CSA Week 2

Hope you all are enjoying working through a surprise box of veggies as much as I am! Here's what's in the box this week:

6 ears of corn
2 tomatoes
2 summer squash
1 zucchini
8 new potatoes
2 sm heads broccoli
1 red onion
1 yellow onion
1 head cabbage
1 pint raspberries

Recipes:
Parisian gnocchi with squash and corn
Spicy chicken tacos with corn relish
Zucchini and corn saute
Colcannon
Cabbage Slaw with broccoli

I made the gnocchi recipe the day I got the box, I have been thinking about this recipe abstractly since last week and thought I would probably have all the things to make it this week. Some tweaks - the recipe called for a pint of cherry tomatoes that you blister in the oven - I had some large whole tomatoes but decided to go for a can of fire roasted tomatoes, drained, instead. Also, the main reason I chose this recipe was because I had a package of premade gnocchi, so I used that (also I didn't realize that Parisian gnocchi was a specific type of gnocchi until I was ready to make the recipe, oops). Still turned out delicious, I liked that you saute the gnocchi themselves so they don't turn into a mush of pasta.

Spicy pulled chicken, ready for tacos. This was a nice, quick recipe. My friend and I made this and the squash saute after work on Friday. Yum! It uses chipotle chiles and jalapenos for the spice. Chipotle in adobo are really nice things to have - they come in a can in the Mexican section of the grocery store, be warned, a little goes a long way! I take whatever I didn't use for the first recipe and put everything in a jar and keep it in the fridge. That jar will last for pretty much all eternity - the adobo sauce has lots of vinegar, coupled with the heat and no self respecting bacteria would dare grow in there. Also, so we have all the education bases covered - a chipotle chile is a smoked jalapeno. Yum, yum, yum.

This recipe called for summer squash, but I had used ours in the gnocchi recipe, so I used the medium sized zucchini instead. It also called for topping the dish with sunflower seeds - in our haste to eat, we forgot this topping, but I might top the leftovers, I think the added crunch would be nice. The cheese binds everything together so it's a very elegant side dish. Nice little bit of heat as well with the red pepper flakes.

This is the corn-feta relish for the tacos. I decided to lightly cook the corn when I was cooking the other corn for the zucchini dish. It was a very nice addition to the taco - the saltiness from the feta and zing from the lime really made the taco sing. Plus the corn added a nice crunch to something that might have been all one texture.

Dinner's on! We realized later that we forgot the avocado and the sunflower seeds, oh well. Still very tasty!

I get the joy of dispatching the cabbage, my friend said she was not overly fond of cabbage. I was thinking that since I have potatoes, I would take some of it and make colcannon as a side for some of the leftover chicken (we added a few extra pieces to the mix and didn't shred them to have for meals later in the week). I also have the small heads of broccoli, which might go into my cabbage slaw, or they might get roasted on their own as a side as well. It always seems like a head of cabbage is more than you think, so I believe that I will be enjoying slaw for a week or so...