CSA Box Week 2: What to do with beans and cabbage? – The Bohemian Kitchen

These CSA boxes remind me of Chopped, a cooking show where chefs are given mystery baskets with random ingredients, which they must use to cook a meal. Obviously, me receiving a CSA box isn’t the same thing as a televised cooking competition. However, I find myself saying the same thing that the chefs say: what the heck am I supposed to do with this?

I picked up our box for week 2 on September 2nd. The ingredients are so simple, yet they still managed to stump me.

We got: cherry tomatoes, raspberries, green beans, a yellow pepper (I think it is a sweet Feherozon pepper), a red onion, a head of garlic, broccoli, and cabbage.

I know what to do with most of this stuff. But cabbage? I don’t cook with cabbage. I only ever used it one time (and it was Napa, not green) for kimchi, and I’m not in the mood to make kimchi again. As for the green beans, well of course I know what those are, but I rarely cook with them. Look how many they gave me! What the heck am I supposed to do with one pound of green beans?

Google to the rescue! I looked around and found a recipe for Cabbage Slaw with Cilantro Dressing. I like that it doesn’t use mayonnaise. Instead, it uses a dressing of 1/4 cup rice vinegar, 2 tsp sugar, 2 tbsp vegetable oil, 2 tsp ginger, 1 tsp sesame oil, 1/2 tsp chili oil (optional). The original recipe did not call for sesame or chili oil but I added them, and I left out the Serrano chile.

For the slaw itself I mixed together green cabbage, cilantro, green onions, chopped peanuts, and that pale yellow pepper.

It tasted crisp and fresh and healthy. I served it with the salt and pepper tofu that I had leftover from Chinese takeout.

Now for the green beans. Well, I decided to ferment them with salt water and dill and spices. I still had yellow beans from the week before, so I made a jar of spicy yellow beans by adding crushed dried chili peppers instead of dill.

The yellow beans turned out just fine. Unfortunately, the green beans were a complete failure. The stupid things kept floating to the top of the jar and sticking out above the saline, which caused a lovely layer of mold to form in the jar. Bah! Oh well, at least I tried.

I still need to do something with the broccoli, if it hasn’t gone bad yet. Yes, I know that I shouldn’t have left it in the fridge for this long. I’ll probably steam it and serve it as a side dish, or cook it into a Quiche.

Thanks for stopping by!