From my kitchen: cabbage six ways, eggplant and zucchini lasagna, green bean salad, pickled radishes, blueberries and black currant muffins

Broiled cabbage in cheese sauce.

The week at home after a week away is always a hectic one. Add to that an urban farm heading into peak production and you can imagine how busy I have been! Less than an hour after we got home I was picking green beans - eight pounds of them, in fact. More cabbage, peas and strawberries found their way into the kitchen, as well as radishes and the first zucchini and yellow pear tomatoes of the season. This week saw my first trip to my local blueberry farm and a compromise was made in the black currant department in the interest of keeping my sanity.



One of my favorite summer dishes is green bean salad: cooled cooked beans, tossed with mint, lemon zest, minced red onion and feta cheese, drizzled with a balsamic vinaigrette.

I defrosted some grilled eggplant rounds from last year and with some zucchini sauteed and added to the marinara along with fresh basil, assembled a lovely vegetable lasagna.

The Caraflex cabbages are splitting - time to eat or process them!

We are still overrun with cabbage so the challenge continues to make it different and interesting each time I serve it!

Making coleslaw

On the menu this week was roasted cabbage which was served with the lasagne, coleslaw, a yaki soba stirfry with sausage, cabbage, carrot, and ramen noodles, a cabbage, zucchini, and chicken stirfry in a peanut butter sauce, broiled cabbage in a cheese sauce, and a cabbage soup base which I froze for the winter.

Soup base with cabbage, green beans, zucchini, carrots and barley

Making winter soup bases is a great way to use up summer vegetables. I add everything except a protein and freeze in multiple containers. When I defrost a container I can add whatever protein I want and season it accordingly. This way I get several different soups out of one soup base. I do this a lot over the summer and use the veggies in abundance at the time.

I made Cookie and Kate's refrigerator radish pickles this week which turned out nice and crunchy. I used homemade raw apple cider and the color combination with the pink radishes is beautiful!

Each year I go to Rocky Point Blueberry Farm. It is a small farm located in an old residential neighborhood overlooking Narragansett Bay. I picked six pounds of berries, some of which will become jam while the rest was eaten or frozen. I'll be going back this week for round two.



Also in season right now are currants. Black currants are one of my favorite fruits and I had planned to make the hour trip each way to a 'pick your own' farm in Connecticut as there are no black currants in Rhode Island. Reality, however, kicked in and I just couldn't justify the time. Whole Foods had black currants for sale this week at four times the PYO price per pound but I made the compromise so I could continue to preserve my own produce and get my family back on track. I only bought a couple of containers rather than the couple of pounds I would have bought from the farm. The black currant muffins I made were terrific and such a treat. Sometimes you have to choose time over money.

What's coming out of your kitchen right now?

Sue