Magenta Marinara and Something Other Than Greens (CSA Box #4)

We got our fourth CSA box this week (we are doing AVOG – here’s some other local CSAs, too) and there was finally something that wasn’t a green, leafy vegetable!  We got purple carrots, baby beets, zucchini, yellow squash, baby argula (?), red leaf lettuce, and some other stuff.

Oh, and honey – yay!  Something that doesn’t need to be eaten right away!

With the beets we got last week, I made what I called Magenta Marinara.  I had aspirations of pickling them but honestly, haven’t felt well enough to do anything like that lately so I’m just trying to use up the produce in whatever I can throw it in.  (My thyroid and iron have been out of whack and I’m hoping the treatment starts helping soon.)

Anyway, so I just boiled the beets until they were soft and then pureed them into my normal marinara sauce.  You can’t taste them, but the color is bright magenta.  Some people had a hard time getting over the color. :)

I tossed the yellow squash and zucchini in olive oil, salt, pepper, and paprika and then roasted them.

We ate the purple carrots raw, and I’ve been putting kale and spinach (from previous week’s box) in fruit smoothies that I’ve been eating for breakfast.  Getting rid of kale that way is kind of slow going… (A couple of you suggested different things to do with it but honestly, I haven’t felt like trying anything new. :/)

Oh, and the garlic scapes we got two weeks ago were, um, very garlick-y.  We grilled them and the garlic flavor was so intense we couldn’t eat them, so I chopped them up and put them in the marinara.

I still have a lot of greens to use up, which proving to be, uh, more then challenging when I’m not feeling creative.  But, I’m feeling more positive that future boxes will lighter on the greens.

What was in your CSA box this week?  Anyone found anything good at the local farmers markets lately?