In week thirteen of our CSA season, we got: seven ears of corn, one bunch green onions, one head green leaf lettuce, two cucumbers, two yellow squash, two zucchini, one bag potatoes, one bunch collard greens, two bunches spinach, five stalks of rhubarb, one (giant) bunch parsley, several carrots, several banana peppers, and a lot of yellow tomatoes.
Rhubarb
I have to say that I was shocked (and dismayed, honestly) to see the rhubarb. I thought rhubarb was an early season crop; we got a lot at the beginning of the season but haven’t seen any for weeks. I’m not a rhubarb hater, exactly, but I don’t like the fact that it requires extra work to make it palatable. I knew I could use it in a fruit crisp, but I just didn’t really feel like it. Finally, inspiration struck in the form of this gummy recipe from the Mommypotamus. I’d been dying to try out the recipe ever since my gelatin arrived in the mail but I didn’t have any lemon juice. Perhaps rhubarb could be a good replacement for lemon juice? They’re both sour, right? 
So, I made rhubarb juice:
Rhubarb juice
I then used some of the juice to make these gummy candies:
Rhubarb gummy candies
The texture is great but the flavor needs some work. I could really taste the rhubarb when I was mixing it with the honey and stevia, but once I added the gelatin it mostly disappeared. Maybe I could boil the juice to make the flavor more concentrated? I may be experimenting with that one, especially since I still have a lot of rhubarb in the freezer…
Greens
I’m tired of spinach. It’s darn tasty with bacon and onions, but unfortunately even very tasty things can become tiresome when you eat them all the time. So, I decided to be proactive and freeze all of the spinach that I knew we weren’t going to get to before it went bad. I have to say that I am quite proud of myself for this. It took a little while to get it all prepped for the freezer, but now we have a bag full of spinach ready to cooked for some meal down the road.
Spinach ready for the freezer
As has now become my habit, I used the collard greens in soup. I’ve found collard greens to be somewhat tough to eat in the past but I think they’re awesome in soup, particularly in soups with a lot of strong flavors. I steam the greens first before adding them to the soup.
Corn
Jesse was nice enough to take over the job of blanching, cutting and freezing last week’s corn. It didn’t seem to take long, although it did generate rather a lot of dishes. I was surprised to see that all those ears didn’t actually yield more than a cup or two of frozen corn. Apparently they were rather small under all the silk and husks. Still, there’s now plenty of corn if Jesse ever feels like making a batch of tortilla soup.
Tomatoes
Since our garden is now regularly producing tomatoes I ended up with a few too many tomatoes on hand last week. Although I’d originally planned on drying excess tomatoes, I decided that the CSA tomatoes were not good candidates for dehydrating because they tend to be excessively juicy. Instead, I decided to make a small batch of tomato sauce for the freezer. After agonizing over whether I needed to skin the tomatoes, I decided to just cut off the stem ends and then throw everything in my blender.
Tomatoes ready to be blended
I cooked the blended tomatoes for several hours until the sauce was pretty thick, then poured it into a container for the freezer. I ended up with just about two cups of sauce. Hopefully it’s tasty!
Cucumbers
I haven’t fermented any cucumbers yet, partly because I’m lazy but also partly because I’m really just enjoying eating them fresh. I’ve discovered that they’re great sliced thinly then added to canned tuna and cherry tomatoes. I’m pretty excited about this because I’m always looking for (tasty) ways to get more fish into my diet.
Zucchini and Yellow Squash
So I always hear that during the summer people are just dying to give away boatloads of excess summer squash, but I have the opposite problem…I want more summer squash! I actually bought an extra three at the store last week because the four that we received in our share did not seem like nearly enough. I love summer squash—it’s super tasty and can be cooked in so many different ways. I guess I’ll just have to try to grow some of my own next year!
This post is shared at Real Food Wednesday, Fresh Foods Blog Hop, Fill Those Jars Friday, Fresh Bites Friday, Freaky Friday, Sunday School, the Morristribe’s Homesteader Blog Carnival, and Monday Mania.
What’s coming in your CSA box? (Or coming out of your garden?)
Posts on Whole Natural Life may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase through an affiliate link, I will earn a small commission to help support this site. Rest assured that I will never endorse products that I don’t personally recommend. Thank you for your support!
I would trade you our CSA’s overload of summer squash for your leafy greens and spinach in a heartbeat! Here in Virginia, we’re moving into the winter squashes … delicata last week and butternut this week. I feel some soup coming on ….
Denise recently posted..Almost New York Bagels
Ah, wouldn’t it be nice if we could do cross-country CSA trades?
That’s terrific that you’re buying extra zucchini! I used to get grief for serving it too often (like more than once a week) when it was in season (I love it grilled!), so give Jesse a poke in the ribs from me.
Haha. I didn’t know Jesse used to not like zucchini! Not that I’ve actually asked him if he likes it now…but he eats it without complaint!