the sub directions after I finished them (took a while for my fuzzy brain to figure out everything that someone walking into my classroom needs to know). She is a great teacher, and taught 2nd with me before she stopped teaching to have her son and raise him, and now she is on the sub list. She is my first pick because I only reluctantly give my class up to someone else, and I want to trust that they will do the job well. I trust her.

So that brings me up to today. I am still not 100%, but I can go awhile before having to grab a tissue or cough, so I count that a victory. There were times that I was super tired today, and pretty achy (my back hurt a lot of the day), but I knew I could get through the day because it was pretty low impact as far as instruction was concerned with a couple of assemblies and tests and minimal teaching in between.

In other news... Blake and I bought half a bison!

No... its not live... no... it doesn't arrive as half a bison, it is completely butchered for us. Bison is a lot healthier than beef, and actually even healthier than chicken. It tastes very similar to beef (with a slightly gamier taste), and can be used in place of it in any recipe. The farm that we get our produce from recommended Glacier Grown to us (www.glaciergrown.com). This is an organic bison ranch in Montana, and they are coming down to Southern California in November. Their price per pound is WAY better than what we can get in the store for organic beef for even the cheapest cuts, and for high quality cuts like steaks, it is almost half the price. Its the whole costco thing... we buy in bulk, and we save lots.

It will probably be enough to last us 6 months to a year... but we are also buying a deep freezer so we can store all of this, and then we have "beef" any time we need it for a recipe. When we did the calculations... it is just a big initial investment that pays itself off in the long run for all the meat we don't have to buy.

We are also willing to let our friends/family reinburse us for the costs of certain cuts (no profit to us... that's illegal :-) )of bison if they would like to buy cuts off us, since not everyone wants to buy a half a bison worth of meat.

We're excited... nervous... but excited. I'll let all you readers know how it goes when we get it.

Csa 18

A picture's worth a thousand words... so here are 3 thousands words for you this week because I'm not feeling like typing a lot this week, but want to at least make it through a year of chronicling my CSA boxes.



New pet pictures! Aren't they cute!


(sorry about his crazy eyes... someday I'll learn how to take good pictures of pet eyes without them looking weird)


30 second update of my weekend- San Diego Zoo, read Hunger Games and Catching Fire, gym, Indian food, library. Good weekend!

4th Grade- First impressions

I'm reminded of the Annie song, where she sings, "I think I'm gonna like it here." Granted, I have only been a 4th grade teacher for 2 days at this point, but I am feeling like its a really good fit.

The most amazing experience in 4th grade to date happened on the first day of school. I had all of the kids start on a writing assignment. I explained what to do, then told them to get to work. Then an incredible thing happened... they just started working... quietly... there were no questions... no one I had to force to work... it was unlike anything I had every seen in my 2nd grade class before!! Now, I had classes that were pretty well behaved, but there was always SOMEONE who needed some nudging, or had a question immediately after beginning, or a few kids that thought it was time to talk instead of work. I previously considered it a victory if it only took a few minutes to get everyone on task... but immediately? It was beautiful!

Now... this assignment was not completed perfectly by all, nor was it question free the whole time... but it was quiet, and it got completed.

I had some more great experiences today where all the students were reading silently in the morning, or when the class was hard at work during grammar. Overall, the maturity and responsibility of the grade level is great, and I look forward to what we are able to accomplish this year.

It isn't all perfect, of course,for example I am a bit concerned of how much they have forgotten over the summer... in fact... worse than that, there were some review concepts on their work today that I taught in 2nd... so for kids to be struggling on them concerns me. Along the same lines, almost all kids have forgotten almost all of grammar since 1st grade! I had kids not know what a noun was... scary... hopefully it will come back soon. Also, I think I expected more of 4th grade reading skills than I heard today... just another thing to work on.

All of us, including me, are figuring out the timing and procedures for the day, and I have great hopes that lessons will go smoother as we get the hang of it.

I did use the smartboard today for lessons. Overall, it was good, and the kids thought it was really cool. My plan for how to take turns on it and be fast and effective didn't work. I had a random list of their class numbers, and they were supposed to be aware of who was ahead of them, and be waiting for their turn... kids were too interested in the game to notice their numbers... so tomorrow, I think I will have groups go up and wait for their turns... I think it will go smoother, we shall see. I had one girl that somehow wasn't applying the right pressure, or her hand was sweaty or something, and she couldn't drag an object on the screen... so I am planning on troubleshooting that if it happens again. Oh, and the default eraser size is too big... need to figure out how to resize that.

Not to mention that since our tech people are behind right now, my projector is sitting on a desk instead of mounted on the ceiling... which means that students' pencils show up on the screen, the girl who sits next to it joggles it every so often, the kids are super tempted to put their hands in front of it, and my favorite, you have to stand to the side of what you are writing so you can see what question you are answering without blocking the projector. Sigh... all those problems will be fixed (hopefully, prayerfully) within the month (what I was told by the tech guy).

The other tricky thing about the new grade at the moment is that it takes me SO LONG to set up for the next day (which is my new school year resolution, so I don't make them wait while I transition myself between subjects, and as a bonus, if I am sick, it is set up for my sub already). Today, I was working in my classroom from 3- 5 after school today mainly preparing for tomorrow... sigh. (Part of the problem is that just the lesson plans don't always make sense to me, so I have to keep going to other 4th grade teachers and asking them questions... which makes setting up take longer too). Oh, and the fact that I had a student drop today, and a student add today... so that was more work lol.

Reader's digest version- I like the more mature grade level, I am concerned about where they are academically, the smartboard is cool, but still has some kinks, and will be lots better once the projector is mounted, and I need to get used to what I am doing, but I think I'm gonna like it here. :-)

In case you have never heard of the song... and want to see it...here you go!

csa 17... A very green week

The entire left side of the picture is green! Yes, I did color sort the box this week... but only because there was so much green stuff this week and I wanted to show that clearly.

So...

On the "green team" we have watermelon, zucchini, swiss chard (which we are really excited about, and are planning on growing some this fall/winter), limes, cilantro, arugula and lettuce.

The "red team" has only one member... the cherry tomatoes, which have many friends in the cupboard from our own garden.

The "yellowish orange team" has a lot of oranges and some grapefruit on it.

Great week, nothing too new or exciting, but lots of good fruits and vegetables to eat.