What's For Dinner? June Week 1

Last Tuesday (May 31st) was our first CSA bag pick up. It didn't take me long at all to get to the designated pick up location at UT after work and Diane Riehm was there with a helper to distribute bags quickly and efficiently. All they asked was whether I'd prefer zucchini or cucumber this week and I chose cucumber. I made it home only about 15 minutes later than normal, so no big deal!

This is what came in my bag last week: 1 bunch each of bok choy and romaine, 1 bunch of green onion, 4 radishes (the white root veg in the middle), ~1# asparagus and 1 cucumber. We were told that the bags would be smaller than usual this week because of weather and assured that they'd make up for it in future weeks. I've never eaten bok choy before (that I know of) and I've also never seen radishes in any form other than the trimmed, red balls on a relish or vegetable tray. So this direct-from-the-farm "shopping" is going to be a great learning experience for me! My parents never had a vegetable garden so I've never been shown this sort of thing. As a kid, I just assumed things always looked as they did in the grocery store. But I really want to learn and to show MY kids so they're better educated about their food choices.

Okay, so what am I going to do with this stuff? Well, we ate up the cucumber in no time with our salads. And lettuce is lettuce in my book, so the romaine will get eaten just like we use our typical green leaf. My newsletter from the farm this week had a great suggestion for using the bok choy in a simple Mexican recipe, sort of like a vegetarian fajita. That sounded good, so I'm going to try that this week too. And finally, I have a plan for the radishes, the asparagus and some of the green onions to accompany a new, yummy-looking, potato salad for dinner this week.
I just trimmed up the asparagus, green onions and radishes and stuck them in my handy dandy moisture control box from Tupperware till I was ready to make my potato salad.

Here is my binder that will store all my weekly newsletters/recipe pages.

There were several recipe suggestions for this week's harvest and I really appreciate the descriptive info on each veggie, as well as what they anticipate arriving in the following week's bag.

In other news, I have a new lunch bag! Yay! The one I got last year was very poorly made and fell apart at the seams (literally) a couple months ago. So I found this Igloo brand bag on sale for nine bucks last week and it appears to be much better quality for a cheaper price!

Memorial weekend was filled with lots of late afternoon socializing, so we didn't really eat any normal dinners at home. I've been trying to use up a half gallon of buttermilk in our fridge, so we had whole wheat oat pancakes for breakfast this weekend and lots of berries on the side.

I made a corn salad and another rhubarb pie for Craig's family picnic and this one turned out even better than the last.

Considering our weekend was pretty much spoken for, I kind of over planned the dinner menu for the week. So I packed lots of leftovers for lunch and we continued eating leftovers into the next (this last) weekend.

I served one of my favorite salsas (have I mentioned my love for various salsas served with grilled meat?) over grilled chicken with a tossed salad on the side. Avocado, Tomato and Cucumber Salsa may be one of the best tasting things in this world. I could eat it with a spoon... or even better with some lime tortilla chips. I like A LOT of salsa when I serve this so I typically play with the proportions of each ingredient depending on what I have. In this case, I used an English cucumber instead of seeding a regular one and I also used enough diced, Roma tomatoes to balance the color instead of grape tomatoes. Ahh, my mouth is watering again and I'm tempted to put it on the menu for next week too!

Will asked if we could bake some chocolate chip cookies again and we did. In his mind, this is the only variety of cookie that exists in the world. He LOVES baking them and loves hyping it up to surprise his daddy every time.

On Wednesday, we tried Weelicious Mexican Lasagna along with another tossed salad and it was pretty good. Could use a little something to punch up the flavor in my opinion, but it was better the second day, so maybe just top it with a little extra salsa on day one.

And, sorry. I know this isn't super appetizing, but the only picture I have of our spaghetti and meatball dinner from Thursday was the meatballs I prepared in advance. This pic is before baking of course, and then I just pull together the sauce and dump it all in a crock pot to simmer while I'm at work. My mom turns my crock pot on for me on occasion when I do meals like this.

We had a lot of salads this week! (They just taste so good lately.) Though I think we had steamed broccoli with the spaghetti. And I ended up saving one of the last meals I had planned, for this week instead. It was a surprise I had planned for Craig... which I will share with you on this week's menu post along with that potato salad I'm so anxious to try.

Till then... happy eating!