Suzie's Farm: Week 3

Since I wasn't able to make it to the Hillcrest Farmer's Market this morning, I arranged to have my box picked up at the Poway Farmer's Market. I like that the Suzie's Farm CSA website allows you to easily switch the location. I had never been to the Poway market before and although it is smaller than Hillcrest, there is still a good number of fruit and veggie booths and not a lot of craft ones (a plus!).

This week's box contained:

• red russian kale (5.25 oz)
• cabbage cone (1 lb 5.5 oz)
• basket of serrano and cherry bomb peppers (6 oz)
• more zucchini (2 lb 7.5 oz)
• 2 bunches onion purplette (4.5 oz)
• 1 bunch parsley (2.25 oz)
• 2 golden treasure peppers (4.5 oz)
• 2 red bell peppers (5.75 oz)
• 1 red kabocha squash (1 lb 13.25 oz)
• 1 bunch radish (8.5 oz)
• pea shoots (4 oz)
• cannellini beans (shelled weight = 4.75 oz)

I'm not sure if I'm not trying as hard to use my produce (possible - I haven't been cooking as much this week) or if Suzie's Farm is giving me more food than the Inland Empire CSA (possible - I was getting their "small" box), but I have a lot of leftover produce from last week. I still have the zucchini (with more zucchini this week!), 1/2 of the onion purplette (I'm finding it hard to figure out what to do with these), radish greens, and some peppers.

I am enjoying the selection so far (with the exception of maybe the 3 weeks of onion purplette and zucchini), and also that most of the box is VEGETABLES! The only other complaint is what to do with all the "hot" peppers. As a person who doesn't eat hot peppers, I have had a basket of them every week. I usually use serrano peppers in salsa, but I don't know if I can use a whole basket of them. And the cherry bombs? Are those hot?? I haven't seen those before. Maybe Maddie the crazy hot-pepper eating dog wants to try one?

Halloween Spookiness

For Halloween, we had "spooky" chili, cornbread, and a spooky dessert.

The chili contained all ingredients from Suzie's Farm except for the beans. I cut out bat shapes from cheese to make it "spooky." Heh.

For the spooky dessert, I made these Devil's Food Cake cupcakes from Martha Stewart. I generally don't like making cupcakes because they tend to come out dry when I make them, but these were moist and fudgy. My original plan was to fill them with strawberry preserves to make them ooze "blood" when bitten into, but I ran out of time to do this. They were still yummy on their own. And of course, they tasted even better with spooky faces on them!

Suzie's Farm: Week 2

Sorry, it's been a really busy week so no picture this week or weighted values, but I can at least provide the list of items in this week's box:

Suzie's Farm - Week 2 box contents:

• acorn squash, 2 small
• 1 bunch mint
• 6 small zucchini
• 2 large brown onions
• bag of small tomatoes
• two small heads of fennel
• mixed sweet peppers (golden treasure, red pimiento)
• head of lettuce
• basket of habeneros
• red russian kale
• bunch of radishes
• 2 bunches of onion purplette

I used a lot of last week's items to make chili for Halloween.  I'm still working through the fennel and acorn squash.  And the habeneros?  I took those into work and didn't dare try them myself.  I was coughing just chopping jalapenos the other day.

Lettuce Patch!

Real gardening at last!

Landscaping is officially done and I now have a real garden. No more patio container gardening for me! Off to the nursery...

Suzie's Farm: Week 1

This week I begin a trial run in the next CSA I'm trying as part of the CSA Smackdown:

Suzie's Farm

Suzie's Farm doesn't offer a "trial" period so the shortest subscription you can purchase is 6 weeks. Since there is no trial period, there is also no pesky "new joining/registration" fee that some others have.

Reading some reviews on Yelp, I saw that there were some complaints about the boxes containing too many vegetables and not enough fruit, but for me, this is probably a good thing. :) They also do not allow any substitution of items as Inland Empire did. However, their prices are cheaper. I was on a small box at the Inland Empire CSA for almost $35/box and the small box at Susie's is $18/box. Since the regular size box was only $25 (still less than Inland Empire's small box), I went ahead and signed up for the large box. It was $150 for 6 weeks ($25/box).

I picked up my first box yesterday at the Hillcrest Farmer's Market. The boxes are all in the back of a big truck and they expect you to bring your own bags, transfer the produce to your bags, and break down your box. I checked off my name and put all of the produce into my 2 bags. They were pretty heavy bags when I was done! One nice thing I noticed is that there is a printed list of everything in the box so I know exactly what I'm getting. Another nice thing is that a couple of recipes related to the box contents were also included:

Here is what week 1's box contained:

• 4 cucumber (2 lb 6.75 oz)
• 3 green peppers (11.25 oz)
• tomatoes (1 lb 3.5 oz)
• 2 brown onions (1 lb 14 oz)
• sweet pepper mix (7.25 oz)
• 1 butternut squash (1 lb 7.5 oz)
• 1 bunch mint (1.5 oz)
• 2 small heads of butter lettuce (9.25 oz)
• 1 bunch celery (10.5 oz)
• purple onions with the greens on (11.75 oz)
• 8 zucchinis (1 lb 11 oz)
• basket of jalapenos (8 oz)
• 1 green melon (don't know what kind) (7 lb .5 oz)
• dragon beans (8 oz)

The interesting items in the bunch were the dragon beans:

What am I going to do with these?

Otherwise, I'm thinking this box screams CHILI.

What is it?

Here are pictures of the final melon from the Inland Empire CSA. What is it??

Whatever it was, it was sweet and delicious. The watermelon and oranges were also especially sweet. Tomatoes were too ripe and several went bad in a couple of days.

I finished all of the produce this week from the CSA except for a few lemons and an orange.