Tuesday, June 12th, 2012
Central Park East - 6:56am

Good morning!  Another overcast day here in the Big Apple.  I don't mind - it makes it much cooler & moderately less humid.  To be honest I'm not sure I'll ever be used to this East Coast humidity.  Did anyone watch that show Wild America last night?  Wait...I don't think that's the name - I think Wild America is the name of that show with Marty Stouffer back in the 80's that I remember watching as a kid.  Either way, it was on the National Geographic Channel and was about the America's.  It was on last night and tonight and it was really a great show.  Last night they showed something I have never seen before.  A jaguar in South America went into the river, fought an alligator, then dragged it out of the water and ate it.  They were struggling around in the water for awhile, which to be honest I thought would favor the gator, but then they showed the jaguar bite through the gator head into it's brain, which stopped it thrashing around.  She then dragged it out and ate it!  It was insane - that gator was as big as she was! 

Either way, we got our first round of food from the CSA last night (community shared agriculture).  We paid ahead of time for 24 weeks of seasonal produce from a small farm in NY.  They drop off their harvest each week at a church near our house and we just go pick everything up.  I'm especially psyched about it because we (Brian mainly) get to have fun making all sorts of new things with different kinds of vegetables.  i.e. Rhubarb...WTF do you do with rhubarb?  How does a vegetable that looks like red celery taste so tangy?  So weird. So this week's share was:
-2 heads red leaf lettuce
-1 head green leaf lettuce
-bok choy
-cherry radishes
-mustard greens
-mizuna greens
-rhubarb
-garlic scapes (the supposedly mild garlic green shoot that the farmer trims off early in the season so that the garlic plant devotes its energy to making a bigger bulb) 

So we made fresh pesto with the garlic scapes (NOT actually mild at all - quite spicy and bitey, which was a pleasant surprise).  2 cups basil, 1/4 cup pine nuts or walnuts, 1/2 cup parmesan, little over 1/2 cup olive oil, bit of salt & pepper, 6 garlic scapes then put in the food processor.  We had that with red leaf salad on the side.  So good!  I don't know if I can go back to store bought pesto (at least in the summer)!

Have a great day!!