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I do my best. I plan and make lists. I search for recipes and techniques. But despite all of my significant efforts, there are often weeks in which I don’t make full use of my CSA share veggies. They get wilty or slimey or tossed in the bin, untasted and uncelebrated. Poor fellows. Bad Kate!
Now, don’t get me wrong. I think we do better than some others in eating up all our weekly goodies. Even so, the thrown-together dishes of the end of the week often result in haphazard or unremarkable food.
But this week, ah. This week, Kate done good.
I made use of more than half of our weekly veggies all in one dish — and more importantly, all in one dish that was a real crowd pleaser, both at dinner and as leftovers for the next two days — using this recipe:
Chevre and Greens Stuffed Shells in Bechamel
So many goodies were stuffed in these shells, goodies I happened to have on hand, fresh from the farm. Spinach, zucchini, fresh peas, mint, oregano, small onions (used in place of shallot). Granted, the original recipe called for a cup of broccoli, the one thing I didn’t have. But I had an extra cup of the other veggies, so I simply used more of those to make up the difference.
One potful of luscious green colors, proving to me that there is such a thing as a perfectly seasonal recipe, a dish that can be almost completely culled from the fields and brought directly to the table.
Now if only I had gotten local goat cheese (Hello, Mini Moos!) and local milk for the bechamel sauce. Dern. Well, no one’s perfect.
(But the bechamel sauce just might be, adapted from a low-fat bechamel technique in the New York Times that chops lots of fat and calories from the traditional French version.)
Now, these shells are not going to taste like the more common Italian variety. They’re less saucy, the cheese sauce infused into the noodles themselves. They’re more delicate and slightly tart in flavor, the mint adding an exotic hint that, if you didn’t know which herbs were included, you probably couldn’t place.
We loved them. And even better, not one scrap of our weekly CSA produce went to waste.
I can’t help it! I feel a little proud. And quite decadently well fed, as well.
