The small men and I went to pick up our first CSA basket yesterday afternoon. Look at how beautiful it is!
What was in it? An incomplete list: apples, oranges, potatoes, green broccoli, purple queen broccoli, broccolinni (sp?), Japanese spinach, Swiss chard, kale, red oak leaf lettuce, green leaf lettuce, onions, limes, Chinese cabbage, radishes and dill. I traded in the dill for an extra apple since we don't care for dill here. Everything was packed in a lovely little basket- it was so pretty I couldn't stop taking pictures of it:
It was amazing how fresh everything was...they pick most of the fruit and veg the same morning of the pickup. It's all organic and locally grown, too.
One really nice feature of the CSA is the email they send out on pickup day with recipes using the items in the baskets. I'm really glad they do that, because I'm not sure what I'd do with the GIANT kohlrabi we got (and just so you know, I didn't even know what a kohlrabi looked like so I had to look it up, too).
Little Man wanted to have broccoli with dinner:
But we were having braised beef short ribs + mashed potatoes so we went with some garlicky sauteed kale and Japanese spinach instead. LM had fun washing and cutting the greens (he especially liked picking them out of the basket himself). I had made a loaf of bread so we had that with dinner, too.
There were supposed to be photos of dinner, but we scarfed it all down before I could get the camera out. LOL I'll give you the braised beef short ribs recipe, though. It was SOOOOOO goooood!
Slow Cooker Beef Short Ribs
(serves 4)
1.5 lbs bone in beef short ribs
2 Tb butter
2/3C chopped onion
1/2C red wine
1/2C brown sugar
1/4C Heinz chili sauce (found in the steak sauce/ketchup aisle)
1 1/3TB ketchup
1 1/3TB Worcestershire sauce
1 1/3TB minced garlic
2/3 tsp chili powder (optional- we don't use this because it's too spicy for the small men)
- Melt butter in skillet over med. high heat, add ribs and brown on all sides. Put ribs in the crockpot/slowcooker.
- Combine remaining ingredients in the skillet. Heat to boil, stirring and scraping the pan to get up all the beef bits stuck on the bottom.
- Pour sauce over ribs in the crockpot, cover and cook on low for 9 hours.
The meat will be literally falling off the bone and the sauce will have cooked down in to a gorgeous sweet/sour/spicy concoction. There will be quite a bit of fat from the ribs in the sauce. You can refrigerate the whole thing overnight and skim off the fat the next day, then reheat the ribs and sauce. Or you can just use mashed potatoes to soak up the delicious, fatty sauce because you've been tortured by the tantalizing smell of braising beef for nine! hours! and can't wait any longer.
Since I have no will power, we ate the ribs right away. :)
BTW we got our butter bell the other day and I love it. Like others who commented on my previous post, we were keeping our butter on the counter in a small covered container. But the butter had a tendency to get discolored (even tho it was still safe to eat it didn't look good), and it had gone moldy once or twice during the hot summer months.
So the idea with the butter bell is you fill the top with softened butter (ours is rather large so it holds a whole stick):
Then you fill the base with a few tablespoons of water and turn the top upside down into the base, creating an airtight seal:
This keeps the butter fresh and cool on your counter much longer than just using a plate.
The water needs to be changed very three or so days, which is no hassle at all. I've noticed that the butter doesn't seem to discoloring, and it does taste a bit fresher than just leaving it out in our old container. Plus the small men get a kick out of pulling the top off to get butter for their toast in the morning. So I've definitely got some butter bell love this week!
