A Cabbage Called Kohlrabi

So tonight I have decided to take on my first post. Yes, you heard me correct, I am a...blog virgin. After catching up on the season premiere of Top Chef on the trusty DVR, I was inspired to take the proverbial bull by the horns (kohlrabi by the roots?) and work up a kick ass dinner with our first CSA food share from The Alleged Farms (www.theallegedfarm.com/csashare.html). I have known a few people who have taken part in food shares in the past, and they always mentioned that they did not use the veggies in time before they went bad. That will not be us!


I started out with a basic salad using the leftover lettuce from the salad that Nick made (see blog post 1). I really wanted to work with the kohlrabi because a) I had never heard of it before and b)anyone who has tried it has raved about it. Washed, peeled and sliced, I added it to the lettuce along with walnuts, quartered fresh strawberries from Bowman Orchards (www.bowmanorchards.com) and sliced apples and topped it off with some poppyseed dressing. Yum.




For the main course, we made wheat pasta (nothing special) and used the basil, arugula, parsley and the garlic scapes (the curlicue part of garlic that is tough, but delicious and has a more mild garlic taste) and put it through the food processor with some olive oil, crushed red pepper, lemon juice and parmesan cheese and voila! Pesto...of sorts. Now I can't take credit for this concoction - the good thing about The Alleged Farms food share is that you get a newsletter with every shipment and it includes some basic recipes and ideas for what to do with the stuff they are giving you. Their website is also really good for recipes, but we haven't ventured that far yet. We tossed our pesto with the pasta and it was delicious.

The only bad side was we couldn't finish our bowl of pasta because Nick and I were both too full from the awesomeness that was our pre-pasta salad. Leftovers it will be, and I bet it would even be really yummy cold. I was pretty impressed with myself - the only thing we have left is about 1/2 of the kohlrabi (which I julienned and put in the fridge for tomorrow's meal), the beet greens and the scallons. If all goes well, I'm going to make an apple kohlrabi slaw with sauteed chicken with scallions and beet greens and we will be done with all of our veggies by this time tomorrow. No waste this week for our hungry compost bin...