What I Got: Summer squash, onions, beets, kale, carrots, eggplant, green beans, cherry tomatoes, cabbage How I Used It: Chopped Up Carrot TopsLast time, I threw out a brownish mess of half-rotten carrot greens. So when I got a new bunch of carrots in Bag No. 3, I was determined to use them quickly. I saw lots of recipes online for carrot-top pesto, but my previous pesto experiments have yielded basically inedible results. I was getting ready to just eat them raw when I came across Love and Lemons’ recipe for carrot green chimichurri (no blending or food processing required!). Despite the fact that I had literally none of the spices the recipe called for, I forged ahead, swapping the white wine vinegar for lemon juice and bulking it up with a little cilantro I had bought at the grocery store. I dumped the resulting paste into a Tupperware full of quinoa and chickpeas, and a #NotSoSadDeskLunch was served. MORE: Watch This: Your Desk Is the Hottest New Lunch Spot Kept It Boring It certainly would be nice to do something grandiose and unexpected with every vegetable that hits my cutting board. But sometimes the tried-and-true-and-totally-boring option prevails. That’s what happened with my kale (green smoothies…yawn) and my two eggplants, which I uncreatively employed in an eggplant parmesan. I followed the basic gist of this recipe, but added some feta that was hanging out in my fridge. I give the two-cheese treatment two thumbs up. Made Some Kind of Cabbage Slaw, Like, Every Day I had never purchased a head of cabbage before receiving one in my CSA, and I now I can’t imagine life without one in the crisper. A head of cabbage is a gift that keeps on giving. No matter how long I keep it in there, it never seems to lose that hardy crunch or delicate sweetness. My favorite slaw? Half a head of thinly sliced cabbage with two ears’ worth of fresh corn kernels, tossed with olive oil, lime juice, and salt to taste. Sweet, summery, and stupid easy. Dropped the Beet I’ve been microwaving a ton of CSA veggies lately. Why? Because microwaving is one of the best cooking methods for preserving nutrients, that’s why. And when I sliced open these gorgeous chiogga beets the other day, I was psyched about cooking them in the ‘wave. I certainly wasn’t going to roast the damned things in a hot oven for 45 minutes in August. Four minutes later, they were perfectly fork tender, but they were covered in disconcerting black spots, inside and out. They also tasted incredibly bitter—nature’s subtle way of saying, Don’t eat this, idiot! Sadly, I relinquished the beets and acknowledged that, at least this time, the microwave failed me. Next time I’ll try a roasting method like this one, heat be damned. Luckily, I rebounded from the loss by transforming my carrots into carrot noodles (or canoodles, as I’ve taken to calling them). I don’t have a veggie spiralizer, so I made do by halving the carrots and shaving them into ribbons with my plain old vegetable peeler. They were perfect warmed up in a saucepan with jarred marinara and a little olive oil. MORE: One-Pot Dinner: Red Pepper Beet Soup The Final Word Organic veggies go bad way faster than their conventional counterparts (here’s how to make them last longer!). That means anyone signed up for a CSA needs to develop a sense of veggie urgency: As soon as you unload that bag into the crisper drawer, make a plan for how each one is going to get into your belly. If I’d done that, I could have avoided tossing out a yellow squash that went soft and brown after a week. But I think I’m finally honing that master-planner mindset. And I’m realizing that while it’s fun to be creative (canoodles FTW!), other times life calls for the same boring green smoothie you’ve been whipping up for years.
