AnotherPurl :: a knitter's life

[10 Tuesday] drowning in a CSA

This week's topic is 10 ways to deal with an overabundance of produce. Now this is my first year doing a CSA, so I might not know as much as people who have had successful gardens or spots in CSAs for the last few years. Still, I have been doing a reasonably good job of using up the veggies before they go bad (with less waste than I have during the winter months). It probably helps that I've been a vegetarian since 1992.

The hardest thing about using a ton of vegetables is that even if you are eating your recommended amount of vegetables each day you cannot necessarily eat the amount you get. My husband and I are splitting a single share with a family of four and still we both have tons of vegetables (and the times they are on vacation are even more vegetables than ever for us).

1. Prioritize. Some vegetables are hardier than others. Eat the ones more likely to go bad first. It's a simple triage, but it does make a difference.

2. List your produce. This is probably more rightly part of the triage idea. Each week when we get our CSA, we put the list of vegetables on the white board on the fridge with the date. We use the oldest vegetables first and erase them from the list as they are used up. You need to know what you have before you can even attempt to use it all.

3. Bread. Zucchini bread is not the only bread you can make, but it does nicely deal with fact that zucchini often grow like weeds! I have zucchini and summer squash that I will turn into bread this weekend just in time to get another basket full of the same things. I've made this cake which uses apples, carrots and potatoes, but I bet it would work well with zucchini or other easy to grate vegetables.

4. Frittata. We have an egg share as part of our CSA, so this for us is 2 birds with one stone. Frittatas are a great way to use up random vegetables. I have a mandoline, which makes cutting the vegetables in similarly sized pieces both quick and easy.

5. Stir Fry. I'm admittedly not much of a stir fry kind of gal, but it is a great way to use up vegetables.

6. Veggie burgers. I make this recipe and cook the burgers for a lower amount of time (15 minutes on the first side, 10 on the second) before storing them in the freezer. I've used salsa, pesto and artichoke hearts among other things to make many different burger flavors.

7. Pickles. I obviously like pickles, and the latest issue of Bon Appetit has an article about canning. One of the commenters complained that the article is pretentious, but the article isn't aimed at people who already do canning. It is there to show the possibilities to people like me who think canning is hard. This weekend I made the pickled beets (they are in the basement), pickled radishes, and kosher dill-style pickles. With a CSA we don't really have such an abundance of any one vegetable to make the full on summer canning kitchen really necessary, so I've also been eyeing this article.

8. Freezing things. I love corn, but my husband isn't a huge fan of corn on the cob. We are getting about 6 ears a week, which is a fairly large amount once you stop finishing the corn up each week. This past week I took most of the corn from the past couple of weeks and froze it. This is one of the guides (and this is the other) I used as I made both frozen cut corn last week and frozen cream style corn this week.

9. Jam and preserves. I made red currant jam last week, and I have cherries to make cherry preserves this week. It is easy and many fruits have enough pectin naturally that you do not need to add pectin to the cooking fruit. When properly preserved, these items can also just live in your pantry (which for me is the basement). I didn't do the full on water bath with the jam, so it is all in the freezer. I will be doing it with the cherries though!

10. Salad. I know people think of salads as boring, but it is a great way to use up tons of produce. It is also an easy way to make sure you are eating vegetables each day. So, add a salad to part of each dinner and you will at least use up the lettuce portion of the CSA without fail. Salads can also include slaws, which are a great vegetable user.

If none of this works and vegetables are going bad before you can use them up, you can always share your produce, give the greens to a family of deserving bunnies or compost the bad stuff. Just because your produce has gone bad doesn't mean that it cannot help you and your yard out!

a monster in the office

Last week I finished making a monster toy from the latest issue of Knit Simple. M. Monstre joined me at the office and then hopped into a backpack to go to a little girl. Such a great step in life!

Of course, M. Monstre had much more humble beginnings.

Yeah, that's a hand up my butt. Leave me alone!

Needless to say, such an auspicious beginning led M. Monstre to a career in politics. Starting this career was a little challenging. People don't hire monsters as a matter of course. So, M. Monstre decided to start small with kissing hands and shaking babies (I did try to explain that it wasn't how it is done, but M. Monstre was having none of it. Thankfully, there is no muscle strength in M's arms to hurt a fly) and came in to work with me to find a new home.

M. Monstre took a look around the office and enjoyed a nice latte from downstairs. Pleased, M. Monstre spent a bit more time imagining life as CEO and President of the world and then hopped into a backpack to start a career to span many a child.

I tried to tell M. Monstre that children don't provide lattes, but I could be wrong. I don't really know that many 6 and 7 year old children. Maybe they play coffee shop and serve "lattes" to each other. Or maybe that is only the children of coffee afficianados like me.

M. Monstre did care. Children are more important than lattes after all even to monsters. And office chairs are not as much fun as a future with a little girl or boy who will show them all that they can be. And dreams of the future are best shared with those who will take your dreams and expand on them until you could never believe that you ever dreamed so small.

Welcome to a new child's life, M. Monstre. I hope the journey goes well for you.

Pattern: Malcolm the Monday Monster (rav link)
Yarn: Berocco Plush
Needles: Size 8 (5.0 mm)

Started July 28th (picked up the yarn after work) and finished on July 31st for knitting and stuffing, and August 4th for sewing on the mouth. Rav project details.

my tiny foodmill

Sur la Table is a dangerous place. It is in the mall, and like the Williams Sonoma that was in it before has a lot of fun kitchen implements. Unlike Williams Sonoma, there appear to be items across a wider range of prices, so not everything is quite as pricy. If we catch the bus on a Sunday afternoon, we can ninja there and make the bus for its return trip into town. As you can see. Very dangerous.

Last weekend I picked up the mini food mill from Sur La Table. While I might have liked a more robust product, I am a novice and do not have a problem buying novice level equipment while I am learning what I'm doing. If I ever need to do huge projects, then maybe I'll switch. Possibly not, because this did exactly what I wanted of it.

Last week, I decided to make red currant jam. I was afraid of my currants going bad, so I spent the afternoon making jam and having little side trips. Clean berries and remove the stems, and realize the recipe highly recommends a food mill. Search the internet and realize the alternatives to a food mill are pretty annoying (umm, I have a sieve, and I do not want to use it to squish pounds of fruit to make sure that the 1000s of seeds are not in the jam). Go to Sur La Table and get the food mill. Wash and set up the food mill. Start heating the currants and realize I'm completely out of my 10 pound bag of sugar. Get sugar and then finally make jam.

Along the way I thought about buying a canning pot, but did not. So, my jars were sterilized in boiling water, but I did not resterilize after filling them. According to the recipe, they should be good for a year without it as long as stored in the fridge. And so I did.

My currants from the farmer's market produced 3 8-ounce jars of jam. I used the recipe on David Lebovitz's blog and followed his suggestion that the currants and jam did not need a 1-1 ratio, so my jam is less sweet. While I have helped one of my friends make jam (and a lot of it, we were pitting and chopping cherries for an evening), I have never done any of the jam making process myself.

I like that this was an easy recipe relying on the natural pectin in the fruit, so no additional pectin was harmed in making this jam. It is tasty, and I have been using it on english muffins and other bread products all week.

Of course, I have other fruit I could potentially do this with, and large quart size jars for making pickles. The CSA means that this will be the summer of canning, so I can enjoy the produce we've acquired all winter long.

It's time for Fealty

My friend, Eric, is finally getting his game published. Now, I'll admit that I'm not the best game player. For me to enjoy a game I have to 1) not crush my opposition, 2) not feel like I'm losing all the time, and 3) still feel like there was a challenge. I tend to play a lot of card and word games as a result, because I already have most of the learning curve in my bones. It is also why I enjoy Bridge so much. I certainly am not a master bridge player after all.

Eric is different. I am not sure that there isn't a game he won't play at least once and he is an awesome player and teacher of games. I don' make it to his game nights, because I haven't perfected my ability to go south of Boston, feed and walk the dog, and then go north of Boston in under 2 hours. I also haven't really perfected the life built on no sleep no matter what it might look like. I didn't get to play this game during the pre-production phase, but my husband did as one of the play testers.

Last night Chris and I broke open his copy and set the pieces up. Games are pretty short; 8 turns for a full length game took us including set up time and reading the instructions under 45 minutes. I had a bit of a problem with the learning curve. Like Othello, this game is easy to play but hard to master. Needless to say I lost! Maybe I'll cream my husband next time we play!

1. Time for scoring!, 2. Chris is playing Red, 3. What's in the box, 4. Nice box, wanna play?

Eric has a Kickstarter campaign in order to get funds to make a larger print run and cover more of the printing costs up front. If you like strategy games or territory control games, then this would be a great fit for your game library. It is nice to have a little quick pick me up game in the collection, especially if you are like us and your games include Pandemic (fairly quick), Thurn and Taxis (relatively speedy), Dungeon of Dorukan (long), and Talisman (super long).

Required warning: I'm one of Eric's friends, but I receive no $ or other tangibles for writing about the game on the blog.

[10 Tuesday] romantic comedy?

I probably shouldn't be writing about romantic comedies or movies at all. I mean, I am the person who thinks it is perfectly reasonable to watch both Addams Family Values (the play within a play) and Sweeney Todd as Thanksgiving movies. They are about eating after all.

Needless to say my bar doesn't always match what any reasonable human being would expect.

However, I do watch actual romantic comedies and I need to finish up fast as Mr. Victor cannot be put just out into the back yard right now (fertilizing means extra actual dog walks), and he is patiently waiting for me.

1. Ever After. I like fairy tale retellings for stories and it turns out I like them for movies as well. It is something that is perfectly acceptable for my husband to watch too, though that mostly has to do with Leondardo da Vinci. It is endearing and has a reasonable dose of grrl power.

2. Into the Woods. What? I like it. There is romance, and then another romance, and maybe even more romance. It is completely broken and I love all the characters. It has Bernadette Peters and Joanna Gleason, and for someone like me who cannot remember names the fact that I didn't need to look anything up might say something.

3. Never Been Kissed. Drew Barrymore and John C. Reilly make it really easy to use this movie as part of our 6 degrees. Every once in a while we decide that we are only going to watch a movie if it uses someone from the cast of the movie we just watched. This movie links Charlies Angels and Chicago. It also has some of the elements I like best. I don't want my characters to be patsies or all Too Stupid to Live.

4. Tangled. What? You mean that I cannot fill it with my favorite fairy tale retellings? But this one definitely hit all of my favorite tropes: grrl power, bad guy redemption, and the love in between. And there is knitting, which I find kind of hilarious!

5. The Princess Bride. I have loved this movie since before my friends and I tried to do this at Wellesley. The movie has been part of our family since I was 12, making Christmas for a year or so extra silly. At Wellesley, I was the Dread Pirate Roberts and probably best known for: I would soon as destroy an artist as a stain glass window like yourself...

6. Wall-E. I love the relationship between Wall-E and EVE. They are so cute. Even more I love how their adventures spark romance in other people aboard the ship. I also love that the movie is an admonition to exercise.

7. Marley and Me. I don't remember if I thought the movie was awesome because it was awesome or if I was too distracted by Doggie! No matter. It is on the list either way.

8. Clueless and The Craft. These are two movies that are I watched at about the same time that were theoretically supposed to be loosely based on Emma. While I can see the resemblance in Clueless, I never did feel it in the Craft (not that it stopped me from enjoying it at all).

9. Dangerous Beauty. My 6 degrees link between The Three Musketeers and Feris Bueller's Day Off, it has Oliver Platt conducting a poetry slam. It is pretty awesome!

10. The Cutting Edge. Hey, it is about both figure skating and hockey (sort of). Moira Kelly allows me to link to Dangerous Beauty and the Lion King (she is adult Nala).