My boss offered up his cherry tree on July 4th, so I met up with a coworker and we went to town, each filling a bucket in about 20 minutes. After over an hour with a cherry pitting machine (and thanks to my DH who took over midway), I have 2 ½ quarts of frozen pie cherries and a homemade cherry crisp that I took to work. Mmmm….
In other local fruit news, my in-laws brought their ice cream maker over that afternoon and we used my hand-picked strawberries and some peaches from their tree to make ice cream. We also grilled with some local grass-fed hamburgers and hotdogs; I added a couple of local side dishes to the mix as well. From the Farmer John cookbook I got for Christmas, I made up some kohlrabi and carrot slaw, and a marinated beet salad. I’m not a slaw person, so I left that for the DH, but the beet salad was excellent. I had ordered two bunches of beets from the co-op last week – Chioggia and another (not-identified) variety. I have plenty leftover, so I’m going to whip up another of the beet recipes sometime this week.
I have some kale from the coop, too, part of which I used to make a potato and kale casserole for lunch yesterday. It was decent – smothered the potatoes in some herbed butter and covered the whole thing in parmesan cheese. Hard to go wrong with cheese! The rest of the kale will go towards a Cajun Kale and Corn salad, or perhaps a soup with potatoes and carrots.
Our CSA delivery for the weekend was cancelled – too small a harvest, so small that they didn’t even attend the farmers market at all. Fortunately not every farm is having this issue, so plenty of food is available. My own garden yielded two large bags of lettuce mix; the last for the season I fear, as one plant had started to bolt. I harvested all I could – good eating for this week at least.
