Playing with Vegetables

I have been reading a lot of books lately, but I don’t especially feel like writing about them, so I won’t.  I have been trying to be a little more creative with my cooking, almost entirely because of the bounty of vegetables we have been getting from our CSA.  Today I made a very tasty pasta sauce almost entirely out of CSA produce.  Here is how to do it:

Pour a very generous puddle of olive oil into a crock pot or slow cooker of your choice.  Chop up four pounds or so of fresh tomatoes and toss those in the pot.  Clean the mud off of your frighteningly fresh onion, chop it up, and add it to the mix.  Then take a moist bulb of fresh garlic, clean it, and peel the outer layer.  Chop up all of the cloves and mix in.  Pick out the fattest yellow squash and zucchini, clean them, and chop them up before adding to the crock pot.  Hack apart a green pepper and throw it in the pot.  Then wash the sand off the fresh oregano, mince the leaves and mix the herbs in.  Toss in some salt and pepper, and turn the crock pot on high.  Let it simmer for a few hours.  If you are carnivorous, brown some ground beef with a little salt and white pepper and add it in about two hours before you plan to eat.  After the sauce has simmered for several hours, you have an almost unbearably delicious topping for the pasta of your choice.  The salt, pepper, olive oil, and beef came from the store, while everything else came from the farm.

The CSA produce is quite delicious.  I am not a very good boy when it comes to eating my vegetables, but there is something about getting fresh organic produce straight from the farm that works for me.  I think the vegetables were so fresh they didn’t realize they had been picked yet.  The stuff just tastes real–full of subtle flavors that our hybridized modern agriculture has lost.  The tomatoes, for example, are oddly shaped and unevenly colored and thus would look terrible in a supermarket bin, but they are full of juice and taste like something other than water and vague tomato flavoring.  Try this out–it’s worth the effort.