CSA vegetables and some minestrone

Hooray--its Community Shared Agriculture time again! I hopped onto my trusty bike and biked over to the Carter Center to pick up my share. Its a nice ride, about 3 miles from our house. Here is me, post ride, in the Atlanta heat. Sexy, no?

Here are our goods! So much produce for the first week--its fantastic. We have collards, swiss chard, green onions, squash, green beans and a variety of herbs. We continue to use Huckleberry Hill as our preferred CSA--Tynesha and her mother are fantastic and the shares are generous. This is our third year with them.

I grabbed some bread and goat cheese that we picked up at the farmer's market on sunday, a cup of coffee, and started going through my cookbooks...

As usual, even though its summer, I was drawn to the soups. A nice minestrone would work well with the vegetables, and it would leave me with plenty of vegetables to try other items as well. I based the recipe off the one found in Wendy Stephens' The Essential Mediterranean Cookbook. That is a great book, by the way. Its divided up into regions, such as North Africa, Greece, Turkey, Spain--its really cool.

The nice aspect of this minestrone is that you slow cook the base ingredients (onions, carrots, swiss chard, crushed tomatoes, garbanzos, parsley and broth) for over an hour, then add the remaining vegetables (zukes, squash, green beans) and pasta and cook until just al dente. I ended up using some leftover rice instead of pasta. It worked quite well.


Plenty for lunches as well. Hope all of you are having a nice June!