I’m always so sad when the end of strawberry season rolls around, but I would be less so if I remembered that peach season was just around the corner. We get beautiful peaches in Maryland, sweet and juicy and perfect, every summer. I’m always so delighted to see the peaches in the pickup, and I’m very careful when loading them so as not to squeeze them against other vegetables and break their skins. I’ll let the bread get all squished before I bruise a peach.

Anyway, week 3 of the summer CSA: spinach, a head of romaine lettuce, patty pan squash, white mushrooms, a pint of blueberries, English peas, cucumbers, peaches!, eggs, and bread (Great Harvest onion rye).

We’re inundated with vegetables now. Despite my optimistic words of last week, and my resolution to keep up with the CSA every week, we still had kale and green beans left in the fridge when the next pickup came along. Oh well, they’re still good…

Yay, Breezy Willow’s summer CSA is back! (Though because I’ve been picking up their spring CSA for months already, it just feels like a continuation.)

This week: spinach, lettuce, beets, sweet potatoes, pattypan squash, cucumbers, white mushrooms, a quart of strawberries, radishes, eggs, and bread (Great Harvest white).

Seeing the pattypan squash always makes me slightly nervous because my skin reacts poorly to something in the squash — the first time I cut some up for cooking (they’re great sauteed in butter, with a little salt), my left hand got red and swollen. (My right hand was fine; it was holding the knife.) Now I wear gloves when preparing squash. Fortunately I seem to be able to eat it without any problems.

We didn’t cook anything yesterday so most of this food is still sitting in the fridge. I did cut up some strawberries to have with ice cream, though. I’ve also been nipping a strawberry or two every time I open the fridge. I have a feeling the strawberries won’t be around for very much longer.

Having slacked off on CSA posts, let me do a quick catch-up. The end of May brought the last two weeks of the CSA. Here’s week 11:

That’s a head of romaine lettuce, some spinach, beets, white potatoes, eggplant, green beans, and the usual eggs and bread (Great Harvest challah). I really love getting the beets because it’s like getting two vegetables in one — you can eat the beets, and you can saute the greens as a separate side.

Week 12 brought more strawberries, cucumbers, red potatoes, Vidalia onions, really big green zucchini, radishes, and white chard. I got Breezy Willow eggs this time, and a loaf of Great Harvest’s Old-Fashioned White.

I love it when we get double quarts of strawberries — makes it easy to split the share. I’ll miss the Vidalia onions, since the summer CSA is local whereas the spring CSA is far-ranging… but Vidalia onions are easy enough to get at home.

I turned the red potatoes into Ina Garten’s potato salad, which was, as expected, delicious. (Interlude: K saw me steaming the potatoes under a kitchen towel and said, “Why are you doing that?” “It’s what Ina said to do,” I said. “Okay,” he said. “Whatever Ina says, goes.”)

I never mess with Ina Garten’s recipes. They’re unfailingly reliable.

This week in the CSA: a riot of greens and reds. We have spring onions, romaine lettuce, a bunch of radishes, red chard, strawberries, apples, baby bok choy, and cucumbers. Also bread (Great Harvest challah) and Breezy Willow’s own eggs.

I love getting Breezy Willow’s eggs because their heritage hens lay speckled and colored eggs. I can’t really taste any difference, but they sure are pretty to look at.

They are terrible for boiled eggs, though; since they’re so fresh, they are very hard to peel.

Anyway, back to this week’s pickup. I love this recipe for butter-braised radishes; it takes away the harsh bite and leaves them nutty and sweet. Halfway through the simmer I throw the radish greens in to cook as well; they retain some of the bite but get softened by the butter and the long braising time.

It’s not pretty but it’s incredibly good. Tastes like spring.

It feels kind of silly making an update because I’m actually going to pick up week 10’s produce later today. But I figured I’d go ahead and get this post out, so as not to crowd the next post. Week 9:

Green leaf lettuce, green beans, oranges, eggs, bread, spring onions, beets, strawberries (from North Carolina), red potatoes, and mushrooms. I was really excited about the spring onions, but then I just ended up using them like giant scallions.

Whenever you see beets, it means you’ll also see beets on the trade table. I would roll my eyes at the non-beet-users among my fellow CSA members, but I have to admit I have the same impulse regarding kohlrabi.

Now that we have the kid at home, weeknight hours are much more precious. I’ve started cooking the vegetables in batches, for easy reheating later. So far it’s been pretty easy; I just mince a lot of garlic (my sister points out that an even bigger time-saver would be to get one of those big jars of pre-minced garlic) and spend a couple of hours at the beginning of the week prepping and cooking.

Here we have green beans, beet greens, and diced eggplant, all ready to finish chilling in the fridge. The process for cooking all of them was the same: heat oil in a wok, add minced garlic and a bit of chili flake, and let it sizzle a little bit so that the oil gets flavored. Add sliced spring onion, and let it cook just a tad longer. Then add in the vegetable and toss to coat, stirring occasionally, until it’s cooked. Salt and pepper to taste.

(I remember asking my mother how she knew when something was cooked. “You’ll just know,” she said. The voice of experience. Now I know to keep tasting the food, to recognize a good color, and to pull it immediately from the heat when it’s done.)

Last week: chard, romaine lettuce, kale, eggplant, radishes, strawberries, cucumber, and apples. This week was a bonus item so we got almond granola in place of eggs.

I cooked down the chard and kale with some olive oil and garlic, and stashed it in the fridge for quick weekday meals. We had the lettuce as salad (my preferred salad topping is soy sauce and an over-easy egg, whereas K prefers a quick vinaigrette of balsamic vinegar and blood orange olive oil*). The eggplant and some of the radishes are still hanging out in the fridge, and K turned the cucumber into a garlicky Hungarian cucumber salad to go with his grandmother’s recipe for chicken paprikash. It’s incredibly good. Maybe I’ll share the recipe here, if he allows it.

There was also supposed to be a loaf of bread, but I forgot to pick up the bread because it was right next to the strawberries. In-season strawberries! I was so excited that I bought an extra quart.

They’re not Maryland strawberries, I think, because the ones at Larriland Farm aren’t ready yet. These are probably from somewhere down south where it’s been warmer. But there’s nothing like the intense flavor of an in-season, fresh-picked, almost-too-ripe strawberry. When I bought the extra quart, I was entertaining the idea of making strawberry shortcake, or maybe cooking them down into a coulis to top ice cream.

Who was I kidding? We ate them all just as they were, licking the juice from our fingers. Man, I can’t wait until strawberry harvest hits Maryland. I intend to do some serious damage to the stocks at Larriland and at the farmer’s markets.

…Just a reminder, because Jessie made a comment last week: unlike Breezy Willow’s summer CSA, their spring CSA is not local and a lot of the produce is from farms up and down the East Coast. Anything out of cold storage is from Maryland, but the citrus is from Florida, and then as warmer weather moves up the coast, we get greens from Georgia and North Carolina; we don’t start getting freshly harvested stuff from Maryland until May. It’s all from organic, natural, or IPM farms, so I’m still happy to support it, but just in case anyone was thinking they could find this stuff in Maryland farmer’s markets… you’ll have to wait just a little longer.

(I’m bursting with impatience, myself. I can’t wait for the berry harvest!)

* We got the blood orange olive oil from LOVE in Frederick. It’s worth a visit if you find yourself out there; they sell flavored oils and vinegars, and they let you taste and sniff as much as you want. We got a mushroom scented oil as well, and had to stop ourselves from buying more.

These past couple weeks flew by for me, as we were traveling a lot. Fortunately our kid was very well-behaved in airplanes and slept almost the entire time we were in the air. As for me, I was less than thrilled with the culinary delights available at Newark airport: overpriced sandwiches and sad-looking shrinkwrapped fruit were my only alternatives to chips and candy. Unfortunately, it’s hard to sneak a decent meal past the TSA (no liquids over 3oz) or the border police (no fruits or vegetables). I’m so relieved to be back home.

Week 6 of the CSA brought us green leaf lettuce, apples, cucumbers, beets, carrots, grapefruit, kale, eggplant, bread (Great Harvest White) and eggs:

The good thing about cold storage items (the apples, beets, and carrots) is that they stayed perfectly fresh in the refrigerator while we were out of town. The bread, eggs, eggplant, cucumbers, and kale also held up fairly well in our absence. The lettuce was the only unfortunate casualty.

Week 7 of the CSA: green beans, spinach, green leaf lettuce, mushrooms, oranges, Vidalia onions, red potatoes, yellow squash, bread (Great Harvest Herb de Breezy Willow) and eggs:

We ate the lettuce with a quick dressing of mayonnaise, anchovy, garlic, olive oil, lemon juice, and Parmesan cheese. I had been aiming in the general direction of a Caesar salad, but I must have gotten the proportions wrong; it didn’t taste at all similar. Still, it turned out pretty tasty.

Another pleasant surprise was the pasta bake that we made with whole wheat rotini, ground beef, tomato sauce, sauteed mushrooms and onions, and mozzarella, feta, and cheddar cheeses; the flavors combined beautifully and masked the taste of the whole wheat pasta (which I personally find rather unpleasant). I like pasta bakes; they come together quickly and reheat easily on busy weeknights.

Finally, the yellow squash became sublime when sliced and tossed with olive oil, salt, pepper, and garlic powder, then roasted briefly at 400 degrees. I generally prefer green zucchini to yellow squash but this treatment was frankly delightful. I’ll be making it again in our toaster oven as the summer goes on.

This week’s CSA pickup is the usual mix of fresh vegetables combined with last year’s harvest out of cold storage. We got Brussels sprouts, zucchini, sweet potatoes, grapefruit, oranges, assorted apples, spinach, mushrooms, and the usual eggs and bread (Great Harvest honey bunny).

The honey bunny bread is particularly adorable. It’s their normal honey wheat bread recipe, but shaped into a bunny.

They also had hot cross buns available as an option. I love it when bakeries get into the holidays.