In Your Share (June 9th edition)

We’re having a bumper crop of Sugar Snap Peas!! We planted them on a nice sunny day way back in January, and now they are over 4′ tall covered with beautiful white blossoms and plump sweet peas – yum!!

Hope you all had a chance to dig into the specially designated CSA site at Cook With What You Have. Katherine has taken all the recipe packets from past years and turned them into a fabulous searchable archive of tips, techniques and ideas. Check your email for the password to access site. This will provide all of our members with 24 hour access to recipes and inspiration!

This week your share may include…

• Choi: Big beautiful heads this week. I made this Soba Noodle Salad recipe with choi and lots of garlic  for the crew last week and it was a big hit!
• Green Garlic: This will be the last week we have these tender little stems. The big garlic bulbs are sizing up in the field, so we’ll start to harvest those in a few weeks. You may see some small orange dots on the garlic – this is rust, a disease that looks terrible on the plants, but is harmless and peels off easily.
• Garlic Scapes: These tender & curly whips are actually immature garlic flower stalks. They can be chopped up, sautéed and used in almost any dish that calls for regular garlic. I like to coat them with a bit of olive oil, lightly salt them and roast a pile on a cookie sheet under the broiler. Let them wilt and start to caramelize then put them on the table and watch them disappear. They have a nice roasted garlic flavor and make fun finger food.
• Lettuce Heads: Sweet & tender, red & green heads of lettuce will make a nice spring salad! Varieties this week are Tropicana & Red Baron
• Mizuna: These frilly greens are mild enough to be added to salad or lightly sautéed.
• Spring Onions: Fresh spring onions are here! They have a nice little bulb and the tops can be used just like a green onion.
• Italian Parsley: I’m a big fan of this Italian parsley – at our house we use tons of it for everything from clam linguini to tabbouleh. Often herbs are used sparingly, but I think of parsley more like the greens and don’t hesitate to add heaps of it when cooking.
• Sugar Snap Peas: You can eat the whole thing! Both the shell & peas inside are sweet & crunchy – I usually just eat them raw, but they also work well lightly sautéed.
• Radish: These make a great raw snack or try this recipe for radish butter.  The greens are a bit spiky to eat raw, but are tasty when cooked.

Coming soon… fresh fava beans!!