vinaigrette

This is part 4 of a summer long series about our CSA boxes and what we do with them. Recipes for a white wine vinaigrette and crab and lentil salad follow.

This was the week where failing in the kitchen was the prevailing theme. Normally, nine out of ten times, I hit home runs. Of course, some meals are more compelling than others, but usually the worst are still edible. This week, I was in a slump. I wanted nothing to do with my last couple of dishes.  

Leaden vegetable fritters and gag-inducing spaghetti carbonara that I tried to lovingly scent with lemon zest and Serrano chili were on the menu. The foul food ate up most of my week’s CSA vegetables. Beans, snap peas, spring onions, golden cauliflower, and kale: they all perished and the remaining scraps went straight into the vegetable stock bag in my freezer.  

The greens are growing wildly in my garden, the spinach is getting munched up as soon as the leaves are as big as half dollars. Soon, I will be buried in salad greens from the crunchy and mild butter crisp lettuces at the farmers markets, to the mix of lettuces and other cutting greens in my garden. Add in the mustard greens and dill that grow everywhere in my yard now and I'm set to eat as much salad as I can handle. The only way that is going to happen is if I have great dressings constantly on hand. This is key. I mean, I love a spot of salad with every little thing, but if I have to make dressing every time or suffer through another bland canola oil based bottle of store bought dressing (for $5 bucks, no less), then there is no way this massive influx of greens will get eaten. Some will inevitably end up a slime project in the bottom of my crisper.

In 2007, Josh Engel of Driftless Organics Farm in Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin planted a trial crop of sunflowers. It was a pilot run, so he only gave it a few acres. At the end of the season he harvested the seeds, pressed them, and gave the oil as gifts to friends and local chefs. They clamored for more, so Josh knew his experiment had been a success.