Figure It Out Fridays: Zucchini, Radishes and Eggs

Dinner Menu:

Curried Zucchini and Summer Squash Soup with Aged Feta Crumbles (farmer's market, Stokesberry Sustainable Farm, Glendale Shepherd)
Roasted Carrots and Radishes (Oxbow Farms)
Roasted Kale (farmer's market)
Hard Boiled Eggs (Stokesberry Sustainable Farm)
Raspberries (Oxbow Farms)

It's Friday night!  Which means my CSA pickup was three days ago, and I go to the farmer's market tomorrow morning.  So I'm kind of in scrounge-mode around here, which is why I've dubbed these evenings "Figure It Out Fridays."

These kind of meals really highlight what eating locally and seasonally and by the schedule of the markets REALLY looks like.  You don't get to ask yourself what you WANT to eat.  You get to ask yourself what you CAN eat.  What's in your fridge tonight?  And what can you do with it, given your time constraints?  Your dinner won't look polished, nor will it make any sort of cohesive sense.  But that's just a part of the system: you eat what you have, and you make it work.

The soup I made with my massive pile of zucchini and summer squash and my leftover chicken stock from a whole chicken I bought from Stokesberry Sustainable Farm was good, but it needs some tweaking before I can post the recipe to My Paleo Crockpot.  I'm sure I will have plenty of zucchini and chicken stock to experiment with this summer, though.  :-)

For serving pureed soups to my kids, I give my three year old a small bowl with an egg drop soup spoon I picked up at an Asian grocer.  Then I actually have these reusable food pouches I fill with (chilled) soup for my baby.  This recipe in particular was a bit too spicy for me, so I didn't actually make my kids eat it.  (I am a bit of a spice nut, so I know if it's too spicy for me, it's definitely going to be too much for them!)  They just had an extra hard boiled egg instead.  But normally that's how I would serve it to them.

And our lovely CSA, Oxbow Farms, hosted a U-Pick Raspberry Picking today!  So I loaded the kids up and drove out of the city this morning and we picked a pound of raspberries.  My toddler loved it, and even though most of the really ripe ones at her height were already picked, she enjoyed picking what she could.  I wore my baby in our hiking backpack and he was happy enough as long as I kept handing him a new raspberry to eat every few minutes.  So we had a local evening snack tonight!  (Although I didn't have any because I'm actually *this close* to fitting back in my super skinny pre-baby jeans I wore back when I was 22.  They technically fit right now, but they are *just* uncomfortable enough to warrant skipping sugar for a few more weeks.)  It was also lovely to travel out to the farm where we get our "farmer box" every week and see the magic behind the amazing food we are so privileged to eat.