The food our family eats
Just back from a weekend of camping and a crazy week ahead, but we’ll figure out some meals here to use this week’s CSA portion: sweet potatoes, rutabagas, carrots, daikon, scallions, lettuce, collards, dill, broccoli and spinach.
A bit of a crazy week with evening meetings coming up, but a nice long weekend ahead first, so hopefully there’s a good balance of quick and easy and somewhat more involved meals here. The CSA this week included: sweet potatoes, carrots, scallions, beets, mint, rutabagas, collards, parsley and lettuce.
The CSA has started back up with a great collection of veggies: lettuce, parsley, beets, turnips, rutabaga’s broccoli (1 regular and 1 Chinese), kale, cauliflower, cabbage and sweet potatoes.
One thing we’ve noticed in the past couple of months, and realized again during the CSA break, is that the CSA has us eating a lot more veggies. They tend to end up much more prominent on the dinner plate than they do when I look for recipes that look good and then throw on a veggie to make a meal.
And for one breakfast this weekend:
MealsWeLike.com is 4 years old this week! While it’s still a small site, MealsWeLike has worked well for meal planning and organizing our families favorite recipes. Happy New Year and here’s to another great year of yummy food!
No CSA pickup again this week.
No CSA this week, though we do still have some daikon, collards and turnip greens to use up and a fair bit of turkey! Also an odd week with visitors and travels.
Trying new recipes is really the main purpose of this blog. Every week, I rummage around the web looking for new recipes for our meals. Sometimes we find a recipe that we use over and over, though even the most repeated of our recipes has only been re-used 4 times. I am constantly amazed by the variety of recipes out there, and that we’re closing in on 4 years of menus and there’s always more recipes to try.
When we find one that turns out well, I’ll make a note of it, perhaps snap a photo and, for some really great ones, write up the recipe, especially if I’ve modified it a bit. This recipe is one that I almost skipped over because the original is a pdf file (often problematic) and is written to make 48 tacos by a chef at a restaurant–all flags that this could go badly in my hands. But what we ended up with was so delicious that it had to be written up! The flavors and textures were amazing! The recipe below is probably a poor rendition of Richard Sandoval’s Duck Carnitas Daikon Tacos, but wow, they are delicious!
I simplified this a lot–perhaps too much?? Be sure to look at the original recipe and follow it where you want. I am sure duck would be delicious, and I’m not sure what Peking duck is, but sounds like it’s kind of orange-flavored, so I opted for chicken thighs and brushing with marmalade since we had some. You could steep the sauce overnight, but hadn’t read that part and it was fine without it, plus we used ground coriander, and finally grated orange zest, so no need to remove the solids.
Anyway, enjoy and let me know if you try it. I am sure we will do them again and I’ll update the recipe and add some more photos–this was a cell phone shot taken at the table when we realized just how delicious these were.
Merry Christmas!
Here’s the CSA haul for this week…now to figure out how to work it all into Christmas dinner and other meals for a crazy week: sweet potatoes, carrots, daikon, scallions, green and red cabbage, tatsoi, mint, broccoli, hakurei turnips, collards.
We’re starting to get a bit of a backlog of veggies that need to be used up, so some of these recipes may include things from last week. It is that time of year when one activity leads into another and we missed making a meal or two last week while running from work to concerts. This week looks similarly hectic, but we’ll do our best. The CSA veggies this week include: sweet potatoes (now we have enough for a good recipe), carrots, daikon, beets–already used up–one tatsoi that may be a bit small for much, lettuce, cabbage, broccoli , parsley and kale.
Last week we had our first CSA veggie casualty–the really good looking head of butter lettuce froze in the fridge before we could use it 🙁
Luckily there’s more this week, so we can enjoy some. Here’s what’s in this week’s share: daikon, Napa cabbage, turnips, beets, chard, red and green lettuce, mint, braising mix, garlic chives, and collards.
After a yummy and fun Thanksgiving meal with friends and family, and the awesome Salvadoran Pupusas con Cutrido from TheKitchn from last week’s menu (photos coming soon), I’m ready for some more tasty meals. Here’s this week’s CSA haul: kale, lettuce, tatsoi, sweet potatoes, beets, parsley, rutabagas, broccoli, spinach and scallions.