Cooking Away My CSA

I am joining in on the "Cooking Away My CSA" challenge created by Flour Girl.  What a great idea!  I'm usually pretty good about pulling together some meals with my CSA box contents, but I am occasionally stumped by such things as fava beans.  Fortunately, there are some brilliant resources online (including the Google group for the CAMC challenge) where I can find ideas on just what to do with those crazy fava beans! 

This is the first week of the challenge, so I'll kick it off by sharing some photos of our CSA-based meals this week.  

First, the fava beans.  I must confess that I had never had a fava bean until this year.  It isn't that I've avoided them, we've just never crossed paths until now.  I have heard that they are difficult to work with so they sat in my fridge for a long time before I got around to cooking them (these came in a prior week's CSA box).  I decided to try a grilled fava recipe from 101 Cookbooks over the weekend.  The recipe was super simple and the beans tasted great!  Oh fava beans, I am now a fan of you!

We typically have pizza about once a week and usually on Friday night.  With last Friday's fava beans, I made grilled vegan pizzas.  I used many of the things from our box including heirloom tomatoes,  gypsy and lipstick peppers, red onions, and summer squash.  

The pale yellow heirloom tomato had just a touch of pink on the inside.  So pretty!

Grilled pizza, I've found, involves a bit of alchemy.  I make my own crust and I've found that I prefer to use mostly "00" flour with a bit of whole wheat.  I slice the veggies super thin (so they cook quickly on the grill) and I use soy-based cheeses.  Here are two of the finished products (I added non-CSA veggies to one of the pizzas):

If you've never tried grilling pizza, I definitely recommend giving it a try!  This recipe will help you get started.  

On Saturday night we had leftover pizza.  I sauteed the rest of the summer squash with one of the peppers and added garlic, salt, and pepper for a quick side dish:

Next, I made a large salad using more of the peppers, tomatoes, and leftover fava beans.  I also added some lightly toasted walnuts and made a simple dressing of olive oil, lemon juice, sea salt, and agave nectar:  

Finally, tonight I made some vegetable juice in our new Vita-Mix blender.  I used parsley, dandelion greens, carrots and non-CSA celery, lemon juice, ginger, and apple.  The juice was seriously green and I didn't take any photos for fear of freaking out the more mainstream diet folks out there!  It was good stuff, loaded with all kinds of veggie goodness.

What's next?  I'm not sure yet.  Maybe some cobbler made with strawberries that I picked up at a local roadside stand.  I vegan-ized a strawberry rhubarb cobbler recipe a few weeks ago with strawberries and rhubarb from our CSA box.  That was the first time that I had tried rhubarb.  Ever.  Loved it!  

Happy locavore cooking!  

PS- Speaking of locavores, I enjoyed Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and recommend the book to anyone interested in local eating and growing food at home.