Sunday, September 14, 2014

CSA Week 8

Here's what's in the box this week:
bell pepper
corn
onions
broccoli
eggplant
zucchini
watermelon
potatoes
hot peppers

Extras:
zucchini from work friend
pumpkin puree


Cheesy corn bake. Allison got to use her roux skills again this week with this dish. Yum yum yum.


Zucchini Buffalo chicken bites. I'm not sure what the zucchini really adds to this dish...it's in the breading, but overall the chicken was very tasty and buffalo-y. The breading had A LOT of components and then just gets covered with hot sauce....not that I am saying that's a bad thing! And for those of you that don't know what to do with the left over buttermilk that you always seem to have around, I use buttermilk powder for these type of things. I found mine on Amazon.


Zucchini Fries. I keep seeing these on Pinterest and so decided to give them a try. I just love zucchini...think this may be my last batch since the days are getting colder.  :(


Southwest Pizza. We took some liberties with this recipe. As you can tell from the grill marks, we decided to throw the dough on the grill. Since we were doing that, I mixed all the topping ingredients together so I could just spread them on the pizza. It was very tasty. I also made the avocado cream with yogurt instead. The dough was one of my no knead bread recipes, I used an olive oil whole wheat dough.


Spiced Pumpkin Syrup. I came across this recipe while going through my rss feed on Saturday morning. It was pretty chilly in the house and it sounded sooooo good. I had some squash puree in my freezer from last season and thought this would be a good use for it. I had 1 cup of squash so I doubled the recipe and added in the whole amount of squash (what would I do with that extra 1/2 cup anyway???). When doubling the syrup, I didn't double my sugar (maybe 1.5 rather than 2x), so in the end this wasn't too candy sweet as some syrups can be. This would be great over pancakes or french toast...or of course in your morning coffee.


Since I now have all this wonderful syrup, I decided to find a zucchini bread recipe that used maple syrup and just swapped them out. This happens to also have whole wheat flour...guess I'm making up for the sins of our casseroles from last week.


Roasted eggplant spread. This is when having a food processor really comes in handy. You roughly chop your veggies then roast them. Add them to your processor and whiz away. I don't usually have tahini in my house since I don't have much use for it other than hummus so I subbed almond butter instead. Yum! Great with tortilla chips, but would also be a great sandwich spread with something sweet like honey roasted ham...


Sausage and pepper pasta. I still had 2 bell peppers left over from last week so needed something to use them up. I like the idea of sausage and peppers but didn't want to make a sandwich, so trolled the internet for a reinvention of these flavors and found it in a casserole. Last week I grilled up some chicketta patties thinking I would put them in a pasta later on and thought they would be great in this dish. Chicketta is like porchetta only with chicken not pork. It's an Italian slow roasted dish with lots of herbs and fennel. These smell and taste a lot like sausage, so that's why I used it here. I get these at the Italian market down the street from my house, and I don't let myself go in there that often...they have real prosciutto there...deadly to my wallet!

Not pictured is the broccoli cheese potato soup, as I haven't made it yet. Will probably get to it tomorrow. I also have decided to make hot sauce with my hot peppers. I found a recipe that uses a similar approach to how Tabasco makes their hot sauce and it involves fermenting...I'm very excited!! Just waiting for the peppers that are turning red to fully turn, then I will be on my way to hot sauce!!

Extra weekend project:

I also decided to try making my own liquid soap from some bar soap I had laying around (and probably wouldn't use). I used this recipe. I came across it a while back on Pinterest. The above photo isn't totally accurate as I had to use 2 bars of cetaphil to get the 8 oz needed for the 1 gal of water. I had read that bars with extra moisturizing ended up being too liquidy so I added in an extra bar from Bath and Body Works for insurance. I don't think I let my soap completely dissolve the first time around since I still had some foam on top 12 hours later. I heated it up again and added more glycerin and gave it another go.



I now have a gallon of this stuff. It's still a bit more liquid than soap you buy but I think it would work great for what I want and I used stuff I probably wasn't going to! Score!!
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