Adventures in CSA continues in Week 3. This week's yield contained green beans, leaf lettuce, a tomato (yum), a zucchini,broccoli, a cucumber, beets, 5 small pickling cucumbers (?) and more garlic scapes. For those of you unfamiliar with garlic scapes, this is the stem and flower bud of the garlic plant which are removed in order for the garlic bulb to grow larger. In other words, they are garlic trash.
I was encouraged when picking up my produce to give them another try: "You can make pesto out of them and it is so good!" So, I gave it a try and it was pretty tasty - although not as tasty as normal basil pesto and even using only half of the scapes, it made a large amount of pesto which I probably will not get around to using all of it. The second thing I tried with the garlic scapes was to roast them and turn them into a cream of garlic scape soup. Unfortunately, the roasted scapes were stringy and dried out so instead of soup, they went directly into the trash.
Non-Garlic Scape Results
The remaining produce was a mix of good, bad, and different. On the good end, the beans, lettuce, tomato, zucchini and cucumber were flavorful and part of our normal diet. The beans were roasted, the zucchini spiralized to make zoodles, the tomato employed on sandwiches and the lettuce and cucumber used in salads. The broccoli became part of a pasta salad.
The bad was the beets. Not that beets in themselves tasted bad - it's just that they taste like beets. And one cannot simply overcome a strong childhood revulsion by roasting the beets instead of serving them out of a can.
The Different (or pickle making)
I never imagined when I signed up for the CSA that it would include canning and pickling. Like maybe it would optional for people who like to do that sort of thing but not necessary. This week, however, included 5 "pickles" - and yes they were labeled pickles even though they had not been pickled yet. More of a "prepickle" than a real pickle. Note: no one in my home eats pickles. In fact, the only pickle I have ever actually liked is the Bread and Butter pickles my grandmother used to make.
Luckily, when my grandmother passed away over 20 years ago, I was given some of her cookbooks and inside one of the cookbooks is a recipe for Bread and Butter pickles. I don't know for certain this is the recipe she used, but I am going to pretend it is. And thus, this past week, I made Grandma's Bread and Butter Pickles.
I think they are pretty tasty. No one else in my house will try them - my son, won't even look at them. I gave two jars to my mom and I'm waiting to hear back on whether or not they are good.
