The Great Utah CSA Experiment - Week 17!

Week 17 was bittersweet - our first week in months with only one CSA share, but again with less produce we would have a chance to get caught up on what our refrigerator was overflowing with. Unfortunately I was very sick this week, and spent most of the time (when I wasn't working) either sleeping or drugged up so I would be well enough to work. As a result, fixing food wasn't exactly on top of my priority list. Luckily, the East Farms share again included a lot of produce that stores well!

CSA SHARE		Price (Organic)				Price ('Normal')	Value
0.51 lb Yellow Onions (2)						0.99/lb	$0.80
1.69 lb Roma Tomatoes						1.99/lb	$3.36
4.55 lb Buttercup Squash						0.99/lb (asst. squash)	$4.50
2.5 lb Acorn Squash						0.99/lb (asst. squash)	$2.48
4.27 lb Spaghetti Squash (2)						0.99/lb (asst. squash)	$4.23
1.67 lb Red Potatoes						0.69/lb	$1.15
1.52 lb Zucchini (2)						1.29/lb	$1.96

The total comes out to nearly 17 lbs of food - the squash takes us a long way! The potatoes and onions and winter squashes will all store very well. This week came with yet again a new kind of squash: Buttercup. This looks nothing like a buttercup in my opinion - we can start with the fact that it is green, not yellow; and warty, not soft. But I didn't make the rules, so we'll call it a buttercup.

Only the Zucchini and the Tomatoes will spoil in the next month, if I don't get to them all, and that includes the stash of tomatoes I've been putting off for the past few weeks. I'm sure you are wondering at this point why I was so excited for tomatoes earlier in the season, if at this point I can't figure out what to do with them.

The problem with the tomatoes is two-fold:

1 - Most tomato recipes I am familiar with use vegetables out-of-season. Picture that delicious salad with shaved carrots, garden tomatoes, and green-leaf lettuce. Oh, wait. Lettuce season is over. Hrm, what about the classic BLT? Bacon on wheat toast with sliced tomatoes and lettuce - oh wait, lettuce season is still over. I could do glazed green beans with tomatoes, except I haven't received any green beans in my share recently!

2 - By and large, I have recived a disproportionately large amount of Roma tomatoes compared with those that I typically use. At least the round tomatoes I can slice up and eat straight with salt and pepper, but Romas don't have quite the flavor, and tend to be better in sauces and baked goods, since they are more fleshy. So they have to wait until I use a recipe for them. Luckily, they store a little bit better than the others (so that's probably a good thing).

So I was out shopping at one of my favorite grocery stores, and found they had a really fantastic deal on green beans - $1.00/2 lb California grown green beans. Now, I realize they aren't Utah green beans but I was pretty sure I wasn' t going to find Utah green beans, and I thought at the time that these would help me use up my tomato supply. They looked healthy, so I bought a package and made a batch of glazed green beans with (extra) tomatoes with dinner.

I probably should have seen this coming but, they tasted awful. No - not awful, they just tasted like nothing (which is awful for green beans). I think straw would have had more flavor. This was the first time I can ever remember throwing out perfectly 'good' food (they really were completely healthy looking, no defects at all) but neither Craig nor I could bring ourselves to eat them - even with the really good sugary tomato glaze.

What happened? Have storebought green beans always tasted this way, I just never noticed because I was used to it? Did I notice it now because I'm used to food with flavor? Or was this batch of green beans just no good? I don't have any answers, but I am disturbed. I feel even more leery of purchasing grocery-store fare now than I was before! I suppose time will tell (as I am forced to buy more grocery-store produce over the winter) whether or not this was an isolated incident or a horrifying revelation of actual flavor that I always thought was 'normal'.

In the end, I used up quite a few (~10) romas in a Red Chili dish. (Think the White Chili recipe from last week, but use red kidney beans and black beans in place of the white ones, beef steak chunks instead of the shredded chicken, and lots of added pureed and chopped tomatoes) Note to self: pureed roma tomatoes still don't approach the thickness of tomato sauce, much less tomato paste. The chili was all right - not great enough to justify posting the whole recipe, and the White Chili was better but Craig ate it and that was good. I would have a picture but I'm blaming drugged-up brain fogginess for the lack thereof. Please forgive me!