If you’re looking for a hearty, warm, satisfying winter meal that you can eat for breakfast, lunch or dinner, look no further than Tex-Mex Cornbread Skillet made with ground beef from the Cedar Valley Sustainable Farm share. I used Beth’s recipe from this month’s newsletter as a jumping off point. It comes together fast and really is as good as it looks and sounds.
Tex-Mex Cornbread Skillet
Another tomato recipe already? Well folks, we’re at that time of year when you can use all the tomato recipes you can get your hands on. And this is a great one for using up a lot of tomatoes with minimal effort and fantastic results. Best of all, this is a perfect recipe to make in large batches and freeze – it’s an easy way to capture the flavor of summer tomatoes and enjoy them when it’s cold and dreary.
Roasted Tomato Sauce
This is prime, peak season for tomatoes and they’re the perfect ripeness and flavor for an outstanding fresh tomato salsa. The key to a chunky texture, rather than a soggy salsa, is to let the tomatoes drain in a colander for 30 minutes to purge excess water. Then simply toss with the other ingredients, season with lime juice, salt, sugar and a pinch of pepper.
Fresh Tomato Salsa
Admittedly, this recipe is about one week late. Last week’s box contents were a perfect mix for ratatouille – eggplant, zucchini, garlic, onion, and parsley. But many of you, like me I suspect, have vegetables that hang around the week after and this is a perfect recipe for clearing out your refrigerator. There are a lot of variations and styles of ratatouille and everyone has their favorite. I am a big fan of roasting and I like my vegetables to remain separate and distinct, so this version is perfect for my tastes. You can serve this bruschetta-style on toasted bread with goat cheese. Or, as a side dish to fish or poultry, warm or room temperature.
Roasted Ratatouille
Because of the Thanksgiving holiday, we didn’t receive a vegetable box this past weekend. And since next week is our last and final box of the season (no. 24!), I thought this would be a good opportunity to post a recipe with ingredients gathered from your pantry. This tomato soup has a creamy, velvety texture accomplished by creating a roux. Serve this with grilled cheese sandwiches for a satisfying and warming meal.
Quick ’n Easy Tomato Soup
The tomatoes are one of the crops hit hard by the constant rains. In the last couple of boxes, the tomatoes haven’t looked too good – they have spots or bruises and always seem to be very close to going bad. So this week I wanted to use them quickly in a recipe that wouldn’t suffer from their lackluster appearance. By roasting and pureeing them in a salsa, all of the surface imperfections disappear and the flavors are more concentrated. This would also be a great recipe for the dead of winter or spring when grocery store tomatoes aren’t at their peak; you can use standard Roma tomatoes and coax more flavor out by roasting them with garlic, onions and peppers.
Roasted Tomato Salsa
Watch out – here come the tomatoes. Once the boxes with tomatoes start, they seem to never end. Which is fine with me; I can think of a lot of things to do with tomatoes. You can make salsa, Insalata Caprese, BLT sandwiches or a classic tomato soup. You can roast them, can them or stuff and bake them.
Click here to download a pdf of the Angelic Organics Farm News for box no. 08.
