Saturday, June 11, 2011

Pickle Me

This week's CSA share was quite a haul and we also picked up a few things at the Greensgrow farm stand. Originally, we just needed to buy a loaf of bread for dinner and some strawberries and rhubarb so that my husband could make another crisp after his first foray was not quite right. Delicious, but not quite right. But there was a $20 minimum to use our debit card and we had no cash, so I hunted around the stand to find some other good stuff that I could use.

Our share came with eight pickling cucumbers and fresh dill, so I'm hoping to make some tasty dills this week. We also got garlic scapes (my favorite CSA item!) but I already knew that I wanted to try to pickle them, too, so we picked up another bunch of scapes for cooking. We also grabbed a big bunch of scallions and I might even take half of them for pickling, like I did with spring onions recently, since we never manage to use a whole bunch of scallions. We are hoping to go to the infamous Fante's tomorrow and I plan to buy an asparagus cooker so that I can do one jar canning on our indoor cooktop. (I wish I had come up with this idea, myself, but I must credit the awesome Food in Jars maven with the inspiration.)

So here's the full list of our haul:
Picklers
Carrots
Beets
Dill
Spring mix
Yellow Squash
Garlic Scapes
Wildflower Honey
Chevre
Eggs
Strawberries (farm stand)
Rhubarb (farm stand)
Italian Loaf (farm stand)
More Scapes (farm stand)
Scallions (farm stand)
Mint (farm stand)

The mint is for the gallons of fresh iced tea that we make and drink all summer long. While we're at Fante's tomorrow, I'm sure we'll hit the spice store in the Italian Market for a bunch of beautiful tea blends for this summer's tea experiments and some more of the pickling mix.