July 9 - MORE Zucchini?

My parents very kindly picked up our box today since I was away and Mark gets home too late. It also gave them an opportunity to see how the whole pick up process works and to take a vegetable or two for themselves from my box. (Thank you, THANK YOU, parents, for taking a zucchini!) It's not that I don't like zucchini - I do. But wow - I have quite the zucchini collection at this point.

The other fun thing about having my parents pick up my veggies, is I got to play the "guess the vegetable" game with them this week. They were (I hate to say it) a bit better at identifying things than Mark was, but a few things stumped them. For example, "a fluffy green thing that looks like the top of a carrot" was dill. And, "a little red lettuce" was radicchio, which I suppose if you think about it actually IS a little red lettuce. They didn't mention the extra surprise though, which was absolutely fantastic flat leaf parsley.

If you're wondering, this is what we got:

• Swiss chard (Holy cow - is there no end to the swiss chard! I'm going to need to get inventive with the cooking.)
• Beets - yay
• Dill - this is GREAT in salads and smells heavenly
• Zucchini - need I say more
• Yellow squash - yes, I realize that this is really just a zucchini of a different color, but somehow I like its golden cheerful color more.
• Cucumbers - always useful
• Radicchio - I like to shred some of this in a salad. It's bitter, so you wouldn't necessarily want to eat it straight, but it really adds, both in color and flavor, to a salad.
• Red Batavian Lettuce - nice, sort of wavy leaves
• Romaine lettuce - always useful, but the curlier lettuces fill up the salad bowl more easily.
• Parsley - this is honestly the VERY BEST parsley I have ever tasted. I put it in our salad.

Tonight I brought a huge bowl of salad to my parents' house. It had two types of lettuce, yellow squash, radicchio, dill, parsley, white salad turnips (from last week) and shredded carrot (also from last week). It was a big hit, and really, I'm not sure if I've ever had a fresher salad.