CSA Week 5. I think?

Happy Friday! What is everyone doing for Memorial Day weekend? Matt and I are hopping in the car tomorrow morning and driving to South Haven, MI, where we will spend a long weekend with my parents to celebrate my mom's 60th birthday. We are really looking forward to getting away for a few days (even though it sucks making yet another long drive with gas prices as high as they are) (can you believe how expensive it is to fill your tank? holy moly!).

Anyway! My dad had to work tonight, and I had to work today, so our long weekend is running from Saturday-Tuesday. I took Tuesday off of work and I am realllllly looking forward to the three day work week. School is almost out (THANK GOD) and I'm trying to stay calm and not focused on the 6 (S-I-X) students I had in court yesterday morning. OY.

Since we aren't leaving until tomorrow, we had time to go pick up our veggies this afternoon! Here's what we ended up with:

Salad greens (no close-up because by now, you know what lettuce looks like) ...
... some adorable little radishes ...

... garlic scapes (ever heard of them?) ...

... and glorious, glorious shiitake mushrooms. MY FAVORITE. Yessssss!!!

I was in the mood for a light little evening snack, so I chopped up the radishes and made a little radish salad. For those of you who are wondering, radish salad = radishes + olive oil + sea salt. The end.
It was good, I guess, if you're into radishes. To be honest, I'm really not. But the mushrooms? Oh yeah, baby. I love them so much.

Have a wonderful Memorial Day weekend, friends! xxoo

History of a Blog Friend

I started blogging back in 2008, before I realized that blogging - and the friends I would make through blogging - would be such a huge part of my life. The next year, on a roadtrip down south with Lisa, I managed to be in Nashville at the same time as Jenny from Lucky in Love.

July 2009

We had a great time eating pancakes and hanging out, and I thought ... wow, it's pretty fun to meet a blog friend!

So I did it a few more times. In February 2010, to help celebrate my 28th birthday while Matt was deployed, we had a little blog weekend in Chicago.

... then, in July 2010, I went up to Canada to visit Lucy, and Jenny came too. Here we are, very shiny, at a Brazilian barbeque place. Delish. Jenny was relatively newly pregnant at that time while Lindsay was nearing the end of her pregnancy, and we had a lot of fun thinking about the blog babies that would be born soon.
Fast forward to two weekends ago. The place? My apartment in Bloomington. Jenny, her husband, and their beautiful baby girl Natalie came to visit for an afternoon and we had SUCH a fabulous time. It seems like blog friends get to a point where they're not blog friends anymore.

They're just friends.

Sigh

Well, I disappeared again, although this time there was a reason. Right after my last post, my grandma passed away at the beautiful old age of 90. It was both sudden and expected - as once you get to 90, things happen. She had a heart attack over the weekend and was stable for awhile - I was able to talk to her, and she told me that it was all "very exciting" and that she got to ride in a helicopter for the first time (she had been airlifted to another hospital). A few hours later, she was gone. It has been hard, but I know that Grandma lived a long, wonderful life so it makes me feel a lot better about her not being around. Lots of mixed feelings and emotions.

So. That's that. We missed a week of veggies, and got a double share this past Friday, which of course I forgot to photograph - but we got two big bags of beautiful lettuce, giant bunches of beets, green onions, and some mint. I never know what to do with mint - thoughts? Ideas?

Matt is done with school now for the summer, and just got a job working at a research center on campus so he is staying busy. I am, of course, counting down the seconds until school lets out for the summer. I believe we only have 14-15 days left! Then I get to work part time over the summer. RELIEF!

In other news, Jenny came to visit this weekend and I got to meet beautiful Natalie! I have some photos but that will be a separate post, hopefully tomorrow. :)

Also, here's a shameless plug: we just launched Fantabulously Frugal Weddings on Monday, and we're dying for you to check it out! And if you hop on over there today, you'll catch a glimpse of my wedding as this week's featured Real Wedding. Check it out!

CSA Week 2

Okay, I tried to do a little better with this week's CSA photography. A LITTLE bit.

This week: more beautiful (and slightly blurry) salad greens,

shiitake mushrooms (yayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!),
green onions,
and arugula! Yes! I LOVE arugula!!!
On the menu this week: not totally sure yet, but I will probably make some arugula pesto and lots of salads with sauteed shiitakes. Deliciousness!

How has everyone's weekend been? My mom came for a very quick visit to see my orchestra concert last night, which went very well. Her car battery died on the way here, north of Indy, and she had to wait for AAA to come with a new battery, which delayed her trip a bit. So all in all, she was here less than 24 hours. But we had a fun time, and a good concert, and a tasty brunch this morning, and that's about it!

Now, it's raining again (surprise, surprise) and Matt and I are relaxing. I have to work out at some point today, but I'm going to put it off a bit longer until brunch has more time to settle in my tummy. :)

How are YOU?

More CSA Cooking!

Things I need to work on:

1. Cleaning

2. Laundry

3. Working out

4. My food photography skillz ... or lack thereof.

I am seriously almost embarrassed to post these photos. Food bloggers seem to have the most amazing food photographs ... so perhaps my new goal will be to work on that! I think the first stop towards achieving beautiful food photographs is to use natural light.

Whoops.

Well, here is tonight's dinner, somewhat courtesy of my CSA:

It consisted of eggs, Laughing Cow light swiss cheese wedges, caramelized onions and mushrooms, and wilted beet greens. On the side: a piece of that soggy sesame bread we got (don't worry, it's not soggy anymore) toasted with some Maranatha almond butter.

It looks incredibly ... brown and boring and stuff. But in reality, it was delicious!!!! Pinky swear.

I also roasted the beets and now they are marinating overnight with some onions in olive oil, apple cider vinegar, sea salt, and a drizzle of honey.

Here is the worst photo ever of my bowl of beets. It's so dark!

I picked up some organic strawberries today and they looked so perfect that we had to eat some right away. So, for dessert: vanilla bean ice cream with strawberries, drizzled with this chocolate balsamic vinegar. Which was absolutely incredibly amazing.

Mmmmm.

Tomorrow for lunch: greens with the marinated beets and some feta. CSAs RULE!

CSA Week 1: Kale. And Kale. And some other stuff.

I seem to have lost some of my food photography skillz since last summer ... I will try to work on making my veggies prettier. :)

Matt and I drove to pick up our very first CSA share of the season on Friday, and I was so very excited! Except that it was pouring rain. And our (cardboard) box of food sits outside in someone's driveway for pickup. And when I got there, I saw that there was a loaf of bread inside. In a paper bag. A very, very wet loaf of bread. But hey, there it is! You can almost see it. This week, we received:

-Kale! Some really curly small-leaf kale. I forgot to take a photo of it before I made it into kale chips (recipe below) - which are in that plastic bag in the last photo.

-More kale! A different kind of kale. I forgot to get it out of the fridge for the photo, so just imagine MORE KALE.

-A half loaf of soggy sesame seed bread. Okay, it didn't end up being very soggy, and tasted very good heated up with some almond butter. Yums.

-BEETS!!!! Yes, I really am that excited about the darn beets. I used to think I hated beets ... then I got some in last year's CSA, learned how to roast them, and realized that they are one of my new favorite things. These beets are pretty weeny, but I am looking forward to roasting them tomorrow and having them with some salad. Yums.

-Greens - beautiful, beautiful salad greens. Seriously - don't they look fresh and delicious? I cannot wait to make myself a good salad Monday for dinner while Matt is at a decades-long group meeting for grad school.

Last year, the CSA share started kind of weak, with only salad stuff and other greens, and gained momentum as the growing season progressed. I am really looking forward to all of this deliciousness!

I got lots of kale last year, and never really knew what to do with it. Unfortunately, a lot of it went bad before I figured out what to do. But not this year! I am determined to not let ANY of this produce go bad. I had heard about kale chips last summer, but just never got around to making them. But since I had not one, but TWO giant bunches of kale, I decided to give it a shot yesterday. I went with a recipe from Smitten Kitchen:

Kale Chips

Ingredients:

kale (duh)

extra virgin olive oil (I used spray evoo because that's all I had on hand - worked great)

sea salt

aaaand of course I added a little garlic as well

Preheat oven to 300.

Wash and dry kale in a salad spinner to get out all the moisture (I had done this the night before, so the kale was nice and dry already). Cut or rip into bite-size pieces, removing the thick stems. Toss in olive oil, sea salt and whatever other herbs/spices you would like, and lay on a baking sheet covered in parchment paper. Or not. I am out of parchment paper so I didn't use any, but I guess that would have been easier for clean-up.

Bake for 15-20 minutes or until crispy. Mine were perfect at 15 minutes - and wow, I was really surprised about how fantastic they are. They really satisfy the salty chip craving - only it's kale! Which is amazingly good for you, and has a ton of health benefits. I am hooked, and I'll definitely be using the pounds and pounds of kale we get this spring to make kale chips!

Day 2!

Hey, look! I'm here again! For the second night in a row! Weird, right?

To be honest, I've got nothing. I just finished writing two posts for FF and now it's bedtime. But I am really trying to get back in the habit of blogging - I remember when I used to just LOVE sitting down to blog and I want to get that feeling back! - so I am going to leave you with a photo of my two main men:

Oscar LOVES to be picked up. Duh.

Guess what happens tomorrow? Week One of our 2011 CSA share! This season, I hope to actually blog about our CSA every week ... you know, like I did last year. Ha. Ha ha. Okay, so that didn't really happen. But I'm certainly going to try. Wish me luck!