Weekly Farm Challenge 6/21/12 - 6/27/12

This week we received:  beets, radishes, green onions, zucchini, swiss chard, garlic scapes, cabbage, kale, spinach, romaine, butter lettuce, oregano and thyme.  AND we completely outdid ourselves!

Couscous and Saucy combined efforts for a night of farm freshness and wine!

The much loved kale chips made an appearance (poor picture, but tasty)

Salad of butter lettuce, radishes, avocado, red onion and lime vinagrette

Sliced zucchini served with roasted red pepper olive oil with oregano and thyme.

And mini spanakopitas with spinach and green onions.

Grapes also took on the greens challenge and found a new love - Kale Chips!

She also whipped up some grilled romaine and green onions

And the ever popular, hunky cabbage dish - haluski!

Looking forward to another week of freshness, experiments and hopefully more Kale Chips!!! 

Weekly Farm Challenge 6/14/12 - 6/21/12

This week we received:  strawberries, rhubarb, beets, swiss chard, spring greens, green leaf lettuce, romaine, spinach, broccoli, garlic scapes, and parsley.  It was a busy week, but here are our attempts:

Grapes challenged herself to try her greens for the first time.  It looks awesome, but she said it was a failure.  :-( Better luck next week!!

Couscous, while she would love to experiment further with beets, she simply cannot help but eat them all after cooking them!  Here they are roasted!  YUM!

The broccoli was also roasted and devoured (so quickly a picture was not taken!)

She also tackled the intimidating rhubarb for a tasty strawberry-rhubarb crisp!

UPCOMING JULY DINNER CLUB

Upcoming Dinner:  July

Hostess: Grapes

Theme: Letters & Numbers

Weekly Farm Challenge 6/7/12 - 6/14/12

This week we received:  a boatload of strawberries, rhubarb, beets, swiss chard, kale, spring greens, green and red leaf lettuces, spinach, and basil.  Our monthly dinner provided our main challenge for us and we used our farm ingredient of strawberries, but we did sneak in two other dishes during the week:

Couscous made a small batch of kale chips topped with Parmesan cheese.

And attempted homemade Strawberry Jam!

Next week Grapes vows to work some magic with Greens!!!

June - Strawberry Theme Dinner Club

The gals again were amazing and creative and dinner was berry, berry good!

Grapes presented an unique twist to a traditional bruschetta with Strawberry Ricotta Bruschetta.

The variety of flavors of strawberry, balsamic and arugula were a party in your mouth!

She brought an accompanying  Malbec that paired nicely with all those flavors.

Couscous broke out of her comfort zone by making her own pizza dough for a Strawberry, Goat Cheese, Pistachio Pizza.  A surprisingly tasty combination that is assembled cold atop of the just baked pizza crust and served immediately.

Saucy shared a wine she picked up many moons ago in Upstate NY, that we detected a taste of flowers and a hint of  mustiness - reminiscent of a funeral home!  LOL! Eh, you win some, you lose some!  You never know until you try!

She made up for it with her dessert - homemade strawberry ice cream with a strawberry crisp!  It was a perfect ending to another wonderful night.

(And yes, you must return the ice cream maker!)

While it first seemed strawberries would be an easy ingredient to work with, it ended up being more challenging than we thought, but the end results were fantastic!  Another job well done!  Stay tune for next month which is going to put us all to the T-E-S-T!

Weekly Farm Challenge 5/31/12 - 6/7/12

We joined a CSA this summer and will now have a weekly challenge to use the ingredients from the farm.   (Recipes provided upon request).  We must pick something that we received and make a dish with it (edible or not).  This week we received:  strawberries, rhubarb, swiss chard, spring greens, bibb lettuce, leaf lettuce, spinach, pea shoots and parsley.  So, what did our creative girls come up with???

Grapes attempted and conquered rhubarb and strawberries to create a Strawberry Rhubarb Cobbler

and it tasted as good as it looks!

Couscous had an excuse for indulging in garlic by preparing Swiss Chard with Garlic and Oregano

Good thing she lives alone - there was ALOT of garlic, but it was yummy!

Saucy also tried her hand at the intimidating tart rhubarb and the beautiful local strawberries to make this Almond, Strawberry, Rhubarb, Banana Bread!

Looks delicious - still waiting for the final tasting report!!
The verdict: "Different but good.  It was a tropical morning treat with all the fruit flavors!"

Stay tuned for next week to see what the farm's bounty brings us and what new and exciting dishes we create!