CSA: Week 11

In this week's basket we found the following deliciousness:
Patty pan squash (1 giant one)
Cucumbers (2)
Slicing tomatoes (5)
Eggplant (2)
Rainbow chard
Sweet onions (4)
Sage
Carrots
Red peppers (2)
Muskmelon

If you pay way more attention to photos than I do, you might notice that there are no onions pictured. That's because we are overwhelmed with onions and garlic and I put them in someone else's basket.  Sorry, person who got twice as many onions as you thought you would.

Here's the plan as it stands:

• Carrots and cucumbers will be eaten raw in my lunches.  Maybe the peppers too if they're not too hot. If they are hot, I'll slice them up and put them in the frozen bags of vegetable scraps for stock*.
• The tomatoes do not look good. A couple already have soft spots. I've been quite disappointed in the tomatoes this year. We don't get very many and we haven't actually gotten any heirloom tomatoes at all - they've all been slicers. So this is good information for me to remember when I do the survey at the end of the year.
• I'll eat the melon for breakfast, I guess. Neither of us is a big melon fan, but Dr. BB actually has mild allergies to them, so it's on me.  (In our defense, we signed up for a "vegetable CSA," not a "vegetable and random melon CSA," so I think our continued bitchiness about the melons is entirely justified.)
• We'll make a frittata with the chard and eat it for dinner on Monday and Tuesday nights.
• We're kind of over summer squash at this point, so I'll probably grate and freeze the patty pan (and the two large zucchini we have left from last week) so that I can make some zucchini bread in the fall or winter.
• It's not enough eggplant for baba ganoush. If Dr. BB can get to the Farmers' Market tomorrow (I'll be out of town), maybe he'll get another one and I can make it again. If he doesn't go, though, maybe I'll just grill them.
• I have no idea what to do with the sage.  We mostly use it in dishes with winter squash, so I'm befuddled by its presence in this basket. It reminds me, yet again, that we suck at using the herbs we get.

We did pretty well with last week's basket. I even used some of the parsley in the baba ganoush.   Let's keep our fingers crossed for better tomatoes next week!

* I've discussed how to make stock before.  I have since learned that a real cost-saving secret is to save all the vegetable scraps as I clean vegetables, freeze them, and then I don't have to buy vegetables just for use in stock.  I don't peel carrots, but I cut off the tops. I throw those in the bags. We only use the leaves of rainbow chard and kale and I throw the stems in the freezer bags. Tops of peppers go in, along with pea stems and bean tips.  I think I can easily get three or four gallon bags full during CSA season.