It’s Wednesday! Hurrah!
In a house that receives its weekly quota of fresh vegetables and fruit from Chubeza on Mondays, Wednesday is an interesting day. Gone is the excitement of Monday, when the box of new edible toys made its way to our living room, and when we had the freshest salad ever and had a few ideas what to do. Gone is also the laboriousness of Tuesday, when we executed one of those ideas (soba soup with greens – this time, not too exciting. Shame, shame, shame, amazing spinach and carrots gone to waste). What now? What now?
Well, as Chad points out, we do have squash.
Squash is a strange vegetable, to me, at least. It’s stringy, and it has a very tough skin, and it has a wonderful color. While Americans eat their squashes on a regular basis and make all sorts of wonderful things out of them, Israeli squash is often too watery-juicy (and not very “buttery”) and therefore, isn’t too good to mash. When baked, its consistency is more like zucchini. Thing is, it’s tasty.
So, I have a large piece of organic squash in my fridge, and while I *could* make some soup or stir fry, I’m not inspired. So I decided to open this up for discussion: What do you suggest I do with the squash?
6 Comments
After reading about Chubeza on this blog, I contacted them to sign up and sadly they don’t have room at this time. For shame! All I wanted to do was support locally grown produce!
Hi, Harry and Safranit!
In their latest issue of their little newsletter, the Chubeza people did mention that they now had a waiting list, but were able to accomodate up to four or five families a week off the list (here’s what they have to say about this: http://chubeza.com/newsletter/?p=128). I’ve seen the field – it’s quite small, and probably can’t support so many people.
But do not despair. There are other ways of obtaining good locally grown produce. Here’s a list of some places that might do organic deliveries from various smaller farms that care about what they grow:
http://www.altnet.co.il/Companies/Index.asp?SubIndicatorID=83&CategoryID=44&SearchType=1&Letter=238
There’s also these folks, who seem to operate on a Chubeza-like principle: http://www.salatorgani.co.il/
Then there’s these folks, up in the north – it seems a fun store, but I haven’t been:
http://www.irisplace.net/framesetorganic.html
Good luck!
Ditto to Harry… (although I didn’t call) we belonged to a CSA in Wisconsin and it was great. Do you know of any others?
I just found your blog for the first time, and we are in jerusalem and get our vegetables from Chubeza too! We love supporting a local farmer, knowing where our food is coming from, eating what is fresh and in season and all the general reasons for joining a CSA. I was so happy to find it (and that they had room for us after being on the waiting list for a bit)after having read a lot about CSA’s and not realizing that it was a possibility here in Israel.
last week, i made a great dish with the squash we got – a squash gratin from Deborah Madison’s “Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone”. I’ve also (obviously) made soups with it in the past.
I could post or email the recipe if you want.
Hi, Chanie! Welcome!
We went ahead and made a stir-fry with fresh tofu, cabbage, and the squash, and ate it over brown rice noodles. It was really good.
sounds good!
i’ll definitely be back to see what you are doing with the vegetables we are all getting.
i’m trying to stick with what they send me, and that is also a nice change in mindset – not getting what i want or am in the mood for, but what is fresh and local and in season, and figuring out what to make based on that.
i have been supplementing some things like garlic, onions, and leeks (though we did get onions this week).