Shannon Phillips

Today in our veggie box we got: chard, asparagus, snap peas, radishes, a large leek, a bunch of green garlic, two bunches of spring onions, and a bag of little red potatoes.

I didn’t make the asparagus risotto I’d planned last week, so we have a leftover bunch of asparagus that’s looking pretty withered. I’ll go ahead and do the risotto tonight, incorporating the new asparagus and the bits of the old asparagus that aren’t too dessicated. I’ll also use the leek.

Tomorrow night I’m thinking boiled potatoes with butter and dill, and a salad using the snap peas and radishes. I have some green goddess dressing left over, though I’ll probably have to make another batch anyway, as there isn’t very much.

Friday night I’ll try this recipe for pasta with chard and ricotta cheese: I have some ricotta left over from the last time I made baked polenta, and I can also use the spring onions and the green garlic.

And that’ll use up all the veggies, except for the kiwis which Robin always eats. Saturday I think we’ll probably have an afternoon picnic in our new backyard (yay!), but I might just buy sandwiches and lemonade from Whole Foods. Maybe I’ll make cupcakes or something to bring along. Then Sunday I’ll do a pork roast, and Monday we can have the leftovers in sandwiches. And I’ll leave Tuesday open as usual.

Today in our veggie box we got: kale, red chard, asparagus, radishes, two bags of baby lettuces, four spring onions (red this time!), four leeks, a bag of snap peas, four kiwis, and about a pound of yellow fingerling potatoes. Snap peas! The seasons are changing in our bellies! Oh man, I am craving fresh tomatoes so hard, it will be like a miracle when they show up.

Last week I forgot to account for Easter in my meal plan. Whole Foods has the local, grass-fed lamb at the butcher counter right now: it’s only here a couple times a year, and it’s so good. The rest of the time the lamb is from New Zealand (and isn’t grass-fed, and isn’t as good). So last Sunday I got some cubed lamb and roasted it with honey and saffron, using the Silver Spoon recipe for “agnello all’araba” that I discovered last year. As a result, we still have a bunch of chard in the crisper: it is not as lovely as the new chard, but it’s not bad yet, so I’m going to go ahead and use both bunches in that polenta dish tonight. I’ll use the leeks too.

Tomorrow night our doula is coming over in the evening (we’re hiring a labor doula this time around) to discuss our birth plan, so I’m not planning on cooking: we still have some leftover lamb, so I’ll just reheat that quickly before the doula shows up.

But I do want to get to the rest of the veggies while they’re still fresh and gorgeous, so Friday we’ll have a big salad with the lettuce, radishes, snap peas, and green goddess dressing. I might put in some bacon too, and/or the hardboiled eggs left over from Easter.

The weather’s turned beautiful again after a brief spate of rain earlier this week, so over the weekend I’m planning a picnic lunch in the park: I’ll make potato salad and the roast beef and blue cheese sandwiches described in this article (item #5: I can incorporate the red onions from our box!) I’ll have to do at least some of the prep work for that on Friday, but maybe Saturday morning I can whip up a batch of oatmeal-raisin cookies to add to our picnic. Then dinner will be…oatmeal cookies. Along with whatever’s left over from lunch, or can be scrounged from the fridge.

Sunday night I’ll make asparagus risotto, and Monday, braised kale crostini—probably with something to accompany or follow it, like maybe fruit and cheese: there are lovely local strawberries at the store right now. And Tuesday will be for leftovers, as usual.

Today in our veggie box we got: collard greens, chard, russian red kale, lettuce, asparagus, a small head of cauliflower, two leeks, a bunch of spring onions, a bag of small yellow potatoes, and bunch of fresh oregano.

A quick review of some of the new recipes I tried out lately (links in previous posts): none of them were so hot. Actually, I liked the New York Times recipe for farro with collard greens, and Robin seemed to like it okay too, but Sam said it tasted like oatmeal and he would not be particularly keen on seeing it again. (I overcooked the farro a little bit, but for the record it was not the consistency of oatmeal.)

Anyway, this week we’ll go back to old standbys: I never got around to cooking a chicken last week, so I’ll get one tonight and roast it with the potatoes and oregano. Then tomorrow we’ll have the bulgur with kale and salami recipe that we always like, along with roasted asparagus, and Friday cauliflower cheese with a salad on the side.

Saturday is gaming day, but Sunday I’ll make polenta with chard, leeks, and cheese. Then Monday I’ll do pork chops smothered in spring onions and spicy collard greens, and Tuesday will be for leftovers as usual.

Today in our veggie box we got a veritable rainbow: purple kale, red chard, green garlic, and a handful of yellow fingerling potatoes, along with spring onions, collard greens, asparagus, a bunch of rosemary, one huge leek, a few small heads of lettuce, two little cauliflowers, and a bag of kiwis.

Tonight Robin’s Pappy is coming back from a trip to Ethiopia, so Nonna is in town and we’re all going out to meet him at the airport. We’ll probably go out to eat afterwards, if Dave isn’t too jet-lagged.

Tomorrow night I’m looking at this recipe for greens and potato gratin—I could use the kale and the chard, as well as the potatoes. I might toss the lettuce in some dressing for a small accompanying salad. And Friday night I could try out collard greens with farro, maybe with roasted asparagus on the side: I know I like farro, and I don’t cook with it often. Between those two recipes I’m pretty sure I could also work in the green garlic, spring onions, and leek.

Saturday will be cook’s night off; Sunday we can have a chicken roasted with rosemary-garlic paste. Monday I’ll use the cauliflower in a spaghetti dish (I seem to be finding a lot of New York Times recipes this week)—and then Tuesday will be for leftovers as usual.

Well, tonight, it’s corned beef boiled with cabbage, potatoes, and carrots; I’m baking soda bread, too. We got the carrots and potatoes in our veggie box, along with Russian red kale, green and red chards, collard greens, three thick leeks, three spring onions, four bulbs of green garlic, a small head of cauliflower, a little bundle of cilantro, and six kiwis.

Tomorrow we’ll have corned beef sandwiches with collard greens as a side; I’m also saving the broth from tonight’s boiled dinner for a beef and barley stew, which will incorporate the leeks and the spring onions, along with whatever remains of the corned beef. I might do that on Saturday, though, so that Friday night we can have a break from corned beef. I’m thinking a veggie dinner of artichokes with green garlic aioli, along with creamed chard.

Sunday I want to try out two new Cook’s Illustrated recipes, one for a vegetable curry with potatoes, cauliflower, peas, and chickpeas, and the other for a cilantro-mint chutney to go with it. Monday will have to be something with kale: Capay Farms has a recipe for kale risotto that I might try (though I’d leave out the pumpkin seeds). Then Tuesday will be reserved for leftovers, as usual.

Using our vegetables this week will be a challenge, as we’ve been eating out a lot with Nanita and Marqueño. But our box this week was super exciting: after the long winter weeks of endless chard, kale, squash and leeks, we’re starting to see the first harvests of spring. Not that we didn’t get chard and kale—in fact we got chard and two different kinds of kale—but we also got some things we haven’t seen in months: cauliflower, and asparagus, and shallots. We also got carrots, kiwis, and a bag of lovely little red potatoes.

Wednesday night I made chicken pot pie for everyone (I didn’t make that last week, which is good, as then I was able to use the carrots and shallots from our box), but last night we went to eat at the new Yemeni restaurant that opened up down the block: I wrote them a good review on Yelp. And tonight my mom and Mark have offered to babysit Robin so that Sam and I can have a “date night.” We have reservations at Rue Lepic, a little French bistro that I’ve been interested in for ages—and one that’s a bit too nice for a two-year-old. So that’s exciting.

Tomorrow Nanita and Marqueño are going home, and I’ll be out for my D&D day with friends. I think we’re wrapping up early, though, so I might have time to cook afterwards. I think I’ll buy a flank steak today and put it in the fridge to marinate, and then when I get home tomorrow I can pan-roast it quickly, and roast the asparagus in the oven at the same time. (Mmm, roasted asparagus! I’m so ridiculously happy about the asparagus—my friend Robyn who gets her CSA box from Full Belly Farms mentioned a while ago on Twitter that they were getting asparagus, and I’ve been seething with jealousy ever since.)

Then Sunday I want to try the recipe for blue cheese macaroni with kale that Molly suggested: if I up the proportions just slightly, I think I can probably cram in both bunches of kale. And Robin’s good about eating strongly-flavored cheeses; he loves dairy fat in pretty much any form.

Monday we’ll have a veggie dinner of roasted potatoes and cauliflowers with sauteed chard, and then Tuesday can be leftovers night as usual. So despite two nights of eating out, I think we’ll get to all the vegetables by next Wednesday.

Yesterday in our veggie box we got: kale, two different kinds of chard (white and gold), collard greens, broccoli, a pound and a half of leeks, six kiwis, and a bag of fingerling potatoes. Last night we had boiled potatoes and peas along with a salad (incorporating the broccoli); tonight I’m doing yet another run of that polenta-with-chard recipe. I’ve been making it a lot lately, but Sam always seems happy to see it, and by modifying the recipe very slightly I can use up both bunches of chard and most of the leeks.

Tomorrow I think I’ll do another retread, this time the bulgur salad with kale and salami (and I’ll throw in the collard greens too). That’ll take care of all the veggies, and then I can branch out into fun stuff for the rest of the week: I think Sam would be pleased with chicken pot pie on Sunday, and maybe homemade pizza on Monday.

Breaking News: What I had taken for a bunch of skinny leeks turned out to be only half leeks, and half narrow stalks of green garlic. I used them all in the polenta and it was delicious. That is all.

Last week I pretty much failed at vegetables. First, I tried to get rid of our squash backlog by making butternut squash puree, as I read you can use squash puree instead of pumpkin in recipes for pumpkin bread or pumpkin pie. Unfortunately, I only got as far as roasting the squash; then I forgot about them, and left them in the oven for two days, at the end of which they were moldy and had to be thrown out. I felt more relieved than guilty, to be honest, but I do think I’ll call up Capay Farms and ask them to reinstate the squash in our box.

Then, a couple days ago, we all came down with a horrible cold. Well, Robin and Sam mostly just had stuffy noses, but I seemed to be hit harder; for a while I was afraid I actually had the flu, as in addition to the congestion I was running a low fever, ached all over, and could barely muster the energy to move from bed to couch. Yesterday I was pretty much flattened, but today I felt much better and went about our routine as normal. Anyway, I didn’t cook for a couple of nights.

So going into this new week (vegetable weeks start on Wednesday, as that’s when our box is delivered) we had on hand: lettuce, chard, leeks, and bok choy. Then in our box we got more leeks, more chard, and more lettuce, along with kale, broccoli rabe, six kiwis, and a bag of fingerling banana potatoes.

Tonight I made the polenta with chard recipe that I didn’t do last week, using both bunches of chard and all of the leeks as well. Tomorrow I’ll make hot and sour soup with the bok choy, and then on Friday a winter pesto with the kale and collards.

Saturday I’ll make some kind of salad. Sunday I’ll roast a chicken with the potatoes, and then make stock from the carcass, as I’m out of chicken stock. Monday, pasta with sausage and broccoli rabe—and then we’ll be all caught up with vegetables!

This week in our veggie box we got a couple pounds of little yellow potatoes, which are identified as fingerling Russian banana potatoes. They came in a brown paper bag which I put up on the counter. I was reminded of this as I stepped out of the shower this morning, and Robin came pelting up to me and handed me a potato.

“Um,” I said.

Then he ran away. As I toweled off my hair he came back with another potato, and gave it to me.

When I followed him into the kitchen I found that, indeed, the potatoes were strewn all over the floor. The funny thing is that I haven’t been able to find a shred or scrap of the brown paper bag.

The upshot of this is that Robin can obviously now reach things on the kitchen counter. He has to stand on tip toes and stretch his arm up, and he can’t actually see what he’s groping for, but he’ll pull down anything that he touches. Ridiculous child. At least he’s pretty good about picking things up again: when I got a bowl for the potatoes, he quite happily picked each one up off the floor and dropped it in the bowl.

In the box we also got two heads of lettuce (butter and red leaf), a bunch of carrots, some bok choy, kale, collard greens, chard, two leeks, and six kiwis. We also had a lot of leftovers from last week: the shepherd’s pie and the caldo verde both lasted a while, so I still have a leek and a head of lettuce on hand that miraculously is looking just fine. And of course I still have three butternut squashes to deal with. So I’m a little overwhelmed with veggies at the moment.

Tonight we’ll have a big salad, with hard-boiled eggs and ham as well as the broccoli and carrots. Tomorrow night I’ll make pork chops smothered in spicy collard greens, and Sunday we can have polenta with chard and leeks.

Monday I’ll use the rest of the lettuce in a seared tuna salad—they tell pregnant women not to eat sushi-style fish, but I think it’s fine if you get your fish from a trustworthy source and handle it sensibly. Tuesday, bulgur salad with kale, salami, and olives. That’ll leave the bok choy and the potatoes (and the squash) to deal with next week. Maybe on Wednesday I can make a bok choy-potato-squash casserole. Mmmm!

This week in our box we got: Nantes carrots, dinosaur kale, collard greens, two heads of lettuce (one butter, one red leaf), two leeks, a butternut squash (nooooooo), twelve kiwis, and two pounds of those beautiful red fingerling potatoes.

Tonight we’ll have baked potatoes and a salad (probably using the butter lettuce). Tomorrow, I’ll use the red potatoes, the leeks, and both the kale and the collards in another big pot of caldo verde (that recipe is really good). Tomorrow we’re also going in for the ultrasound, by the way, so I might have something exciting to post after that.

Friday night I’ll tackle the squash: I think I’ll try this recipe for Bulgur and Squash Kefteh from the New York Times. Sam won’t be thrilled, but there will probably be leftover soup that he can have instead if he wants.

Saturday is my day out with friends, and cook’s night off; Sunday is Valentine’s Day, so I’m going to make a shepherd’s pie at Sam’s request (it’ll be a potato-heavy week), and probably something chocolate for dessert.

I’ve got some anchovies in the fridge that I want to use up, so Monday I’ll make pissaladière, a kind of anchovy and garlic pizza. I know you’ll all want to come over and kiss us afterwards! If the other head of lettuce holds out till Monday, we’ll have a salad on the side too. And then Tuesday we’ll eat leftovers.