week 16!

This week's box included eggplant, collard greens, edamame (fun!), tomatoes, summer squash, and mizuna!

This week was also a special week for me as our Just Food team hosted our first community meal at the church. We had a great turnout, and it was amazing to see people from our church, fellow CSA members, and neighbors all gathered together to share a meal. A few of you asked me to post some of the recipes from that meal. You have to realize though that I rarely use just one recipe, the final product instead ends up being a combination of 2 or 3 recipes. So here they are, with my changes.

I'm trying to find a recipe that's similar to the roasted heirloom tomato soup with pesto that we served but I'm not really finding one and it's really simple so here it goes. If you have great tomatoes, and we had some really beautiful tomatoes from City Farm, simply quarter them and put some olive oil, salt, and pepper (white pepper if you don't want bits of black in your finished soup) on them and roast for about 50 min. at 450 degrees. Puree them in a blender and pour through a strainer to catch all the skins and seeds. Take some veggie stock to thin it out to the consistency you want. Thats it! Serve it cold, room temp, or hot. If you end up with both red and yellow tomatoes do the above steps seperately and add the finished products at the very end for a really neat presentation. For the pesto: 1 cup (packed) fresh basil leaves, 2 tablespoons pine nuts, 1 garlic clove peeled, 1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil. Blend it and you're all set. I think it makes for a pretty soup and its really tasty too.

The dressing on the green salad I stole from Lenore and her post below. I've made it a few different times now, and I really like it. Thanks Lenore!

The roasted chicken was basically one recipe. Here it is . I gotta admit I was a bit nervous about cooking that much chicken. Chicken is tricky since you have to cook it just so, definitely don't want to overcook or undercook it. I think the rosemary garlic paste added a nice flavor, and by using skin on, bone-in, chicken it kept it extra moist. I couldn't find juniper berries so I didn't use them, but I'd make this recipe again at home and try to use some to see what that adds to it. In addition, I just quartered up some baby red potatoes and placed them on the bottom of the roasting pan, covered them in some olive oil, salt, pepper, sprigs of thyme and rosemary and placed the chicken on top to cook them all together.

The zucchini/summer squash is also really simple. Just slice them up very thinly and sautee them with olive oil and some minced garlic. Once they are almost done toss in some chopped basil, salt and pepper. At the very end put a little squeeze of lemon on top of it to really brighten up the dish and give it a nice flavor.

For dessert I decided to go with fruit crumbles. I've really been on a crumble kick lately, mostly because they are super easy and delicious! I didn't use the sliced almonds that this recipe calls for and I added cinnamon to the mix. Be creative and add whatever fruit you like, I'm pretty sure any fruit or combination of fruits would be great.

Thats it, I hope those of you who were able to make it to the meal had as much fun as I did!! I'm already looking forward to our next one in October, hope you all can make it!