More Food

Tonight makes week two of our CSA (see previous post). Heck yes this was an awesome idea.

Last week we picked up the following:
One half-gallon of whole milk
One quart of peach yogurt
One dozen eggs
One half-pound of jalapeno apricot cheese spread
Pork chops
Hot Italian sausage links
Parmesan-herb baguette

Wow. That's a lot of food for two people for a week. Corbin and I began planning the way we'd use the food. I was mostly concerned about the whole milk and the eggs, since the meat was frozen and who ever has to worry about eating a baguette before it goes stale?

Our first idea for milk & eggs: ice cream. Well, you could say this was my sister's idea too, since she's been saying from the beginning that that's how we should use the milk. We have some local honey on hand that we bought a few weeks ago from a farmer's market nearby and I have ten or twelve Madagascar vanilla beans from making Basil Lemonade, so I made honey vanilla ice cream. Yum! Six egg yolks down. Here's the recipe.

I had six egg whites left over, so I made one of my favorites: Forgotten Cookies. Here's the recipe:

6 egg whites
2 1/4 cups sugar
chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 375. Beat the egg whites until they're foamy. Very slowly add the sugar while continuing to beat the eggs until they're stiff. Fold in the chocolate chips - as few or as many as you want - and spoon the mixture in teaspoon-fulls onto a parchment lined baking sheet. Place the pans in the oven and turn the oven off. Let the cookies sit without opening the door until the oven is completely cooled. overnight is best.

Next I decided to use our last six eggs, our hot Italian sausage, and some of the milk in a dish that my family made for Christmas last year: The Neely's sausage and leek casserole. This is basically a spicy breakfast casserole, and I love it because the main filler is not eggs (though there are eggs in the dish) but French baguette cut up into cubes. Delicious. Here's the recipe.

So all of this food was delicious, but of course we still had a lot of milk left over, the yogurt's only half gone, and we've totally neglected our jalapeno-apricot cheese spread. So imagine how it felt tonight picking up another share :) But I'm definitely looking forward to finding new ways each week to use this food. And luckily for us, they were extremely limited in their milk because of a problem at the farm where they get it so I forfeited it for a little goodie: garlic and chive chevre. I've already eaten a ton of it. I also picked up:
A dozen eggs
A quart of plain yogurt
A half-pound of Jumpin Jack Horseradish
A pound of ground beef
A pound of ground pork
Bacon
Green beans
Red peppers

Anyway, I just wanted to share what's been going on in my food universe. Definitely try out these recipes if you're able to - I have to super-endorse the sausage and leek casserole because that was my favorite. I'll keep you updated with what else I make ;)