This week I got:

4 heads of garlic -- and let me tell you it's STRONG STUFF
2 big (softball-sized) pattypan squash
4 assorted onions
A big ziploc bag of sunflower greens
A big bunch of Italian parsley
A bunch of radishes
2 fennel bulbs
4 beets, with greens attached
A bunch of mizuna (a green with a slight mustard flavor)
A cabbage
A bunch of carrots
A gorgeous bunch of chard
1 cucumber and 4 "lemon" cucumbers
1 head lettuce
A bunch of dinosaur kale
A big bok choy
A bag of the first full-sized tomatoes of the year
A ambrosia melon
A bag of Red Flame grapes

Since my girlfriend took a pass on any of the goodies last week, I let her
pick what she wanted out of the box this week. She took all the garlic (not
a problem; I still have some left over from last week), a couple of the
onions, all the parsley (I have leftover parsley from last week too), one of
the fennel bulbs, all the beets, half the mizuna, the cabbage, the chard,
the lettuce, and half the bok choy.

There's a newsletter provided each week along with the CSA boxes. This
week's newsletter contained a recommendation for steaming chard and mixing
it in with mashed potatoes, something I find a bit reminiscent of the Irish
colcannon (mashed potatoes with cabbage). I'm thinking kale would work in
that setting too. The newsletter also contained this recipe:

Squash Delight

2 pounds summer squash, sliced
1/2 onion, chopped
3 cloves garlic, diced
small handful of parsley, chopped
olive oil and butter
sea salt and pepper
1/2 basket cherry tomatoes

Sauté the onion and garlic in the butter and oil for a few minutes. Add the
remaining ingredients and cook for a few more minutes until bright. (You
don't want the squash to soften too much; it should still be al dente.)

Well, I've got a bit of a glut of squash and cherry tomatoes at the moment,
but I think I'll do something a bit different: I'm going to make a kind of
curry, following this rough template: Briefly cook chopped onions in oil,
then add curry powder. When the spices start to separate from the oil, add
sliced squash, cherry tomatoes, a tiny bit of honey, and maybe coconut cream
or heavy cream -- or maybe not, it depends on my mood at that exact instant.

I'm going to roast a couple chickens tonight. (After all, why heat up the
oven for just ONE chicken?) One of them will be stuffed under the skin with
a mixture of stale bread cubes, parsley, lemon zest, salt, pepper, and
garlic. That one will also have a bunch of garlic cooked in its body cavity.
The other chicken will be stuffed under the skin with thin slices of orange
and puréed chipotles in adobo.

I want to make a radish-carrot dish loosely based on the Moroccan salad of
lightly-cooked carrots with cumin. But I'll have to roll the idea around a
while to figure out exactly what I'm going to do.

Now that the full-sized tomatoes are here, it's time to make BLT's. But
first I've got to make some mayo, and I'm not motivated to do that at
present.

I think I will try kale with potatoes, but my exact plan will depend on
whether I see those exquisite tiny potatoes when I go to the farmer's market
tonight.

The texture of the ambrosia melon makes me think it would go well with
cream, so I'm going to make ice cream with it, following Ben & Jerry's
recipe for cantaloupe ice cream. I've still got most of a honeydew melon
left over from last week; I think I'll make a honeydew sorbet out of that.

Bob