CSA Week 6, Back from Holiday Break

Carrots and fennel are technically in the same family and although they couldn't be more different, they compliment each other beautifully.  This week French Farms is harvesting his carrots and we're harvesting our fennel for a flavor bomb combo in all of your kitchens.  Hands down my favorite thing to do with both of these is roast them, especially together.  Carrots are naturally considered sweet and fennel is super sugary too, but it's anise type flavor can be overpowering when it is raw;   roasting both of them together creates an earthy syrupy side dish.  Cooked fennel turns out a lot like cooked onions; it brings complexity to a dish and compliments many other vegetables and meats.   

 THIS WEEK'S SHARE:

This week's share is loaded with flavor items; you've got scallions, fennel and assorted herb bunches to make your meals impactful and saucy.  You can use them to make an herbaceous salad, maybe a potato salad... you can make my favorite Colombian scallion sauce to go with shrimp and tostones or you can make an herb pesto.  The sky is the limit when it comes to herbs. 

A head of lettuce is one of the simplest items in a CSA share, it usually needs no explanation and it be hard to get creative with it.  Check out this article called "Lettuce Is So Much More than Salad.  Here Are 10 More Ways to Eat It."  The lettuce wraps and the grilled lettuce recipes really stood out to me. 

Chris French is harvesting assorted cabbages this week.  Some of you will end up with napa cabbage and others will get round green cabbage.  These two varieties are pretty different and lends themselves to different cooking styles, but if you're open minded they can be interchangeable for the most part.  They both store really well so if you are overwhelmed with making use of your CSA share this week, feel free to keep the cabbage in the fridge for future use.  They can both be fermented for a long lasting probiotic flavor bomb; a lot of you are familiar with the home made kimchi we sell at the farmers market.  They can also both be sauteed with many different flavor profiles, you can go the simple ginger-garlic route, Thai curry with sesame oil works with cabbage too good and there's also the Southern style cabbage cooked with bacon and broth.  My favorite food website of all time, 101cookbooks.com, has a beautiful recipe for a colorful peanut coleslaw.  Just looking at her photos makes me hungry and the ingredients in this recipe are so simple that you could probably whip it up without a trip to the store.

Starfruit is also known as carambola and it's considered an exotic fruit in most of the country, but for us in South Florida it is a common backyard fruit (this picture is an excerpt from Tiffany's book Forager, which is about common edible plants found around Miami).  Carambola are beautiful small trees so many people have them in their yards.  They grow really well in our hot tropical climate and produce fruit two to three times per year.  This week we're including Bee Heaven Farm's beautiful startfruit crop in the CSA.  Starfruit is a sweet juicy fruit that is best eaten right out of hand, but cutting star shaped slices is pretty irresistible and adds a special touch to a breakfast plate, a fruit salad or a snack.  They are a good source of fiber and vitamin C.