CSA Food Budgeting, plus Beets!!

Not Money Budgeting, really, but budgeting the actual food that we receive from our CSA is proving to be a challenge. This week, I must get better at incorporating the fresh veggies into our weekly eating routine. Even with the freezer meals, we can be more easily eating fresh vegetables on the side, rather than the frozen ones that came with the meals. As of yesterday we had a lot of left over veggies from last week still sitting in the fridge. 

Last night, in an effort to blow through a lot of vegetables, I made a HUGE salad of 1/2 a head of small cabbage, all of our remaining mixed greens, the remaining onion tops, and some (non-CSA) carrots and celery. I served it with goat cheese and lemon-tahini dressing from the farmer's market, and altogether, it was a side dish to pasta shells with meatballs (from the freezer from last time I made meatballs)

Well, the kiddo didn't want the salad, and mostly ate meatballs and pasta. Truthfully, the salad was so good that we basically said, "OK! No problem kid!" and ate all of the salad without him. Oh by the way, the child seems to have moved from "will eat only carbs if they are on the plate" to "will eat meat first and carbs after if there is room." I suppose that a toddler appetite really is different from week to week. 

My friend Kristen, who picks up a smaller share from our CSA on Tuesdays, says that we have beets this week! I love beets! I know that beets are somehow some kind of childhood trauma food for some people, but I'm so excited about the beets. I make this awesome side dish of beets with beet greens--it uses the whole vegetable in one dish and everyone loves it! Very messy to make of course, but worth it for the awesome mix of flavors. You just roast the beets and then dice them when they are done, and steam the leaves and chop them up, then put them in a bowl together with some salt & pepper. So you get the sweet from the beets, bitter from the greens, and salty from the salt, and have a perfect mix of flavors all in one dish. Yum! I can't wait!

It looks like we'll be getting garlic curls again--I really need to get out to the store and get some other ingredients for Garlic Pesto. Kristen made hers with walnuts (we are going to use almonds) and she said it was strong but delicious. She also froze a lot of pesto in ice cube trays for later. Great idea, and I will probably do the same.