CSA 27

My record is broken. :-/ Even the times I have slacked in posting, I was still great about getting that photo taken to post later... but not this week!

This is mainly due to the fact that we forgot about our box until much later than we usually get it.

I had a half day Wednesday and Blake was able to get off early too. So, the two of us were able to get on the computer and start playing early afternoon, earlier than we usually even get home, and before the box is dropped off at the house in Irvine that we pick them up from.

We got into an amazing group in the game, a group we had been hoping for days to be a part of. So we changed our plans from going out to staying in, ordering Chinese food for delivery so that we could be a part of this group. All is well... and the box that we usually get on our way home from work is totally forgotten!

I am talking later about Thanksgiving and what we need from our box for the recipes that we are making when I stop mid-sentence and realize that we didn't get our box! So, Blake left the computer for a half an hour to go pick it up, and then run back to the group.

Later that night before bed, the vegetables got put away, but I didn't even think about my camera at that point. Oh well.

We got two different kinds of winter squash, which is exciting, both Acorn and Spaghetti squash.

We got more feijoas, and we already had a bunch, so I am throwing them into a few recipes this week.

Otherwise, it was more of the usual: lettuce, carrots, celery etc. Nothing too much to note.

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Thanksgiving went great! I am always so thankful to have it at our house so that all the families blend together, and every year I am excited to see that there really aren't cliques, but everyone seems comfortable with everyone else. Blake's grandfather is getting married again, and he brought his fiance to Thanksgiving. Funny thing is that my grandmother's name and his fiance's name is the same, so that was a bonding point for the two of them. Also, his fiance knew a lot of people from my grandmother's church, so they talked about that, and at the end of the night they exchanged phone numbers so they could get together later! Isn't that great?

The turkey (main event) turned out well, even if it was ready a little too early and Blake had to be dragged away from showing his bike to his dad to carve it.

We had lots of leftovers, and have been eating them for many meals... and aren't actually tired of them yet!

We also served buffalo meatballs and they were a hit! Not only were they popular with the group, I also liked them enough for them to make the list for what I got seconds of. (Which was not much, because I was pretty full!) They were also one of the first things I ate for leftovers.

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One other piece of news is that we are attempting to dry some of our habeneros so we can make a powder of them to use for later. So, Blake got a needle, and some fishing line and made a string of them. We'll see how they turn out!



And just for fun... some random tweaks of the picture:

Superpost! 2CSA, Bison, and thoughts about favorite colors

First, I want to say that I am feeling lazy today, and do not feel like editing down my photos, so they will be huge... but hopefully you enjoy them anyways:



Above is the CSA from November 3rd.


Very exciting week with an eggplant and butternut squash as highlights. Sad thing is that I thought the butternut squash was acorn squash and chose a recipe accordingly... but it was still great! We made stuffed acorn squash... which was much harder with the small space of the butternut lol. The eggplant went into a great Indian food recipe.

Considering that tomorrow will be two weeks from this box... I don't remember what else I made that week. :-D


Above is the box from last Wednesday. Because many days this week were out with family, the majority of the vegetables went into one of two recipes: Beef with acorn squash and potatoes except we used bison instead or my stir fry recipe. I called it a stir fry extravaganza, and we used the eggplant, green beans, celery, carrots, lettuce and green onions in it. We also cleaned the fridge out a bit and added some of our bell pepper into it as well. It tasted great!

Speaking of bison....

We got our bison on Saturday. It came in three boxes, and we got it directly from the person who runs the ranch in Montana (who was very nice btw). They were very frozen, and packed beautifully!



Each one was wrapped in a smaller more portion size chunk with what kind of meat it was nicely stamped on it. We sorted them by cuts. (Yes... on the garage floor... they're wrapped :D) This is what we got:

1. Hamburger (38)
2. Chuck Roast (2)
3. Sirloin tip roast (1)
4. rib steak (6)
5. sirloin steak (4)
6. short rib (2)
7. cubed stead (2)
8. eye of round steak (1)
9. top round stead (6)
10. flank steak (1)
11. tenderloin (1)
12. t-bone (3)

Unlike we originally planned, we only feel willing to part with some of our hamburger supply (not for a profit, but for what we paid per pound, or an exchange... like one of Blake's co-workers is trading bison burger meat for avocados). The rest of the cuts we don't feel like we have enough that we want to let it go. But we are really excited about our meals, and the slow cooked bison from yesterday tasted great! (Even if Blake found the bullet in his meal today! :-D Don't worry... he didn't eat it:-p)

It all fits in our freezer with room to spare (for frozen fresh fish perhaps?):


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On a totally completely random topic, I was thinking about favorite colors a week or two ago, and how kids (like my students) frequently ask what my favorite color is. I typically say yellow and blue, because that is what I themed my whole wedding around, and I do really enjoy those bright summery colors.


However... When it comes down to it, what makes a favorite color anyways... isn't it the color that when you have a lot of different choices of what color you want something in... you choose the one that's your favorite color? So Blake and I got new phones recently (Droid incredible for a really good deal on Newegg) and I had to choose a cover. I browsed ebay for a while looking for what cover I wanted... and I decided on a pink one.

Then I thought about it more... and my last two phones, I chose a pink one. Tons of options.... I keep choosing pink!

AND last time I chose workout shoes... I chose pink too. So I am wondering if the next time that a student asks me... should I change from my standard yellow and blue to pink?


And one last photo... because it was on my camera... look at how cute Roxie is!

Hair

I used to like my hair long... you can do a lot with long hair, although since my hair is so thick, it is a lot to deal with. Then I met Blake... and he likes short hair. (I found out when I randomly decided to cut it short our first year dating and discovered he REALLY liked it).

Now, I keep it on the shorter side, partly for him, partly because once it gets past my shoulders, it doesn't look as good without more effort... and I am not an effort kind of person when it comes to hair/makeup.

So... I am getting it cut next week. As I have been thinking about what to do with this style... I decided to dedicate a whole blog to it, and a slideshow on my past hairstyles ending with two pictures that I intend to show when I go to get my hair cut to demonstrate what I am thinking about.

note: I meant to crop these so it was just me and you could really see the varying lengths I experimented with... but it got late... so they are mostly unedited.

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.