June 22 CSA basket: What are you doing with yours?

So, what are you doing with your vegetable share this week? just as a reminder, we had:

• English peas
• Sugar snap peas
• Spinach
• Loose lettuce
• Carrots
• Beets and turnips
• Quail eggs
• I am entering my fourth consecutive week of “a spinach salad a day.” My favorite, pictured on the left, is spinach, onion, blue cheese , and apple with a balsamic vinegar dressing.
  
  I’m also making “Bertha’s Carrot Cake” from the Silver Palate cook books (I almost said from the “new” Silver Palate cookbook, but since I just noticed that “new” book had its 25 year anniversary printing, I guess I better come up with a better name). In any case you can view the recipe on Epicurious here: http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Mother-Bertas-Carrot-Cake-107118

I hope Phil will write in with the recipe for pickled quail eggs with beets. I heard him giving this out to someone at the Capitol Hill pick-up yesterday, but didn’t catch it all.

As we eat through what is definitely our last week of peas (both kinds – and remember, the ones with the green twist ties are ENGLISH and must be shelled and the ones with white or no ties are sugar snaps and must never be shelled) and could be our last week of spinach (until fall), I am reminded how local eating is a series of visits from favorite friends that end too soon (forgive the lapse into Hallmark sentiment). Good-bye sweet peas, hello blueberries. It slays me that I won’t get another handful of that crunchy sweetness until 2010 – but then again, I am looking forward to drowning my sorrow in a big face full of blueberry pie. Eat seasonally and experience (or re-experience) the emotional drama of a junior high girl.