Adventures with Vegetables

Admittedly, not a single one of the photos included here contains a vegetable. Unless you consider rhubarb to be a vegetable and, well, I just googled it and it is so I now retract that statement there is a vegetable here it's just hiding under a crumbly top of butter, oats and brown sugar.

We are on Week 3 of our Greeley Farm CSA and I couldn't be happier. We were in New York for the pick up time of week 2 so my old friend Marian (she's not old, just our friendship) picked it up for me and she got to enjoy and share the bounty of my half-bushel basket. That made me happy although it was painful to have to buy conventional store lettuces last week. This week I've added some beautiful eggs from Farmer James into the mix. I scrambled some yesterday morning and what a difference it was. I'm going to hard boil some with some regular eggs and then do a blind taste test to make sure I'm not suffering from a CSA bias.

This week's basket included strawberries so becoming that I bought a spare second quart James had in his truck. It seemed a good decision since we ate the first quart in about 2 minutes with some homemade whipped cream.

We also have rhubarb this week, more bok choy (apparently they had a lot of bok choy at the Transy cafeteria this week as Marc was really elated to have missed dinner at home last night when MR and I ate one and half pounds by ourselves. He said, "please don't say another word about bok choy, I'm sick of it), chinese cabbage and green onions and a lettuce mix.

I hadn't cooked rhubarb before but I just whipped up the crumble below. and it couldn't have been easier. It's adapted from Mark Bittman recipe.

1.5 lbs of fresh rhubarb, trimmed and cut into 1 inch pieces
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/2 tsp of cinnamon
cup of brown sugar (I might use Splenda or stevia next time)

Toss in a bowl and put in a Bybee baking dish (or any oven-safe 8 or 9 inch round dish)

Then put into food processor:
1/2 cup flour
1/2 cup oats
1/2 tsp of cinnamon
2/3 cup of brown sugar
5 tab. of cold butter cut into pieces.
1/2 cup of chopped hazelnuts (any nut would do I think)
Pulse the food processor a few times and spread on top of the rhubarb in the baking dash.

Bake at 400 for approximately 35 minutes.   

Rhubarb Crisp

My basket (in case you didn't know, which I didn't, those long things
that look like celery stalk on the top right are the rhubarb).