2016 CSA Week 8: In Which the Tomato Dream Came True

In the middle of winter, I sometimes have a very vivid dream in which I'm walking home with a bag of vegetables, clearly just having picked up the CSA basket, and I'm eating a tomato. That is the entire dream. I wake up desperate for fresh food and warm temperatures.  Well, today that dream came true. In the half-mile walk to get the basket, I managed to both eat a tomato and come home drenched in sweat.

This week's offerings are fierce:
Fennel (3 bulbs)
Garlic
Tomatoes (7, but I ate one on the way home, so 6 here)
Sage
Dragon's tongue beans
Sweet onion
Eggplant
Zucchini

• So...the fennel is a problem. We still have fennel left from week 6, so now we are overrun. I'm going to make this chicken and fennel crock pot recipe I talked about here and that will use up three of the bulbs. I'm going to pick up some cabbage at the Farmers' Market tomorrow and make a slaw that will include another bulb, but that still leaves me two bulbs of fennel.  Hmmm...any fennel recipes out there?

• The tomatoes I will eat like candy.

• The zucchini is just piling up in the fridge. I think we have five in there now. I'm going to make zucchini bread twice this week (once for book club and once for some folks we're having to dinner on Wednesday), but I'm still three deep in zucchini. I hope it dries up soon.

• I have been slowly but surely using the garlic and onions and so I'll just keep doing my best with those in regular dinner recipes.

• The eggplant will be made into some baba ganoush, obviously. I think I'll make it for book club and the leftovers will go straight into my belly.  

• Last year I ate the dragon's tongue beans raw, but we got some last week and I did not care for them raw, so now I basically have two giant bags of them. I'm going to put them out on appetizer plates for entertaining and try boiling them to see if they're tastier that way. I'll keep you updated.

• The sage...who knows? We struggle with herbs so much.

Let's do it!!