It's the first CSA box of the year! Here's what we got:

2 pints strawberries
3 huge leeks
bunch tokyo turnips w greens
bunch carrots w greens
bunch fresh dill
7 medium zucchini
2 little gem lettuce
1 bag mesclun mix
1/2 dozen eggs

This year we have an egg share, which is super exciting. Just look at all those colors! And who couldn't be excited about stuffing their faces with the first farm-fresh strawberries of the year?

There was only one problem: we got the box immediately before leaving the country for a week. How could we eat as much of this as possible in as little time as possible?

Fortunately, a good chunk of our share keeps pretty well. Leeks, turnips, and carrots are all reasonable storage vegetables. Eggs keep forever, which is good, because we had ten of our last dozen left too. The rest needed to get eaten or cooked and frozen pretty quickly. So what did we make?


Strawberries: Of course, we had to eat an entire pint raw as soon as possible. That's a given. Extras got washed, sliced, and frozen for future smoothies. Otherwise, we could have cut them up and strewed them over some of the mesclun mix for salad.

Zucchini: I am the main eater of zucchini in our house, but even I couldn't eat all seven in two days. I shredded a couple along with a carrot or two, mixed them with tuna, scallion, mustard, and sriracha, and had a lovely spicy tuna salad. I cubed up a couple more and threw them into some brothy soup. That took care of about half of them. The rest sat in the crisper and miraculously stayed intact for the duration of our trip. Other ideas: a zucchini pancake would be a good plan. Zucchini noodles and some relatively hearty lentil and tomato sauce would work well too. And cubed zucchini is great scrambled with a couple eggs or thrown into fried rice.

Dill: Since we had all the eggs, we could have made an excellent egg salad, but we didn't get to it in time. (This is actually on the list for this week.) Instead, I put the whole bunch of dill in a jar of water and put it in the fridge to see how well it would keep. This worked astonishingly well. I've since been snipping it into soup and strewing it over crispbread spread with cream cheese and topped with black pepper.

Lettuces: The little gems keep reasonably well, so we ate the softer mesclun first, along with the bit of romaine we already had. I don't know about you, but when I get a lot of pre-washed, perfectly fresh mesclun, I tend to just eat it in big handfuls out of the bag, or throw a handful of undressed leaves on my plate, along with whatever random quesadilla may be on the menu otherwise. That's exactly what happened here.

Verdict: success! We managed to eat all the tender vegetables in record time, and the rest kept in good shape for the week that we were away.

And now we have another box coming this afternoon. Yay!

Do you have a CSA share? What are you making with all your bounty?