I want this dress

(and, by the way, reading people magazine makes me feel dumb. the only reason i read it today and saw this picture was because cnn.com had a link to a people article about daniel radcliffe.)

Red White and Bru

In celebration of the 4th of July, we made a flag parfait for breakfast. Corny, but good.

Yogurt, Grape Nuts, sberries, and blueberries. 

And, by the way, here's a picture of the cutest baby ever, Eric. He's my friend Amy's. 

Somebody must hate us...

First of all, wow! I didn't even tell anyone except my mom that we kind of started blogging again (if you can call posting twice in a month blogging...) and we somehow got 6 comments on the last post. So I'll try to post a little more often now, if I can - I started my summer job two weeks ago and its quite a commute, so I'm not sure how often I'll get to this. But since now I know that I have to keep you all informed about the CSA box, I'll have a little motivation! 

Anyway, the purpose of this post is not the CSA or garden (although I finally have to upload the original garden pics and the garden at a few weeks old pics), but to complain. For some reason it seems that whenever Steve and I really start to like a product or place, it is discontinued!! It is so frustrating, and I'm starting to think that its some sort of conspiracy against us.

This all started back when I lived in King of Prussia. On the way home from work, I'd stop by the Trader Joe's in Gateway. I always loved to get a particular olive tapenade, and one day they just stopped stocking it. They came out with some substitution, but it was no where near the same. 

OK, so this was just a little annoying, but it continually got worse. 

The next instance I can think of also involved Trader Joe's. We love to make caprese salad in the summer with cherry or grape tomatoes, basil, balsamic vinegar, oil, and mozzarella. We used to get Trader Joe's pearlini mozzarella - tiny pearl-sized balls of mozzarella, and it worked so well with the salad - perfect size and we didn't even have to slice it. Well, one day the beginning of last summer they stopped selling it. Sure, the other sizes of mozzarella taste the same, but the cubes I cut just aren't as pretty. 

Now we move on to the more recent losses - 

First, Steve and I loved the margherita pizza from a place down the street called Luciano's. Then they shut down, just like that. We have no clue if they relocated or just went out of business. For a while we were on a quest to find a comparable margherita, but we've had absolutely no luck. Oh well. 

Second, we love a recipe - actually from The Herbal Kitchen, one of our cookbook club books. Its a kale-pancetta orecchiette. The orecchiette really makes the dish. We used to get it at our usual grocery store, Acme, but they just stopped stocking it. A few other local grocery stores don't stock it either, and I really don't want to have to go all over town just for one product! It must be the Main Line grocery stores - they suck! Seriously. I guess they are smaller because they're along busy roads and not in a strip mall, so the selection is horrible for everything! Orecchiette is a sturdier pasta, and I haven't been able to find anything to replace it well. We've been using small shells, but they just don't work as well. 

And finally, a loss we've suffered just today! And I think this is the absolute worst! There was a stand in the Ardmore Farmer's Market called Ariana's Caravan. It was a GREAT spice shop - it had a huge variety of spices that you can't get anywhere else (even stuff that our fellow cookbook club members had to go to Chinatown for for our last meeting); so many kinds of dried peppers; teas; oils; vinegars; our favorite curry paste; really cool leather wine carriers for BYOs (which we've already lost and had to replace - hope we hold on to this one!); etc etc etc. Well, we were in the Farmer's Market today to get some fresh squeezed beet-strawberry-mango juice, and there was a huge sale at Ariana's. Great, we thought. But then we found out that they are looking for a buyer. They're even selling their stands and shelves, so there's little hope that the buyer will keep the shop open in the same space. I really don't know what we're going to do now! What do we do when we need a new crazy spice for cookbook club? What do we do when we just need more peppercorns - buy the McCormick brand at Acme, which, by the way, usually doesn't have loose peppercorns and just packages them in the crappy plastic McCormick pepper grinder (which is pretty hard to destroy). 

Anyway, I just realized that all of these items are about food. But its annoying anyway. Either Steve and I just like things that most people don't and so don't buy, which leads to stores discontinuing them, or someone hates us!

Community Supported Agriculture

This year's garden is finally in. I'm writing this on Steve's computer - my old computer - which is ridiculously slow, so no pictures of the garden yet. I'll post them when I upload them onto my Mac. But we have 3 kinds of tomatos (2 regular grape tomatos, a white cherry tomato, and a green zebra cherry tomato), jalepeno, zucchini, cucumber, peas, kale, onions, and horseradish. As for herbs, we have 2 kinds of basil, parsley, oregano, rosemary, and mint. I still want to find cinnamon basil and catnip.

You would think that all those veggies would be enough. But no. We also suscribed to a CSA this year. I read about them in "In Defense of Food," and then found one online. Basically, a local farm takes suscriptions for the season and then delivers you a box of veggies each week. We got a suscription through November, so I'm really excited about the fall vegetables, as well as about getting things I've never had before, like rudabaga and dandelion greens. The CSA winds up being less than $30/week, and we get a huge amount of stuff - enough that we'll have to consciously make an effort to eat all of them. Plus, we're getting chemical-free produce - so its more nutritious than veggies grown with the NPK fertilizers. And we're supporting a local farm that encourages diverse farming, instead of farming acre after acre of one type of plant, which decreases soil health.

Today was our first CSA pickup. As its early in the season, we got A LOT of leafy vegetables...

spinach, collards, dandelion greens, red leaf lettuce, bok choi, scallions, and parsley. We're definitely excited to have this box, but it is a little repetitive to have so many leafy greens - we'll be having salads and chicken on top of wilted greens a lot this week! Tonight I experimented with the dandelion greens. I cooked up some pasta, and then sauteed garlic and a scallion from the box, added the dandelion, and then later added sliced cherry tomatoes and mushrooms. A little salt, pepper, and parmesean to top it off, and it was a pretty decent meal. The dandelion was a little bitter, though. I wish I had had a lemon to cut the bitterness with some acidity. Next time.

-D