As you may have noticed, I try to use my mushrooms from the Mushroom Add-On from Davis-Highlands Orchard & Farm on Tuesday nights.
This is partly because, you guessed it, I am trying to showcase the mushrooms of the week in case anyone wants to buy some extra on Thursday!
But it’s also because it encourages me to be creative with dinner!
Tuesdays and Fridays are my nights to cook during the summer. Stephen LOVES cooking and is a much better cook than me, plus I am delivering CSA boxes on Monday evenings, so he cooks on Sundays and Mondays. On Wednesdays, we always make homemade pizza with extra dough from bread-baking, so that usually ends up being a joint effort. Thursdays are either leftover night or Raphael cooks, since Stephen is delivering veggies and I am at the on-farm CSA pick-up, and Raphael takes after his dad in loving to cook! And Saturday dinners just depend on who has the time and energy after the farmers market!
Last evening when I was starting to make dinner, I decided to walk to the barn to see what veggies we had extra in our new walk-in cooler. When I got there, I remembered that we had an extra medium veggie box leftover from Monday’s droppoint. So I decided to challenge myself and see how many veggies I could include in dinner!
I had already thawed some pieced chicken—believe it or not, we hadn’t tried our pieced chicken yet! Of course, we love our whole chickens, and we have pieced them ourselves before for my “Easy Fried Chicken” recipe (which I will have to write another post about soon!) but I figured I should give our USDA pieced chicken a try!
I think I did pretty well with the veggie box challenge! Here’s what I used:
- 2 garlic scapes
- 1 medium head of broccoli
- 1 head of green cabbage
- 2 bunches of kale
- 3 medium yellow squash
- 2 stems of lemon-basil
plus I also used the following in a salad:
- 1 head of New Red Fire lettuce
- 1 head of Muir lettuce
- 2 stems of lemon-basil
The other ingredients I used from the farm/Davis-Highlands Farm were:
- chicken breasts, leg-thigh quarters, and thighs (enough for each person in my family to each get a piece)
- 1 container of bone broth
- 1/2 pound chestnut mushrooms
- a few salad tomatoes that were already ripe–yes, they’re coming soon!
And I used these ingredients as well:
- butter
- avocado oil
- all-purpose flour
- Old Bay (my go-to spice blend)
- milk
Pretty impressive, right?
Here’s what I did:
- I diced the garlic scapes, chopped the broccoli into bite-size pieces, chopped the kale, and quartered, cored, and sliced the cabbage.
- I melted butter in my dutch oven, then sauteed the chestnut mushrooms.
- I added and sauteed the veggies in this order:
- garlic scapes and broccoli
- cabbage
- kale
- Then I heated avocado oil in my cast-iron so I could sear the chicken pieces, 4 at a time. Once the chicken was in the cast-iron, I seasoned it with the Old Bay.
- I realized I had forgotten to slice and dice the yellow squash, but by then the kids wanted to help, so I put them on that job. They complained that they don’t even like summer squash and I was ruining dinner by adding this. When they saw that I wasn’t budging, they decided that dicing the squash as small as possible would be the best route. Of course, the ten-year-old did a better job at this than the seven-year-old, so we had various sizes of squash.
- I added the squash to the veggies.
- After the chicken pieces had all been seared, I transferred them to casserole pans to be ready for the oven.
- I added some broth to the veggies. I think if I were to make something like this again, I would skip this step and just go to the next step to make the sauce thicker at the end.
- I added a half-cup of flour to the cast-iron pan, whisking it into the drippings to cook. Then I added the rest of the broth, whisking out any lumps of flour. Once that was mixed thoroughly, I added some milk (maybe a cup?) and I continued to whisk this until it thickened into gravy. What could be better than gravy? OLD BAY GRAVY! (remember that I had seasoned the chicken with Old Bay!).
- I added the gravy to the veggies, stirred it around, and then covered the chicken in the casserole pans with the mix.
- I put the casseroles in the oven at 375 degrees Fahrenheit and baked for 45 minutes.
- At the end of 45 minutes, I used our instant read thermometer to make sure all the chicken was done.
- I topped the casseroles with a garnish of lemon-basil.
Then we made the salad from the two heads of lettuce, two stems of lemon-basil (leaves shredded), 5 chopped salad tomatoes, and a simple dressing of mayonnaise–because mayo with tomatoes and lettuce ties with Old Bay gravy!
Dinner was delicious! We ate almost all of it, and kept the rest for leftover night or a lunch!
I hope this inspires you to throw all kinds of CSA veggies (and chestnut mushrooms!) into one of your dinners this week!
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