Farm Box: April 18, 2012

River Dog Farm Box: April 18, 2012

This weeks' box had:

Asparagus -- A huge bunch, some fairly fat, other stalks pencil-thin.
Beets -- Teeny tiny red ones with super-vibrant greens
Spring Onions -- Basically, an XL version of the green onions you get at the grocery store
Braising Greens
Bok Choi -- I have to admit, I am not a huge bok choi fan. I don't hate it, but it's also not a go-to green for me. We will gladly eat several bunches of kale in a week, but bok choi has a tendency to yellow and wither before I get around to using it.
Bunch of orange carrots
A few loose yellow carrots
golden turnips
spinach
Cilantro

And here's what we made with it. Farm box ingredients are in bold.

Nicoise Salad (sorry for the awful cell phone pic!)

Wednesday -- Sort-of-Nicoise salad. Mixed salad greens from the farmer's market, topped with seared ahi tuna, hard boiled eggs, olives, steamed asparagus (green beans are traditional in a nicoise salad, but asparagus is what we had), and boiled potatoes. The dressing was a generous amount of dijon mustard, olive oil, a touch of white wine vinegar, green garlic, and salt/pepper.

Thursday -- Salad again, this time topping the greens with steamed asparagus, olives, and poached eggs. I had a late soccer game, and needed something super-quick. Poached eggs are often my go-to in this situation, since you can make them in 5-minutes flat and they seem much fancier than they are.

Friday -- Soba noodles with sesame sauce. I stir-fried some chicken marinated in soy sauce, brown sugar, garlic, and rice vinegar. Steamed some bok choi, spinach, and carrots. Boiled soba noodles. All tossed together with a sauce made of tahini, rice vinegar, soy sauce, green garlic, and sesame oil based on a recipe from Mark Bittman. garnished with a generous handful of chopped cilantro and thinly sliced spring onions.

Saturday -- Hamburgers on the grill, with grilled asparagus, carrots, and radicchio (an impulse purchase at Whole Foods). After the carrots came off the grill, I tossed them with cilantro, lime juice, and salt.

Sunday -- Chicken and Rice. This is one of our go-to meals, because you can make it in endless variations. This version used green garlic, spinach, bok choi, spring onions, and some braising greens. The sauce used green garlic, shallots, whole-grain mustard, capers, white wine, veggie broth, butter, and a bit of flour to thicken it.

Monday -- We had baked sausages, potatoes, and broccoli for dinner. Didn't use a thing from the farm box because Josh was really in the mood for broccoli and so he bought a bag from Trader Joes.

Tuesday --Roasted Veggie salad. Mixed greens from the farmer's market with a mustard-spring onion dressing. Topped with roasted beets, turnips, carrots, and garlic, blue cheese crumbles, and a couple poached eggs.

So, at the end of the week, we still have: half a bunch of cilantro, the beet greens, half a bunch of carrots, half a bag of braising greens, and one head of bok choi, Hmm . . . we didn't do so well on using up everything this week. Tonight's dinner, whatever it is, needs to use lots and lots of greens :-)