Saturday, June 29, 2013

Summer Produce Bounty

Okay, first of all, my apologies for falling out of the blogosphere for nearly two months.  Work was crazy, and it was all I could do to just keep my head above the water.  The good news is that the old job is wrapping up and then I have about 7 weeks before the new job kicks in, which gives me some time to get my life back on track.

The other good news is that while I haven't been blogging about it, we have certainly been keeping up with our real food diet.  In fact, we are now three months in and doing great.  I'm finding at this point, it's much easier to stay on track because we are so much more knowledgeable.  That doesn't mean that we still don't have questions, or make mistakes, but that we have figured out the daily routine pretty well by now, so it's not as stressful as it was at first, when we were learning everything on the fly.  Plus, with all of the seasonal summer fruits and veggies that are now in the markets, we have a much larger variety to choose from.  Take, for example, some of our meals over the past week.

We joined a CSA this year, which means that every Tuesday we receive a big box of seasonal produce.  This week, our box included cabbage, beets, snow peas, tomatoes, zucchini, yellow squash, potatoes, onions, and broccoli.  Upon arriving home Tuesday night, I decided to scrap our original dinner plans and take advantage of some of these beautiful veggies that had been harvested just hours before.  We sliced the zucchini and yellow squash, and the broccoli, along with some mushrooms that I had in the fridge, and threw them into a skillet with a little olive oil.  After sauteeing for a few minutes, we added some whole wheat fusilli pasta and a little garlic and tossed it all until it was warm.  We scooped it onto a plate, grated a little fresh Parmesan on top, and sat down to a simple, easy dinner.  For dessert, we enjoyed freshly picked peaches with a little whipped cream on top. 

On Wednesday, we put together what became one of my favorite dinners thus far.  I mentioned that when we started this journey, I relied heavily on several great blogs on the internet.  I have visited Lisa Leake's 100 Days of Real Food more than any other site, and on Wednesday, we used three of her recipes to create an excellent meal.  We started with the beautiful tomatoes from our CSA, along with fresh basil from a plant I recently purchased, and made caprese panini sandwiches.  On the side of the sandwiches, we enjoyed zucchini and kale chips.  The dinner was wonderful, and it felt great knowing that we were indulging in such a fresh, vegetarian meal.

In addition to all of our veggies from our CSA and the local farmer's markets, we have also been making weekly trips to a local farm to pick fresh fruit.  We've been eating the fruit fresh, along with mixing it into numerous recipes, some new, and some adapted favorites.  The apricot ginger jam the I attempted last week smelled and tasted amazing, but unfortunately it never really set, so it has more of a sauce consistency.  Tonight, however, I had two successes when I made a batch of raspberry jam and also managed to adapt one of my favorite recipes for blueberry buckle to become real food friendly.  Check back in the next post for those recipes, along with a recap of how I managed to feed real food to 45 campers over the past three weeks.