Too Many Veggies!

Between my bad habit of taking too much cash to the farmers' market, my garden, and my CSA membership, I have too many vegetables in my kitchen!

While I was able to turn large batches of peas, green beans, tomatoes, corn, zucchini, pumpkin, and apples into food for later in the year, I was blessed with four bags of red potatoes from my CSA, along with the warning, "These are not storage potatoes, so you should eat them up." Eat them with what?? I throw other vegetables into soups and freeze them for later. But potatoes don't freeze well. And I couldn't seem to get my act together to coordinate the thawing of some kind of meat with other veggies and the potatoes to make very many meals.

Maybe part of this is due to the fact that I now have two part-time jobs, neither of which has a set schedule, so I can't always count on a regular time to cook anymore. (Case in point: I had to work this past Thursday, which had been a day off for several weeks, thus, I did not cook anything or write multiple posts that day.)

Part of it might also be that, as much as I love fall and the romantic notion of "harvest" associated with my upcoming (but still two months away) favorite holiday, the joy of an overwhelming abundance of fresh produce has worn off. The potatoes have the misfortune of ripening after thrill of the harvest has worn out its welcome.

This morning, however, I was able to clear six bags of produce out of my kitchen! I used two brown bags of CSA potatoes, two bags of carrots (one from the CSA, one from my garden), a bag of yellow beans and a bag of green beans - both from the CSA. I also used two onions (one from the CSA, one from a farm stand) and leftover cloves of two types of garlic from the CSA and the Farmers' Market. This is my first all-local shepherd's pie. (And it's not really shepherd's pie because it is made with local, organic beef, not lamb. It is technically a cottage pie, but I grew up calling it shepherd's pie and I'm going to stick with that, in spite of the fact that this dish doesn't really resemble my mom's at all.)

I actually made two dishes - one large casserole dish for my house, and a smaller one for my parents. (My mom's shepherd's pie consists of one pound lean ground chuck, browned and drained, one can cream of mushroom soup, one-third of a soup can of water, one or two cans of green beans, and about 8 servings of Hungry Jack mashed potatoes. It was one of my favorite dishes growing up. The first time I cooked it for my husband I said, "I don't care if you like this or not. It's my favorite dish, and I'd appreciate it if you keep any negative comments to yourself." (For the record, he has never complained about my cooking. And this is now one of his favorite meals too.) In the past, I tried to cram too many vegetables into my large casserole dish for shepherd's pie, and, as happens too often in my kitchen, I had some overflow problems.

I used one pound of ground beef. I did not drain the beef because it is really, really low fat. I used what little drippings there were to cook my onions. You might choose to use more meat, but I spent many years as a vegetarian and I like the thought of meat as a condiment instead of a main dish. (To replace the canned cream of mushroom soup that would normally be mixed in with the beef, I could have made my own cream of mushroom soup from chicken stock, mushrooms, and cream. But there was no way I was going to buy MORE produce for this dish. The point was to get rid of all the veggies I hadn't been eating!)
I added fully cooked green and yellow beans. I'm not sure how many - but it was two weeks' worth from our CSA.
I also added fully cooked carrots. In the past, I made the mistake of adding lightly steamed veggies to the pie, thinking they would cook more as the dish baked. They didn't. And I did not appreciate crunchy parsnips and carrots in my comfort food.
I topped the dish with a layer of garlic mashed potatoes.
I put the casseroles in my fridge, and will cook one for dinner tomorrow night.

(I could have added corn and peas from my freezer, but I wanted to keep it simple. This dish had plenty of good stuff in it, and I might really want the corn in March.)

Then I went to my garden and dug up several more potatoes, a large bunch of carrots, and picked a huge zucchini and over a dozen tomatoes. I traded my dad the small shepherd's pie for a hunk of stuffed zucchini. I also picked three butternut squash, one of which I will use to make soup later in the fall. I left it at my parents' house for safekeeping.

I still have three bags of beets in the fridge (two from the CSA, one from the garden)(I like beets - but I have a mixture of golden beets and red ones and can't decide if I should cook them all together or separately), another bag of green beans, several small peppers, a bag of tomatillos, a bag of mixed lettuce, two baggies of radishes, and a bunch of cilantro.

I will be making salsa soon. And beets.