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DWS Box August 26 – Some pictures and Recipes

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Every week, one of the highlights is the dismantling white supremacy box we get from FoodShare Toronto. This week’s box was full of really delicious things, including more perilla leaves, red garden egg, and sharp purple radishes.

I like this box, because the greens are always the freshest you can get them, and I like supporting urban agriculture, especially one that centers the leadership and ownership of historically (and presently) underrepresented and under supported groups.

The following list is subject to change, but a lot of now familiar (to us) farms are on this list:

Many of these farms also have CSAs or go to farmers markets around the city, so it’s worth following them on social media if you want to buy direct or sign up for a CSA next year. It’s also supper cool to be able to connect produce we get to the originating farms.

What did we get this week?

A pretty hefty haul if I do say so myself. There is rainbow chard, cilantro, mustard greens, radishes, herbs, tatsoi, perilla (which ,is an over arching name for a bunch of different green herbs in the mint family, including shiso) a giant zucchini, buena mulata peppers, garlic!!, African eggplant, and kale.

So what are we doing with the vegetables this week?

I know that I am going to end up throwing many of the leafy greens into an efo riro this weekend, but I found a great recipe for mustard greens from Susan Voisin – like this balsamic glazed chickpeas and mustard greens, it looks like a great warm salad type of meal, and does more with mustard greens than a stir fry, not that I’m knocking that mind you, especially since the same recipe could make use of some of the chili‘s and garlic in the box as well.

This recipe for roasted radishes and greens from Food and Wine caught my eye, because not only do I have an abundance of radishes and greens right now, it also sounds very delicious and straightforward to prepare. Plant Based Matters has a recipe for Shiso Furikake with Grilled Radish, and I’m tempted to dehydrate some of my perilla and see how it does in a homemade shiso furikake. Red shiso leaves (which are spicier than green perilla/shiso)are often used in commercial blends. In my case, I’d just omit the bonito flakes to make a vegan version, or incorporate the dehydrated shiso with a furikake blend I already have at home.

A use for perilla/shiso leaves that would take me entirely outside of my comfort zone are these delicious looking gluten free Sesame Shiso Biscuits from The Canary Files. I’m also tempted to incorporate the general idea of shiso and sesame with a more gluteny biscuit.

Something that really caught my eye for zucchini were the various iterations of Zucchini Involtini, involtini is an Italian pasta type roll, often made with eggplant, but perfectly possible with zucchini too. The First Mess has a great looking recipe, but I’m going to try rolling them up with some homemade tofu ricotta instead of almond.

For African Eggplant (the red tomato looking things in the green basket above, they’re listed ) you have options, but I’m leaning hard into a Ghanaian or Nigerian type garden egg stew. You can take a look at Afia Kate’s Cooking Channel for a quick way to preserve and store garden eggs (it’s a video) and also a recipe for garden egg stew from Plant Based Naia (also a video.) I really enjoyed reading about garden eggs from Healthier Steps. In many ways, you can use them just like their larger eggplant cousins.

Anytime I get my hands on fresh parsley, I tend to make tabbouleh, here is a delicious looking recipe for tabbouleh from the Classic Palestinian Kitchen cookbook. I’m lucky enough to have a massive mint plant growing, so I’m looking forward to making this soon.

I still don’t like chard, rainbow or otherwise, with an especial dislike of the stems, but I’ve been working on it. The pickled chard stem recipe I tried a few weeks at was quite good, so here is yet another pickled chard stem recipe, this time from David Lebovitz. Someone in the comments there had suggested roasting stems, which is another thing to try someday. I’ve also got my eye on this Aloo Palak recipe from Vegan Richa using chard leaves instead of the usual spinach.

And finally, for the buena mulata peppers, I really want to make a salsa morada, and the folks behind Baker Creek Heirloom seeds have both a recipe and a bunch of information about the pepper’s history and reintroduction.

Hope you find some of these ideas helpful, I know I usually enjoy having a reference point, saves me from searching when I’m hungry.

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