This was a 3-farmers-market week. In addition to buying apples and zucchini early in the week, I bought dill (intended for potato salad) at the mid-week market and tomatoes and lettuce at the end-of-week market. The lettuce is just for salads, because it’s so hot and we have so many good things to put on top of lettuce in salad. The tomatoes were for a family reunion picnic, and were sliced and put on sandwiches.
The family picnic took care of some of our vegetable glut. We made cole slaw, using the shredder attachment for our stand mixer. We used the slicing blade for the cabbage and the shredding blade for the carrots, mostly orange and some yellow for color. Because of the heat, I didn’t use the normal mayonnaise-laden dressing. Instead, I made an Asian dressing of rice vinegar, canola oil (sesame oil gives too heavy a flavor), tamari soy sauce, grated ginger (I buy it jarred), and lots of sesame seeds (cheapest at an Indian grocery).
Also for the picnic, we made a big batch of tabbouleh (using 3 cups of bulghur wheat), and put in the entire bunch of parsley, three cucumbers, three orange carrots, and three yellow carrots. The carrots are on the small side, the kind you buy at the farmers market not the kind you buy at the grocery store.
We finally did some freezing. It’s been very hot, so standing over boiling water to blanch vegetables is thoroughly unappealing. We boiled about two pounds of beetroots. The larger ones are good for grilling. The smaller ones are good for freezing. It works out very nicely. We boiled the beets for half an hour, but probably should have given them only 25 minutes. After boiling, many of the skins came off easily, but if they didn’t come off I didn’t worry about it. Skinning beets involves pushing at the skin, trying to slide it sideways over the inside part. We sliced a few of the beets for putting on salads (cold). The rest we cut into wedges and froze.
We also froze some zucchini and green beans. Putting Food By says that only small zucchini freeze well. Of our six zucchini, I judged that three were small enough to freeze. We cut them into thick slices, blanched them for three minutes, shocked them for three minutes, and put them in our freezer. The green beans were also three minutes to blanch and three minutes to shock. I cut them to lengths somewhere between one and two inches. Unfortunately, sitting on the top shelf of our refrigerator for nearly a week caused many of the beans to freeze and become weirdly translucent and have to go straight to compost.
In other food news, we tried kohlrabi finally. I knife-peeled one of them, and cut it into sticks maybe half an inch on a side. It’s delightfully crunchy. It reminds me of the inside of broccoli stems, which isn’t surprising, because kohlrabi is also a stem.
Finally, the inventory: The non-roots still to be used are one bunch of dill, one bunch of lettuce, three large zucchini, one cucumber, and one kohlrabi. The roots still to be used are lots of carrots, some beets (mostly chioggia), and two pounds of potatoes. The fruits still to be used are most of two pints of black raspberries.
I forgot to mention the raspberries. We went berry picking today with friends, and brought back two pints of purple raspberries and two pints of black raspberries. Well, that’s how many there were before we started the car ride home. There were fewer when we arrived. The purple raspberries I tried to turn into conserve. I hope the boiled berry-sugar soup will firm up. After a night in the refrigerator it will move into the freezer, in one-cup containers, to be moved to the refrigerator as needed during the year.
Tags: beet, beetroot, blanching, cabbage, carrot, cucumber, dill, green beans, lettuce, parsley, raspberries, tomato, zucchini
