11/12 box

While carrots are fairly standard supermarket root vegetables, what about carrot tops? Unlike the denuded carrots you find in a supermarket, the greenery on these carrots is fresh and completely edible. Use them to make carrot top pesto, a student favorite at Paideia, carrot top chimichurri, sauté them, or simply sprinkle them over roasted root veggies (for example, your carrots, or your fingerling sweet potatoes). Or, pair the pesto with the roasted vegetables. The variations are endless.

This is our sixth week with hakurei turnips. These versatile turnips are good roasted, glazed, eaten raw, sautéed, even mashed. And don't forget about the greens, which can be easily sautéed into a side dish.

To incorporate more of this week's ingredients, here's a salad recipe that also uses your mustard greens. You can also use collards or lettuce as a salad base to go with your turnips.

Check out our past blurbs from 11/5, 10/29, 10/22, 10/14, and 10/8 for more recipes and ideas.

This is our fifth week of collards. If you don't want to use them right away, they can be stored for up to a week or two in the refrigerator. Place leaves in a perforated plastic bag wrapped in a damp paper towel in the vegetable crisper of the refrigerator to keep leaves moist and to avoid drying.

Here's a collard and quinoa salad that also uses carrots, along with watermelon radish and goat cheese, should you have any left over. Or, try this simple recipe for garlicky greens that works equally well with collards as with kale.

Check out our past blurbs from 10/14, 10/22, and 10/29, 11/5 for more recipes.

This is our second week with Napa cabbage. It has a slightly more delicate flavor than your usual cabbage. However, they are as hardy as Western cabbages when it comes to storage; if you don't want to use them immediately, they will keep for a week or longer in the fridge, especially if wrapped in plastic. When you're ready to use it, it can be eaten in salad, stir-fried, stuffed to make cabbage rolls, or even made into a quick kimchi.

Click here for more ideas on using your Napa cabbage, or here to see last week's blurb.

Sunchokes - Pi Farm

No, they're not related to artichokes. And contrary to their appearance, they're not related to ginger either. These root vegetables are probably closest in taste and texture to potatoes, and lend themselves to a similarly wide variety of preparations. Whether simply roasted, mashed, smashed, or even made into a puréed soup, they make a healthier, slightly sweeter substitute for potatoes in many recipes. Unlike potatoes, they can even be shaved into thin slices and eaten raw (or cooked) on salad.

In terms of preparation, be sure to wash the roots carefully, as the nooks and crannies can harbor a lot of dirt. However, the peels are edible.

Lettuce - Pi Farm

This versatile salad green can be used in practically any salad or sandwich, or even as the outside container in a lettuce wrap. In addition, it can also be easily grilled, stir-fried, or, with slightly more effort, even made into a puréed lettuce soup if you just want your veggies cooked.

Try this list of lettuce recipes for more ideas.

Habanero Peppers - Pi Farm

We have 2-3 hot habanero peppers for each box this week! Use them to spice up any dish by chopping a little and throwing it in, or adding them to condiments (salsa, jelly, hot sauce) first before using them. A word of caution: remember to use gloves when cutting the peppers and be very, very sure to wash your hands thoroughly afterwards so you don't accidentally get the oils into your eyes.

Fingerling Sweet Potatoes - Pi Farm

UPDATE: We forgot to put these in the bags! There will be extra sweet potatoes in next weeks share. Sorry!

They really are just sweet potatoes, but smaller. However, not only do these fingerlings tend to cook faster than normal sweet potatoes, they are also uniformly soft where a larger sweet potato might be stringy. Moreover, the skin is tenderer and sweeter than that of a fully grown sweet potato, making them delicious without peeling as well. These fingerling sweet potatoes can be prepared the same way normal sweet potatoes are, though with shorter cooking times (roasted, smashed, glazed, etc.)

Mustard Greens - Community Herd

Mustard greens are making a reappearance. These versatile vegetables are delicious raw just lightly dressed with lemon juice, olive oil, and salt for a refreshing, peppery salad (or see the hakurei turnip salad recipe for something heartier.) They can also be stir-fried or sautéed, or used to add more vegetable content to soups. Or, it can replace the napa cabbage in kimchi, or the basil (or carrot top) in pesto. The simplest way to eat them cooked? Serve them the Japanese way: blanched and seasoned simply with a bit of soy sauce or oyster sauce.

For more ideas for cooking mustard greens, click here for a list of ten simple preparations, or check out the 10/29 blurb.

Georgia Sweet Kisses - Franklin's Citrus Farm

These local, tiny, bite-sized oranges are this week'e exceptionally sweet, juicy, and fresh extra. Most varieties of oranges are in season from around November to January, which makes now the perfect time to enjoy these local Kisses from Franklin's Citrus Farm, based in Statesboro, Georgia.

For more about Franklin's Citrus Farm, click here.