Leafy greens

This week's share has an abundance of leafy greens: tat soi, broccoli raab (a.k.a rapini), collards, basil, carrots, lettuce, harukei turnips, summer squash, peppers, shallots, leeks. And, a couple shares were not picked up at our office and I couldn't help but take some extra basil.

Speaking of when someone neglects to pick up their share. I don't have the time to wrap up your vegetables and put them into the fridge for you and even if I did, there's no room in our office fridge. Then again, I feel awful letting the vegetables go bad. It sucks. Luckily this week we had a bunch of people in the office and I gave the vegetables to them. But other times they go to waste. Tisk, tisk.

Once again we had a challenging weekend for farm share cooking, travelling to Bucks County, PA for a family get-together at my mom and stepdad's home. We brought the basil, potatoes, leek, shallots, cilantro, parsley, carrots and radishes along. We ended up using only the potatoes, shallots, cilantro and parsley. The parsley made its way into my mom's amazing paella and the cilantro into Charlie's famous guacamole.

Charlie never made the bubble and squeak dish I mentioned, but we did make some delicious breakfast potatoes for Sunday brunch, using all the potatoes from the last two weeks and the shallots.

A comment on my brunch dish, where you'll see a piece of bacon. Nope, I'm not a vegetarian. I used to be just a fish and egg eater, now I eat meat about half a dozen times a year. Bacon from a local farm without hormones and other bad stuff is hard to resist!

The enormous basil bounty went all the way to PA and back to Boston and the leaves are still in wonderful shape. So last night I made more pesto - time to start freezing. I read that to freeze, you leave out the pine nuts and cheese and add it in after you thaw it. Good thing, because I'm out of those pricey ingredients.

And finally, how's this for leafy greens? A corner of my mother's beautiful garden.