The Farmshare Project: Week 10

By some miracle, I actually remembered to decant all of last week's produce into the Display Basket (aka the big basket I use to hold all the lemons we strip from our friend's tree) and take a picture for your viewing pleasure.

I KNOW! Big times.

Wanna know what else was Big Times last week? The fact that we got the whole share because our neighbors, with whom we share the share (heh), were out of town and not available to eat their share of produce.

I think I just used, "share", every possible way it can be used. Fun.

Now, don't get all excited to see how we were possibly able to do away with a full family-sized share's worth of produce in a week because it's not as magnificent as you're imagining. I didn't come up with a magical recipe that kills two pounds of collards in a single meal or turns 7 pints of strawberries (!) into one dessert.

I did, however, do *something* with nearly everything and, in most cases, I remembered to take photos. So, unlike last week, you're not going to have to use all your imagining powers to figure out what these things look like.

PHEW, I know.

Wow. That's a lotta strawberries.

Last week's box had:
Carrots
Cauliflower
Chard
Cilantro
Collard greens
Fava beans
Green garlic
Kohlrabi
Lettuce
Onions
Rapini
Summer squash
2 baskets Strawberries
5 baskets of strawberries (neighbor's Fruit Bounty option)
1/2 dozen eggs (neighbor's egg option)

And their fate was:
We ate them
Carrots: Juiced! + Broccoli noodle salad
Cauliflower: Added to Punjab choley to create a Punjab Choley Gobi (Gobi is the Punjab word for Cauliflower. Look at that - you just learned a thing.) dish
Cilantro: Chopped and added to Punjab Choley Gobi dish
Lettuce: Chopped cobb salad
Green garlic: Chopped and added to Punjab Choley Gobi
Onions: Chopped and added to Punjab Choley Gobi
2 baskets of Strawberries: Strawberry sorbet!
1 egg: Chopped Cobb Salad
Squash: Pasta Primavera
Rapini + Broccoli from previous weeks: Broccoli noodle salad


We left them at the scene of the crime
Collards
Chard

We gave them to other neighbors when they weren't looking
Carrots
Lettuce
5 baskets of strawberries
Squash
Eggs

We stored them
Onions
Kohlrabi
Fava beans

And because I feel like it's not fun to leave a post at that, without a recipe or fun story about how I'm going to brutally slay a dozen cyclists with improper bike handling and end up on the news, I shall now unveil the juicer which has heretofore remained quiet.

Firstly, thank you for all your reccos on juicers. You are all very wise in the ways of juice, and, from what I saw when I researched your different suggestions, you're also ambitious with the juicing!

I am not.

I just want to make carrot juice and then maybe some day some apple juice when our tree that looks like a stick produces more than 7 in a year. And also on the Maybe Some Day list - I'd like to juice the African Horned Cucumber Jelly Melons in the event that they do more than sit in my garden with their two leaves and don't grow.

The melons are being sort of lame is all.

ButBUT the carrots are not. And the juicer is not. Lame, that is.

And I found all that out last weekend when I had a reckoning with the produce piling up around our house.

See, firstly, I went to our neighbors' and picked their cherries. Then I returned home covered in sticky blechiness, pitted a shit ton of cherries and wrestled a few pie crusts together which momentarily broke my pastry cutter.

This all went back together fine when I found the screw that'd popped loose and landed in the dough. I'm just glad I found it before the pie was baked. CRUNCH. Not good.

All to bake Bubba his annual fresh cherry pie which he has since demolished.

Some of our cherries are in here, too. Like,  maybe 5.

Then, I went for the strawberries. Because you saw how many mother effing strawberries came in the share last week (see gratuitous strawberry footage above) and how the hell else can you eat so many strawberries if you don't have A Plan? You can't. You will die. Or your kitchen will smell really foul of rotted fruit and there will be flies.

NO ONE LIKES A HOUSE FULL OF FLIES.

Gross.

Anyway, I made more sorbet. And this time I took photos so you wouldn't have to imagine what strawberry sorbet looks like even though I don't think it's much of a stretch. You're smart. I know you are.

Which is why you'll forgive me for posting stupid not-helpful pictures of sorbet while it's still in the ice cream maker.

And once that was done and I realized I'd left the juicer as the only clean appliance remaining in the big appliance cabinet (both food processors, the ice cream maker, the stand mixer and the blender had been used and dirtied in the pie and sorbet making process), I felt I needed to finally bow at the foot of the juicer.

Pay some respect to the machine that can reduce a 2 lb bag of carrots to a refreshing pint glass of juice.

So, that's what I did.

I scrubbed and trimmed all the carrots I've been storing up from the farmshare over the last however many weeks, assembled and flipped on the juicer and in HOLY CRAP 2 minutes, I had a lovely orange brew just ready to be chilled and sucked down.

Sound sexy? It's not. But it is good. And these organic carrots have the silkiest, sweetest, most not-disgusting-for-a-juice-that's-all-vegetables flavor that *SMACK* makes you want to smile and feel healthy.

Because you do. Both things.

Also, it makes a great orange mulch for the composter, which is a weird bonus. I was really just glad to be using the juicer and had started making up reasons for why it was so great so that I could justify all the space it consumes in the cabinet.

But I love it! And I love carrot juice.

The end.