~~~
Day’s Verse:
God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them.
Hebrews 6:10
~~~
Please help me raise money for the MS Bike Tour Cape Cod Getaway. Donate today on my MS Participant page.
~~~
First fruits from our CSA subscription:
That strawberry only looks 1/2 to 1/4 as good as it really tasted. The CSA subscription works in a pretty cool way. I was expecting to receive a pre-selected pile of fruits and vegetables, and then have to make do with that. Actually, they assign you a certain number of points (22.5 in our case) based on the subscription you paid for; they also assign each food item a number of points. Then you can pick and choose what produce you want, simply spending your points however you like. This week that resulted in 3 quarts of the best strawberries I have ever tasted; a bunch (3 individual) of beets with the leafy bits still on; a gigantic volume of spinach (possibly only one head, or whatever you call it, but oh my goodness do I have my spinach-eating cut out for me), and an equally gigantic volume of lettuce. After some discussion, we’ve agreed to buy at least one new vegetable every week as a learning experience.
We turned one of the quarts of strawberries into fabulous strawberry muffins, and I think I’ll make a strawberry banana milkshake for dessert tonight. I’m a little anxious about the strawberries going bad because they are at the prime of ripeness right now, so we will just have to suffer through eating them all in a hurry.
Tonight for dinner we are having beet slices cooked in olive oil with dried thyme and sea salt, sun-dried tomato sausages, and foccaccia with extra-virgin olive oil and spices for dipping. I think forcing ourselves to pick unfamiliar vegetables will result in a much more interesting diet, and just being forced to expand our eating repertoire like this is probably worth the price of the CSA subscription. …Honestly, though, I’d pay $450 just for one quart of those strawberries. They truly are overwhelmingly wonderful. I practically swoon every time I eat one — which is often, since we have 3 quarts to consume.
That looks wonderful! I can almost taste it from here…
If you cook that spinach it will practically disappear. A huge pile in a saute pan cooks down to about a cup!
COOK it?! Spoil crispy, cool, fresh spinach by heating it into a limp pile of goop?!! I would never think to desecrate delicious fresh spinach in that manner.
…And actually I just washed it and removed the stems (I assume people don’t usually eat the stems, although I don’t think I’ve ever gotten spinach in such a complete form before, so who knows?) and I estimate it’s about 2 salads-worth. A fairly manageable amount, thank goodness.
Clean, slice, and freeze some of the strawberry slices on waxed paper and you can have that yummy goodness for strawberry lemonade or smoothies in the future, too.
I don’t like cooked spinach either but just thought you might not be able to get it used any other way.