By Julia

This week’s harvest: corn, beets, green beans, a pumpkin, pea tendrils, lettuce, a turnip, spey cabbage, spinach, cilantro, mustard greens, fingerling potatoes, green peppers, arugula.

My share partner and I both went out of town for the weekend, so I didn’t even try to fix everything in the box. I gave the arugula, mustard greens, lettuce and pea tendrils to our neighbors to enjoy. The corn, green beans, spey cabbage and spinach went straight into the freezer for later.

My husband & I go camping every Columbus Day weekend in Maine, and I was excited to bring some of our vegetables to cook over the campfire. I tossed the fingerling potatoes, beets and some carrots with a couple tablespoons of olive oil and some salt and pepper, and wrapped them in foil, to roast over coals. When I had a nice hot bed of embers I tossed the packets in and let them cook for forty minutes, turning once, while roasting hot dogs on a stick. I wasn’t able to get a decent picture, but they were beautifully cooked and made our campfire dinner feel fancy.

Back home, I wanted to use the pumpkin in a non-sweet recipe. I’ve made pumpkin pie from a whole pumpkin before, and although it pains me to say it, I don’t think the extra effort is worthwhile. I wanted to find a dish where the pumpkin wouldn’t be stewed or mashed, and Allrecipes came through for me: Savory Pumpkin Casserole. I made the recipe as directed, except that I used fat-free cottage cheese and added a sprinkle of paprika to the pumpkin-onion-butter step. I paired the casserole with apple-and-fennel smothered pork chops and some roasted potatoes. Is there anything better and easier to prepare than a fall roast dinner? Whatever you have on hand + olive oil and sea salt + hot oven = WIN.

Before:

After:

The pumpkin casserole was delicious, too. The recipe says you get 6 servings at 166 calories per, but I made it in a 9×13 baking dish and got 8 big servings. Then I ate two.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 10:11 am and is filed under Blogs, What's In the Box. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.