CSA Winter Box 2: Roasted Veg and an Extra Soup!

Just a quick one today as I'm excited to say I have finished up November's blog posts which means Christmas is coming!!  It only took until March a few months later to share my Christmas crafts, baking and gift projects.  Oh well, all in good time!  Watch out for a throwback to the holiday season with posts coming up this week.

 

 

Here's a quick round up of our December CSA Box 2 which included amazing mushrooms, a cabbage that my husband made boiled cabbage with (can I use nursing as an excuse not to eat too much of this?! :-S).  We didn't get around to using the beets until after Christmas but they were still good!  The more unusual items this month were the fingerling potatoes, and watermelon radishes.

 

 

By the time we picked up our December box, we also still had the acorn squash leftover from November but that was quickly used for a delicious acorn squash soup, that included roasted seeds as a garnish.  They were so good!

 

I had seen a recipe for squash soup in Chatelaine, and just with a couple of changes we used this recipe you can find the link to here.  It was just perfect for a Winter evening and so, seeing as this Canadian Winter is lingering way, way longer than we'd all like, I'm not TOO behind with sharing this one!

 

There's a first time for everything, and these CSA boxes are really pushing us to try new things.  And that's okay!  We're happy to be trying new flavours, to play around with new recipes and are excited that soon enough our little baby girl will be able to share in this exploration of healthy fruit and vegetables too :-)

Watermelon radishes, named this because of the colour and pattern of the inside of the radish are pretty cool.  Jonathan took charge with these and found a simple way to roast these from the Red Fire Farm website, which we were grateful for as we had never come across these before, let alone cooked with them!  Cut into wedges, and roasted in olive oil with a drizzle of maple syrup coated over them made them pretty tasty!!

More roasted veg to finish up with today.  Delicious, fresh, crunchy on the outside - soft on the inside, these potatoes really did make for a nice change.  Frozen oven chips don't make the cut after these :-P

I cooked these up, with little baby girl watching in the highchair, using a recipe from Food Network's Tyler Florence and it was a quick and simple recipe, that I actually changed a little just because of what I had in the fridge, or rather, what I didn't have in the fridge!  I used cloves of garlic, and fresh sage, but only dried rosemary and thyme as we didn't have any fresh.  I'm sure it made a difference on taste, but ours definitely weren't bad!

The only thing I'd change is to cut up these bigger potatoes into smaller sizes - the smaller potatoes, the crispier edges!!!!  There was a bit too much variety in my sizes of potatoes and how I cut them, which was a shame but there'll be a next time I'm sure.

 

I guess we got too hungry and I didn't take a photo of the cooked potatoes - sorry!  But they were nicely golden and crispy all around the edges, and super soft inside.  I'd definitely recommend them!

 

So that's our CSA Boxes 1 and 2 and the dinners we had adventures with. 

Lots more to come :-)

CSA Winter Box 1: Broccoflower and Kale Soup

Hi... I'm back!  And I'm going to try and catch up with my many many MANY blog posts that are way overdue since last November when well, let's face it - our baby girl was way more fun that writing blog posts! ... And of course she still is - but right now I have a 30 minutes window if I'm lucky so here goes!

*Quick check of the monitor screen ... and we're safe ... write... quickly! *

November was the first month that we picked up our CSA box for the Winter sign up we had bought from Coopers Farm, just a few minutes drive from our house.  Ever since we moved house in the Summer, out of Toronto - we knew we wanted to do this.  CSA ~ Community Supported Agriculture is the greatest thing - fresh vegetables and fruit right from the farm every month (or more - we'll be doing weekly in the Summer!) and in paying for the box upfront you are supporting the farm and helping it to grow and produce these very same vegetables!  Check out the Coopers Farm website here and read more about it. 

Box number one was picked up at the beginning of November, so it was the most colourful box we've had, still with some of the Summer greenhouse fruits and veg still available.  I'll write a few blog posts about everything we did with the box, but the first thing I have to talk about is the Romanesco Broccoli - broccoflower!  The COOLEST vegetable I've ever seen! 

A couple of friends were coming over for dinner and to meet baby girl so we made a Romanesco Broccoli and Kale Soup with Cheddar Cheese from the FruitGuys website - and it was DELICIOUS!  I never thought I'd be saying that about a soup made entirely of greens!  Give it a try, it was really good!

Ingredients:

1 head of Romanesco broccoli, chopped into bite-size pieces
1 bunch of kale, rinsed, stems removed and coarsely chopped
1 large onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
4 tbsp butter
1/2 tsp dried tarragon
6 1/2 cups vegetable or chicken broth (we used vegetable as one friend is a vegetarian!)
1 cup heavy cream
3 tbsp all purpose flour
2 cups (packed) grated extra-sharp cheddar cheese

Method:

1.  Melt 2 tablespoons butter in heavy medium pot over medium-high heat.

 2.  Add onion and sauté until onion is translucent, about 6 minutes.

3.  Add garlic and tarragon; sauté 1 minute.

4.  Add chopped broccoli and kale; sauté for 5 minutes until kale starts to wilt.

5.  Add stock and bring to boil then simmer, uncovered for about 5 minutes.

6.  Stir in cream.

9.  Mix remaining 2 tablespoons butter with flour in small bowl to make paste, and whisk into soup.

10.  Simmer until soup thickens and broccoli is tender, stirring frequently, about 5 minutes.

11.  Blend together to make a soup without any chunks if preferred!

12.  Season with salt and pepper.

13.  Serve while hot, with grated cheddar cheese.

 

If you're a greens skeptic do give this a try!  I never thought I'd be eating a soup made from kale and broccoli (although admittedly the cream and cheese does help!!). 

 

Thanks to Fruit Guys for the inspiration and recipe and to baby girl for taking a 40 minute nap! :-)

A Selection of Soups

Did I ever mention we don't like to take the easy route?  So last Saturday when we decided we wanted to make a selection of soups we didn't just choose 1 or 2 kinds to make.  We planned to make 5 soups and 1 crockpot meaty taco soup but ended up with 7 kinds in total!

We rarely get to eat dinner before 8.30pm and often it is gone 9pm by the time we're home settled and food is prepared.  Pretty late considering there are evenings where I'm falling asleep by 10pm!  So after teaching we get home, eat and sleep!  There must be a better way!  So we thought by preparing a TONNE of soups we would have lots of frozen easy to prepare soups in a short amount of time = easy dinner!  If we remembered we could take them out in the morning, if not we could do a quick defrost in boiling water.

Here are the kinds of soup we made and some photos of the day's work!

Oh, and where I'M from - tea can be called dinner!  Hence the category of this blog post!

1.  Taco Soup Crockpot - thank you Pinterest for helping me find this and especially to Crockpot365 for this YUMMY recipe.  Find it here!

Super easy to make, firstly to brown the meat - then just dumping a load of cans into the crockpot!

This was so filling and so good!  With so many beans to chew into and then the texture and flavour of the meat and the slightly spicy taco flavouring it was really good.  We ate this for about a week - and could have gone on and on and on!  We'll be making this again FOR SURE!

2.  Vanaema's Harvest Vegetable Soup - a quick phone call to get a list of ingredients and we were ready to try out Jonathan's grandmother's famous soup!  We're excited she shared her recipe with us but can't claim that ours was better than hers!

3.  Grandma's Creamy Carrot and Parsnip Soup - My Grandma's turn this time!  A really sweet soup with the carrot and parsnip but really thick and very tasty!

4.  Sweet Potato and Molasses Soup - Thank you Rose Reisman for this soup!  And it's a healthy one too!!  We loved the flavour of this soup - the molasses really brings a different taste to the soup and I LOVE sweet potatoes so what a great combination!

5.  Tomato and Basil Soup - a nice simple one with lots and lots of tomatoes (BOO on having to peel them all however!) and some fresh basil from our herb garden, yey!

6.  Leek and Potato Soup - another easy one to make one of our favourite soups.  I believe we used this recipe from BBC's Good Food, just a simple one using basic ingredients!  

7.  Butternut Squash and Roasted Garlic Soup - For one last soup, we had a lot of butternut squash leftover as they are SO big!  So we roasted it up with some fresh herbs and also some garlic. Whizz them up and there you have an easy extra soup with leftover veg!

*** Careful while peeling the butternut squash - Jonathan ended up with lots of little prickles but also orange fingers and hands for over a week!! ***

We cooled all of our soups down for the rest of the day and the evening was spent carefully ladling the soups into smaller ziploc portions.  We made room in our freezer to firstly lay them flat until completely frozen (some took way longer than others to freeze!) and then when they could stand up we gained some space back in the freezer as they fit nicely stacked or in the freezer door.  

I wrote the instructions for cooking, or how much cream or milk to add, or any extra seasoning required when heated up on 1 of each type and referred to that one each time we cooked a soup.

An important thing:  We did not add any cream or milk to these recipes as we weren't sure how well that would freeze and thaw.  We added milk usually to the soups, unless we had cream in from something else so save that for another day!

We ended up with a good 60 portions of soup so we're definitely ready for the Winter months of late evening piano teaching finishes now :-)