Healthy Harvest

No recipe with this one -- just trying out something new ... a "Healthy Harvest" box from our local farm -- Underwood Family Farms.

It is the first time that I purchased food items that had been selected for me rather than shopping for what I wanted.

I really liked it and I plan on making it a regular habit.   First, I feel like it could help avoid any sort of rut in making the same things over and over.  By being given ingredients, especially some I have never purchased before (like Kale in this box), it forces us to come up with something new or, at least, "new-ish".   Which also makes it a bit of a challenge.

In this box we got:

black kale
green leaf lettuce
purple carrots
turnips
fennel
butternut squash
avocados
sriacha
tangerines
gold beets.

We have eaten all of the tangerines so far; used the green leaf lettuce in asian chicken wraps; used the avoocados, and black kale to make a pesto for chicken sandwiches;  the turnips in a turnip, apple & potato soup; and have tried the sriacha -- which, was surprisingly "not bad"  -- I have always hated the flavor of sriacha, finding that it ruins ketchup and the original "rooster" brand sriacha, I just plain disliked. As it happens, Underwood Farms used to be the exclusive grower of all of the peppers in the ubiquitous Huy Fong Foods Sriacha) but Huy Fong canceled the contract and that resulted in some lawsuit and counter-lawsuit and, well, Underwood's own Sriacha sauce.  No knock on Huy Fong but I like this one better -- though anyone can accuse me of not knowing what "real" Sriacha tastes like and they wouldn't be wrong. :)